Canada Slim and the Lamp Ladies

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 30 December 2017

In this season of goodwill and gratitude for all the blessings we enjoy, those who are healthy should especially be thankful, for we live in an age when life expectancy is higher because mankind has developed medicines and methods to extend life and restore health.

Granted there is still much significant progress needed, for far too many people still fall victim to the scourges of cancer and strokes.

There is still much we do not understand about diseases like Parkinson´s, AIDS and far too many others to comprehensively list here.

Even the common cold with its endless variety of mutations remains unsolvable and must simply be accepted as one of the countless burdens we must endure in life.

What is significant about today when compared with yesteryear is that common injuries are less likely to be fatal.

As well through the contributions of thoughtful compassionate innovators, our attitudes towards the care of the injured and ailing have improved.

Here in Switzerland and back in my homeland of Canada I have been hospitalized due to injuries caused by accidents: a fall from a tree (shattered shoulder), an axe slip (shattered foot), and a fall on a staircase (shattered wrist).

And though I also have medical conditions of anemia and celiac, neither these conditions nor the accidents I have had led to risks of fatality.

For prompt and compassionate medical attention provided to me ensured that I still live a functional, mostly painless, and happy healthy existence.

For the Christian West, Christmas is the season to show thanksgiving to God for sending His Son Jesus Christ to save our immortal souls, we also should not forget the human instruments of change that have assisted mankind to save our mortal flesh.

I married a doctor, and, even though she is a children´s physician, knowing her has given me an appreciation of just how difficult a profession medicine really is at all levels of medical treatment.

From the surgeon whose precision must be matched with efficiency, to the specialist doctor whose diagnosis must be accurately matched with the most likely cause of the patient´s symptoms, to the technicians who operate machinery that can reveal the interior of a patient´s body, to the family doctor who must know when to send a patient to a specialist and when to trust his/her own treatment, to the pharmacist that must know what medicines do and how to administer them, to the administrator who must balance the needs of patients with the cost of maintaining those needs, to the cleaning staff who ensure that the health care environment is as sterile as humanly possible, to the therapist who teaches the patient how to heal him/herself, to the nurse who monitors and comforts the bedbound sick person unable to fend for him/herself…..

The world of health care is a complex and complicated system demanding dedicated people and a neverending desire to improve itself.

A visit to a London museum two months ago has made me consider how grateful I am that an Englishwoman had the courage to be compassionate, Christian, and transformed the world for the better.

London, England, 24 October 2017

As mentioned in great detail in my blogpost Canada Slim and the Royal Peculiar my wife and I visited Westminster Abbey, that necrophiliac fetish house for the Establishment.

And folks whether or not they were avowed antiestablishment found themselves commemorated here.

The poet Shelley, despite wishing to be known as an anarchist artist and was buried in Rome, is memorialised here in Poets´ Corner, across from Viscount Castlereagh, a man Shelley loathed.

Above: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)

“I met Murder on the way.

Above: Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769 – 1822)

He had a face like Castlereagh.”

Before leaving the Abbey, we briefly visited the Undercroft Museum with its death-worshipping collection of royal funeral effigies.

Until the Middle Ages, British monarchs were traditionally embalmed and left to lie in state for a set period of time.

Eventually, the corpse was substituted for a wooden figure of the deceased, fully dressed with clothes from the Great Wardrobe and displayed on top of the funeral carriage for the final journey.

As the clothes were expected to fit the effegy perfectly, the likenesses found in the Undercroft are probably fairly accurate.

Edward III´s face has a strange leer, a recreation of the stroke he suffered in his final years.

Above: Westminster Abbey effigy of Edward III (1312 – 1377)

His eyebrows came from a plucked dog.

Several soldiers are known as the Ragged Regiment due to their decrepit decay.

Frances, the Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, holds what may be the world´s oldest stuffed bird, an African Grey parrot that died in 1702.

Above: Frances Teresa Stewart (1647 – 1702)

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that Frances was the greatest beauty he had ever seen.

Sadly she was disfigured by smallpox in 1668.

Sadly her final fate no different than that of her parrot.

Leaving the Abbey we see the Methodist Central Hall, an inadequate and unnecessary replacement to the building that once stood here.

On this site once stood the Royal Aquarium and Winter Garden, opened in 1876, a grand Victorian entertainment venue.

It housed palm trees, restaurants, an art gallery, an orchestra, a skating rink, the Imperial Theatre, smoking and reading rooms.

A variety of sea creatures were displayed here, but the Aquarium was often plagued by frequent plumbing problems, so the place became better known for the exciting performances staged here than for the fish.

Come one, come all.

See William Leonard Hunt, aka the Great Farini, the world renowned Canadian showman and tightrope walker!

Above: William Hunt, aka the Great Farini (1838 – 1929)

Gasp in awe at 14-year-old Rossa Matilda Richter, aka Zazel, the first ever human cannonball, as she (barely 5 feet tall and 64 lbs heavy) is launched through the air flying 30 feet or more!

Above: Rossa Richter, aka Zazel (1863 – 1929)

Protests were launched over the danger Zazel faced and for a while the venue was in danger of losing its license but crowds kept coming to see the performances.

By the 1890s the Aquarium´s reputation became disreputable and it became known as a place where ladies of poor character went in search of male companions.

The Great Farini and Zazel were one thing, but an Aquarium of ill repute was too much for Victorian propriety to accept.

The Aquarium closed in 1899 and was demolished four years later.

In 1905 construction began on the Hall for Methodists, Christianity´s least entertaining sect.

We headed towards the Thames and followed Millbank Road to a place which suffered the opposite fate of the Aquarium.

While the Aquarium lost its aura of entertainment and was replaced by a stodgy religious institute, opposite the Tate Britain Museum is an almost invisible plaque upon an unremarkable bollard that tells the reader that where the entertaining Tate stands once stood Millbank Prison.

Above: Tate Britain

Millbank was built to serve as the National Petientiary and was used as a holding facility for convicts due for transportation to Australia.

“Near this site stood Millbank Prison which was opened in 1816 and closed in 1890.

This buttress stood at the head of the river steps from which, until 1867, prisoners sentenced to transportation embarked on their journey to Australia.”

Novelist Henry James called Millbank “a worse act of violence than any it was erected to punish”.

Above: Henry James (1843 – 1916)

The phrase “down under” is said to be derived from a nearby tunnel through which the convicts were walked in chains down to the river.

A section of the tunnel survives in the cellars of the nearby Morpeth Arms, a pub built to seve the prison warden and said to be haunted by the ghost of a former inmate.

Depending on their crime, prisoners could be given the choice of receiving a five-to-ten-year jail sentence instead of exile.

Among the many to be sent to Australia – and perhaps the unluckiest of them all – was Isaac Solomon, a convicted pickpocket and the inspiration for the character Fagin in Charles Dickens´ Oliver Twist.

Above: Isaac “Ikey” Solomon (1727 – 1850)

In 1827 Solomon managed to escape while being taken to Newgate Prison.

He fled England to New York, but then travelled on to Tasmania when he discovered his wife had been transported there for crimes of her own.

Upon arrival in Tasmania, Solomon was rearrested, shipped home to London, retried, reconvicted and sentenced to exiled imprisonment for 14 years….back to Tasmania.

We made our weaving way to Pimlico Tube Station, a unique station in that it doesn´t  have an interchange with another Underground or National Rail Line.

We rode the rails until Waterloo, the last station to provide steam-powered services and the busiest railway station in London / the 91st busiest in the world / the busiest transport hub in Europe.

I had once taken the Eurostar from Waterloo Station to Paris as one of the 81,891,738 travellers during the 13 years (1994 – 2007) Eurostar operated from here, before it began service from St. Pancras.

The clock at Waterloo has been cited as one of the most romantic spots for a couple to meet, and has appeared in TV (Only Fools and Horses) and in the film Man Up.

Waterloo Station has appeared in literature (Three Men in a Boat, The Wrong Box, The War of the Worlds), films (Terminus, Rush Hour, Sliding Doors), theatre (The Railway Children), music (the Kinks song “Waterloo Sunset”) and paintings.

Our destination – typical of travelling with a doctor – a hospital, St. Thomas Hospital, noteworthy for a male serial killer and a lady humanitarian.

Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, also known as the Lambeth Poisoner, was a Scottish Canadian serial killer who claimed victims from the United States, England, Canada and Scotland.

Above: Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (1850 – 1892)

Born in Glasgow, Cream was raised outside Quebec City.

He attended Montreal´s McGill University and then did his post-graduate training at St. Thomas.

In 1878 Cream obtained qualifications in Edinburgh.

He then returned to Canada to practice in London, Ontario.

In August 1879, Kate Gardener, a woman with whom he was having an affair, was found dead in an alleyway behind Cream´s office, pregnant and poisoned.

Cream claimed that she had been made pregnant by a prominent local businessman, but after being accused of both murder and blackmail, Cream fled to the United States.

Cream established a medical practice not far from the red light district of Chicago, offering illegal abortions to prostitutes.

In December 1880 another patient died after treatment by Cream, followed by another in April 1881.

On 14 July 1881, Danial Stott died of poisoning, after Cream supplied him a remedy for epilepsy.

Cream was arrested, along with Stott´s wife.

Cream was sentenced to life imprisonment in Joliet prison.

Cream was released in 1891, after Governor Joseph Fifer commuted his sentence.

Using money inherited from his father, Cream sailed for England.

He returned to London and took lodgings at 103 Lambeth Palace Road.

At that time, Lambeth was ridden with poverty, petty crime and prostitution.

On 13 October 1891, Nellie Donworth, a 19-year-old prostitute accepted a drink from Cream.

She died three days later.

On 20 October, Cream met 27-year-old prostitute Matilda Clover.

She died the next morning.

On 2 April 1892, after a vacation in Canada, Cream was back in London where he attempted to poison Louise Harvey.

Above: Louise Harvey

On 11 April, Cream met two prostitutes, Alice Marsh, 21, and Emma Shrivell. 18, and talked his way into their flat.

Cream put styrchine in their bottles of Guinness.

Both women died in agony.

On 3 June 1892, Cream was arrested and was later sentenced to death.

On 15 November, Cream was hanged on the gallows at Newgate Prison and his body buried in an unmarked grave within the prison walls.

Cream´s name does not appear in later McGill graduate directories.

No mention of those who mourned Cream´s victims is made either.

Ladies of the night lost in the shadows of Lambeth lamplight, fallen and forgotten.

Another medical professional is equally remembered at a site as inconspicuous as a prison burial ground: a parking lot.

On the south side of Westminster Bridge, a series of red brick Victorian blocks and modern white additions make up St. Thomas´s Hospital, founded in the 12th century.

At the Hospital´s northeastern corner, off Lambeth Palace Road, is a car park.

A hospital car park isn´t the most obvious location for a museum, but that where one finds the homage to Florence Nightingale, the genteel rebel who invented the nursing profession.

Born on 12 May 1820 at the Villa Colombaia, three decades before Cream, Florence Nightingale was named after the city of her birth, Florence, Italy.

Above: Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910)

“There is nothing like the tyranny of a good English family.”

Florence was born into a rich, well-connected family though quite liberal in their attitudes.

Their circle of friends and acquaintances included the author Elizabeth Gaskell, the scientist Charles Darwin and the reform politician the Earl of Shaftesbury.

(For the story of the Earl of Shaftesbury, please see Canada Slim and the Outcast of this blog.)

Her maternal grandfather William Smith campaigned to abolish slavery and Florence´s father William Nightingale educated both her and her sister Frances Parthenope (after her birthplace of Parthenope, Naples) in French, Latin, German, mathematics, philosophy and science, then considered strictly male pursuits,

The Nightingales loved to travel – her parents´ honeymoon lasted so long that they produced two daughters before they returned home.

Growing up Florence visited many European cities.

She travelled to France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy.

She enjoyed visiting museums, dancing at balls, and going to concerts, confessing at one point that she was “music mad”.

In 1838, her father took the family on a tour of Europe where they were introduced to the English-born Parisian heiress Mary Clarke, with whom Florence bonded.

Above: Mary Clarke (1793 – 1883)

Clarke was a stimulating hostess who did not care for her appearance, and while her ideas did not always agree with those of her guests, “she was incapable of boring anyone”.

Clarke´s behaviour was said to be exasperating and eccentric and she had no respect for upper class British women, whom she regarded generally as inconsequential.

She said that if given the choice between being a woman or a galley slave, she would choose the galleys.

Clarke generally rejected female company and spent her time with male intellectuals.

However Clarke made an exception in the case of Florence.

They were to remain close friends for 40 years despite their 27-year age difference.

Clarke demonstrated that women could be equals to men, an idea that Florence did not obtain from her mother Fanny Smith.

Florence underwent the first of several experiences that she believed were calls from God in February 1837 while at her family home of Embley Park, prompting a strong desire to devote her life to the service of others.

Above: Embley Park

Devout and scholarly, Florence was not expected to do anything much apart from marry and procreate.

As a young woman, Florence was attractive, slender and graceful.

She had rich brown hair, a delicate complexion and a prominent, almost Roman, nose.

She was slim until middle age and tall for a Victorian woman, about 5´8″ or 172 cm in height.

While her demeanour was often severe, she was very charming and possessed a radiant smile.

Florence received several marriage proposals.

She was certainly not supposed to work, but Florence´s ambition was to become a nurse.

Her parents were aghast.

In the Victorian Age, nurses were known for being devious, dishonest and drunken.

Hospitals were filthy, dangerous places exclusively for the poor.

The rich were treated in the privacy of their own homes.

In her youth Florence was respectful of her family´s opposition to her working as a nurse, but nonetheless she announced her decision to enter the field in 1844.

Despite the intense anger and distress of her mother and sister, Florence rebelled against the expected role for a woman of her status to become a wife and mother.

“I craved for something worth doing instead of frittering time away on useless trifles.”

Florence came closest to accepting the marriage proposal of politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, but after a nine-year courtship she rejected him in 1849, convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing.

Above: Richard Monckton Milnes (1809 – 1885)

Whether Milnes´ devotion to the writing of Marquis de Sade and his extensive collection of erotica had something to do with Florence´s decision remains unstated.

She knew that marriage would mean swapping one cage for another and felt that God meant her to remain single.

“Marriage had never tempted me. 

I hated the idea of being tied forever to a life of Society, and such a marriage could I have.” 

In the essay Cassandra, Florence wrote about the limited choices facing women like her and raged against the way women were unable to put their energy and intelligence to better use.

Florence´s parents allowed her to visit Rome in 1847 with family friends, Charles and Selina Bracebridge, hopefully to take her mind off nursing.

In Rome, Florence met the young politician, former Secretary of War, Sidney Herbert on his honeymoon with his wife Elizabeth.

Above: Sidney Herbert (1810 – 1861)

Together Florence and Elizabeth visited convents and hospitals run by Catholic nuns.

Sidney and Florence became lifelong close friends and the Herberts would later be insturmental in facilitating Florence´s future nursing work.

Florence continued her travels with the Bracebridges as far as Greece and Egypt.

Her writings on Egypt in particular are testimony to her learning, literaray skill and philosophy of life.

Sailing up the Nile as far as Abu Simbel in January 1850, Florence wrote of the temples there:

Above: The temples of Abu Simbel: the Great Temple of Ramses II (left), the Temple of Nefertari (right)

“Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering …. not a feature is correct – but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined.

It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man.”

At Thebes, Florence wrote of being “called to God”.

A week later near Cairo she wrote in her diary:

“God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for Him alone without reputation.”

During a visit to the Parthenon in Athens, Florence rescued an owl, which she called Athena.

Above: The Parthenon

Athena always perched on Florence´s shoulder or in her pocket, with a specially designed pouch to to catch her droppings.

Above: Athena (1850 – 1855)

Athena was a demanding creature who had to be bathed with sand daily.

When the badtempered owl died, Florence wrote:

“Poor little beastie, it was odd how much I loved you.”

Her sister Frances wrote a short story, The Life and Death of Athena, ensuring the little owl´s posthumous fame.

Rather than forget nursing as her parents hoped, Florence´s determination grew even stronger.

Later in 1850, Florence visited the Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein, near Dusseldorf, in Germany, where she observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses working for the poor and the sick in a hospital, orphanage and college.

Above: Kaiserswerth Clinic

She regarded the Kaiserswerth experience as a turning point in her life, where she received months of medical training which would form the basis for her later care.

Florence learned about medicines, how to dress wounds, observed amputations and cared for the sick and dying.

She had never felt happier.

“Now I know what it is to love life.”

On 22 August 1853, Florence took the post of Superintendant at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street in London, a position she held until October 1854.

When an epidemic of cholera broke out in London, Florence rushed to nurse victims in the nearby Middlesex Hospital.

Florence read about the disaster facing the British army in the autumn of 1854.

Hundreds of soldiers were sent to fight with the French and the Ottoman Turks against the Tsar´s Russian army in the Crimea were dying of disease.

The Crimean War was the first time the public could read in the newspapers about how the troops were suffering.

Above: Map of the Crimean War (Russian version)

When the news broke of the disaster in the Army, polticians were criticised.

More soldiers were dying from disease, and from cold during the winter, than from enemy action.

“In most cases the flesh and clothes were frozen together.

As for feet, the boots had to be cut off bit by bit, the flesh coming off with them.”

The wounded arrived by the boatloads at the British Army´s base hospitals at Scutari in Constantinople (today´s Istanbul).

Reporting from the front lines in the Crimea, William Howard Russell, Times journalist, blamed disorganization and a lack of supplies.

Fellow Times journalist in Constantinople, Thomas Chenery, reported that the French allowed women to nurse, unlike the British.

After the initial battles in the Crimea, the conflict centred on the besieged port of Sebastopol, where Russian and Ukranian women nursed heroically.

Above: The Siege of Sebastopol (September 1854 – September 1855), by Franz Roubaud (1902)

Conditions in the vast hospitals were horrific.

“Must men die in agony unheeded?”, demanded the Times.

The scandal provoked a public outcry.

Sidney Herbert, once again Secretary of War, wrote to Florence asking her to lead a group of women nurses – a new and risky idea.

Florence and her team of 38 brave women volunteer nurses that she trained and 15 Catholic nuns set sail for Scutari.

Florence arrived early November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari and found that poor care for wounded soldiers was being delivered by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference.

Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected and mass infections were common, many of them fatal.

There was no equipment to process food for the patients.

There was a lack of food, a lack of blankets, a lack of beds.

Casualities arrived, after a long journey, dirty and starving.

“It is of appalling horror!

These poor fellows suffer with unshrinking heroism, and die or are cut up without complaint.

We are steeped up to our necks in blood.”

At Scutari the nurses had to contend with rats, lice, cockroaches and an absence of sanitation and had to cope with long hours and hard physical work.

After Florence sent a plea to the Times for a government solution to the poor condition of the facilities, the British Government commissioned engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital that could be built in England and shipped to the Dardanelles.

Above: Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 – 1859)

The result was Renkioi Hospital, a civilian facility that had a death rate less than one tenth that of Scutari.

Florence reduced the death rate from 42% to 2% by making improvements in hygiene.

She implemented handwashing and other hygiene practices in the war hospital.

She organized the nurses and soldiers´ wives to clean shirts and sheets and the men to empty the toilets.

She bombarded Herbert with letters asking for supplies and used her own money and funds sent by the public via the Times, to buy scrubbing brushes and buckets, blankets, bedpans and operating tables.

“This morning I foraged in the purveyor´s store – a cruise I make almost daily, as the only way of getting things.  I am really cook, housekeeper, scavenger, washerwoman, general dealer and storekeeper.”

Every night she walked miles of hospital corridors where thousands of casualities lay, holding a Turkish lantern (fanoos) on her nightly rounds of the wards.

Florence would always dismiss the idea that she alone improved the Hospital.

It was a team effort.

In Britain, penny papers popularised the image of “the Lady with the Lamp” patrolling the wards.

Her work went beyond nursing care.

Florence treated the soldiers equally, whatever their rank, and also thought of their families´ welfare.

She wrote letters of condolence to relatives, sent money to widows, and answered inquiries about the missing or ill.

When the initial crisis was over, Florence also organized reading rooms.

As an alternative to alcohol, the Inkerman Café was opened, serving non-alcoholic drinks.

She set up a banking system so ordinary soldiers could send their pay home, rather than drink or gamble it away.

Stories of Florence´s devotion to the men flooded home to Britain.

One soldier wrote home of the love and gratitude for Florence felt by “hundreds of great rough soldiers”.

The men worshipped her.

During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died.

Ten times more soldiers died from diseases such as typhoid, typhus, cholera and dysentary than from battle wounds.

Scutari had been built on top of a huge cesspool.

With overcrowding eased, defective sewers flushed out and ventilation improved, death rates were sharply reduced.

Florence still believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition, lack of supplies, stale air and overworking of the soldiers.

She came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions.

Florence believed that she needed to maintain military style discipline over her nurses.

“If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease but of the nursing.”

She wanted her nurses to be treated with respect by the men and doctors.

This meant no flirting with doctors or soldiers, no disobedience or drunkenness.

The first image showing Florence as “the Lady with the Lamp” appeared in the Illustrated London News early in 1855.

As the war dragged on, Florence´s work made her internationally famous.

“She is a ministering angel without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow´s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her.

When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.”

Florence hated what she called the “buzz fuzz” of celebrity, but she knew how to use public opinion.

Fame gave her power and influence to make changes, but she knew it obscured the achievements of others and the human cost of the war.

Florence´s image appeared as pottery figurines, souvenirs and even on paper bags.

Songs and poems were written about her.

When the US poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published “Santa Philomena” in 1857, it fixed Florence´s image forever as the Lady with the Lamp.

Above: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)

“Lo! in that house of misery

A lady with a lamp I see

Pass through the glimmering gloom

And flit from room to room.”

After contracting “Crimean fever” from infected goat´s milk, Florence suffered ill health.

After the Crimean War, Florence returned to Britain in August 1856, travelling under the name “Miss Smith” to avoid publicity.

Thin, exhausted and ill, she felt a sense of failure and grieved over the soldiers who did not return.

“My poor men lying in your Crimean graves, I stand at the altar of murdered men.

Florence devoted the rest of her life to ensure that they did not die in vain.

While Florence shrank from public appearances, she skillfully used her reputation and the authority of her name to convincethose in power of the need for health reform, starting with Queen Victoria, whom she impressed greatly when they met in Balmoral.

Above: Queen Victoria (1819 – 1901)

For the rest of her days she would continue to suffer reoccuring bouts of fever, exhaustion, depression, loss of appetite, insomnia and severe back pain.

Unable to continue nursing, she devoted herself to health reform, founded the first training school for nurses at St. Thomas, campaigned to improve hospital conditions and championed the cause of midwives.

Often irritable, highly critical of herself and others, Florence worked on, writing hundreds of letters, gathering and analysing statistics, commenting on reports, briefing politicians and medical experts.

Prompted by the Indian mutiny of 1857, Florence began a lifelong campaign to improve the health of all Indians, not just British soldiers.

She studied the design of hospitals in Britain and across Europe.

Florence wrote Notes on Nursing to help ordinary women care for their families.

She stressed the importance of cleanliness, warmth, fresh air, light and proper diet.

Florence wrote some 200 books, pamphlets and articles, and over 14,000 letters.

As well as nursing she wrote about religion and philosophy, sanitation and army hygiene, hospitals, statistics and India.

She wrote about her travels and the frustrations of life for educated women.

Florence changed society´s ideas about nursing.

She believed in looking after a person´s mental as well as physical wellbeing.

She stressed the importance of being sensitive to a patient´s needs and their environment to aid recovery.

She helped make nursing a respectable profession for women.

Her work proved an inspiration to many, including the founder of the Red Cross movement, Henri Dunant.

Above: Henri Dunant (1828 – 1910)

Florence championed causes that are as just important today as they were in her day, from hospital hygiene and management, to the nursing of soldiers during war and afterwards, and healthcare for all around the world.

In recognition of her pioneering work in nursing, the Nightingale Pledge is taken by new nurses.

The Florence Nightingale Medal is the highest international distinction a nurse can achieve and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.

The Florence Nightingale Museum doesn´t just celebrate Florence as a devout woman who single-mindedly revolutionized the healthcare industry but as well it hits the right note by putting the two years she spent tending to the wounded of the Crimean War in the context of a lifetime of tireless social campaigning, and also mentions others involved in that same health care crisis.

Dimly lit and curiously curated with circular display cases covered in fake grass or wrapped in bandages, this small museum is packed with fascinating exhibits, from Florence´s hand-written ledgers and primitive medical instruments to pamplets with titles like How People May Live and Not Die in India.

The Museum and the neighbourhood of Lambeth are worth exploring, especially in a world too full of Dr. Creams and too few Florence Nightingales.

Perhaps if our politicians visited more museums like the Red Cross Museum in Geneva or the Florence Nightingale Museum there might less incentive to cause war ourselves or to ignore wars far removed from us, such as Yemen – “a pointless conflict (that) has caused the world´s worst humanitarian crisis”.

Perhaps if we followed role models such as Florence we might one day truly find peace on Earth and good will towards man.

Sources: Wikipedia / The Rough Guide to London / Rachel Howard and Bill Nash, Secret London: An Unusual Guide / Simon Leyland, A Curious Guide to London / Florence Nightingale Museum / http://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk

 

Canada Slim and the Last Walk of Robert Walser

Landschlacht, Switzerland, Christmas Day 2017

As my wife works – she is a doctor – I wonder what I am going to do with my days off.

Weather is rather grey for walking and I am not particularly motivated to accomplish much housecleaning despite the need to do so.

Of course, I could drag out from my DVD collection the classic holiday movies: Die Hard, Home Alone, National Lampoon´s Christmas Vacation, Skipping Christmas, The Sound of Music, It´s a Wonderful Life, Love….Actually, etc.

But I feel somewhat guilty to be watching DVDs on the couch while my wife slaves away in the hospital.

I´ll get over it.

It is Christmas Day, the day of Christ´s Mass, when Christians (they all crawl out of their comfortable hidey-holes at Christmas and Easter) celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, though high church leaders do admit that there is no real way to ascertain with precision what day Christ was born or even what year Christ was born.

The early Church determined that the Roman festival of Saturnalia seemed as good a time as any to fix a date of birth for the namesake of Christianity and decided to let the annually-changing lunar calendar determine when to commemorate Jesus being crucified and resurrected.

Religion cannot be an effective opiate of the people unless it is organized, with standards set and traditions established.

I will not and cannot diminish what Christianity means to the true practioner nor would I want to.

But having been raised in a land that calls itself Christian with the belief that Christmas and Easter should be honoured as simply more than excuses to have a school or work vacation, I wonder at the evolution of my beliefs since the days of my childhood and my youth.

When did I begin to question the validity of what I had once viewed as infallible and unquestionable?

Part of my problem with those who profess to be followers of a faith is that many of them do not actually practice what they preach, except within the confines of a temple of worship.

Some will even violate the basic tenets of their faith in defence of that faith.

(For example, the strict rule against murdering one´s fellow man is somehow justifiable if it is in defence of the faith that forbids killing.)

(The instruction to love one another seems always dismissable to the degree by which the other person disagrees with us.)

I am reminded of the Genesis song, Jesus He Knows Me:

“‘Cause Jesus He knows me and He knows I’m right.
I’ve been talking to Jesus all my life.
Oh, yes, He knows me and He knows I’m right.
And He’s been telling me everything´s gonna be alright.

I believe in the family with my everloving wife beside me,
But she don’t know about my girlfriend or the man I met last night….”

(This also suggests that love must be restricted to the marriage bond and between opposite genders, as if love itself must be defined by the religious rule makers.)

God may be divine, but religion is a human invention.

Above: The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo

So if a person believes in the existence of God, even if the greatest proof of His existence is the inability to disprove His existence, and if a person believes that His divinity should be worshipped, then what is the best way to go about it?

It seems there is no right answer universally agreed upon.

My way of worshipping God, if one could say that is something I actually do, is to walk.

God cannot, and in my opinion should not, be confined within walls or behind altars.

If God exists, then He is within and without, part of all that surrounds us and composes us,

I ask no one to follow me and ask no one to do or believe as I do.

For me, there is something about being Outside, away from the corrupting influence of civilization and the rules and regulations, customs and conflicts that define it, that suggests to me a sense of the divine far more real and powerful than any mighty cathedral or grand temple can offer.

I believe two Swiss men, both sadly departed, may have felt as I do.

Huldrych Zwingli, for all his flaws, may have felt a touch of the divine simply having lived in remarkably beautiful areas of Switzerland like Wildhaus, Weesen and Glarus.

Above: Huldrych Zwingli (1484 – 1531)

I think it was his living in cities or enclosing himself within the manmade walls of monasteries or cathedrals that made him question the certainty of his faith and his allegiance to the Church.

I personally find it difficult to doubt the existence of God and the surety of faith when I am walking in the wilderness.

I find it bothersome to believe in God and the certainty of religion when I see what passes for civilization in human communities.

(More on Zwingli and his questioning of his beliefs in a future blogpost….)

Robert Walser was born in Berne in 1878.

Above: Robert Walser (1878 – 1956)

Walser was born into a family with many children.

His brother Karl Walser became a well-known stage designer and painter.

Walser grew up in Biel, Switzerland, on the language border between the German- and French-speaking cantons of Switzerland, and grew up speaking both languages.

Above: The old town of Biel / Bienne

He attended primary school and high school, which he had to leave before the final exam when his family could no longer bear the cost.

From his early years on, he was an enthusiastic theatre-goer.

His favourite play was The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller.

Above: Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805)

From 1892 to 1895, Walser served an apprenticeship at the Bernische Kantonalbank in Biel.

Afterwards he worked for a short time in Basel.

Walser’s mother, who was emotionally disturbed, died in 1894 after being under medical care for a long period.

In 1895, Walser went to Stuttgart where his brother Karl lived.

Above: Pictures of Stuttgart (clockwise from top left: Staatstheater / Cannstätter Volksfest in Bad Cannstatt / Schloßplatz / Schillerplatz / New Palace / Old Castle )

He was an office worker at the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt and at the Cotta’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

He also tried, without success, to become an actor.

On foot, he returned to Switzerland where he registered in 1896 as a Zürich resident.

Above: Pictures of Zürich: View of Zürich and Lake Zürich (Zürichsee)(top)/ Fraumünster Church (middle left) / Sunrise Tower (middle right) / Night view of Zürich (bottom)

In the following years, he often worked as an office clerk, but irregularly and in many different places.

As a result, he was one of the first Swiss writers to introduce into literature a description of the life of a salaried employee.

In 1898, the influential critic Joseph Victor Widmann published a series of poems by Walser in the Bernese newspaper Der Bund.

This came to the attention of Franz Blei, who introduced Walser to the art nouveau people around the magazine Die Insel.

Above: Franz Blei (1871 – 1942)

Numerous short stories and poems by Walser appeared in Die Insel.

Until 1905, Walser lived mainly in Zürich, though he often changed lodgings and also lived for a time in Thun, Solothurn, Winterthur and Munich.

In 1903, he fulfilled his military service obligation and, beginning that summer, was the aide of an engineer and inventor in Wädenswil near Zürich.

This episode became the basis of his 1908 novel Der Gehülfe (The Assistant).

In 1904, his first book, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze, appeared in the Insel Verlag.

At the end of 1905 he attended a course in order to become a servant at the castle of Dambrau in Upper Silesia, Poland.

Above: Dambrau Castle

“I myself am one of those fellows who find it nice not to think.

Also, I hold the principle of service in immensely high esteem.”

The theme of serving would characterize his work in the following years, especially in the novel Jakob von Gunten (1909).

In 1905, he went to live in Berlin, where his brother Karl Walser, who was working as a theater painter, introduced him to other figures in literature, publishing and the theatre.

Above: Skyline of modern Berlin

Occasionally, Walser worked as secretary for the artists’ corporation Berliner Secession.

In Berlin, Walser wrote the novels Geschwister Tanner, Der Gehülfe and Jakob von Gunten.

They were issued by the publishing house of Bruno Cassirer, where Christian Morgenstern worked as editor.

Above: Bruno Cassirer (1872 – 1941)

Apart from the novels, he wrote many short stories, sketching popular bars from the point of view of a poor “Flaneur” (a person who takes leisurely walks) in a very playful and subjective language.

There was a very positive echo to his writings.

Robert Musil and Kurt Tucholsky, among others, stated their admiration for Walser’s prose, and authors like Hermann Hesse and Franz Kafka counted him among their favorite writers.

Walser published numerous short stories in newspapers and magazines, many for instance in the Schaubühne.

They became his trademark.

The larger part of his work is composed of short stories – literary sketches that elude a ready categorization.

Selections of these short stories were published in the volumes Aufsätze (1913) and Geschichten (1914).

In 1913, Walser returned to Switzerland.

He lived for a short time with his sister Lisa in the mental home in Bellelay, where she worked as a teacher.

Above: Bellelay Abbey, Canton Bern

There, he got to know Lisa Mermet, a washerwoman with whom he developed a close friendship.

After a short stay with his father in Biel, he went to live in a mansard in the Biel hotel Blaues Kreuz.

In 1914, his father died.

In Biel, Walser wrote a number of shorter stories that appeared in newspapers and magazines in Germany and Switzerland and selections of which were published in Der Spaziergang (1917), Prosastücke (1917), Poetenleben (1918), Seeland (1919) and Die Rose (1925).

Walser, who had always been an enthusiastic wanderer, began to take extended walks, often by night.

In his stories from that period, texts written from the point of view of a wanderer walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods alternate with playful essays on writers and artists.

During World War One, Walser repeatedly had to go into military service.

At the end of 1916, his brother Ernst died after a time of mental illness in the Waldau mental home.

In 1919, Walser’s brother Hermann, geography professor in Bern, committed suicide.

Walser himself became isolated in that time when there was almost no communication with Germany because of the war.

Even though he worked hard, he could barely support himself as a freelance writer.

At the beginning of 1921, he moved to Bern in order to work at the public record office.

Above: Old town, Bern

He often changed lodgings and lived a very solitary life.

During his time in Bern, Walser’s style became more radical.

In a more and more condensed form, he wrote “micrograms”, called thus because of his minuscule pencil hand that is very difficult to decipher.

He wrote poems, prose, dramolets and novels, including The Robber (Der Räuber).

In these texts, his playful, subjective style moved toward a higher abstraction.

Many texts of that time work on multiple levels – they can be read as naive-playful Feuilleton (newspaper supplements) or as highly complex montages full of allusions.

Walser absorbed influences from serious literature as well as from formula fiction and retold, for example, the plot of a pulp novel in a way that the original (the title of which he never revealed) was unrecognizable.

Much of his work was written during these very productive years in Bern.

In the beginning of 1929, Walser, who had suffered from anxieties and hallucinations for quite a time, went to the Bernese mental home Waldau, after a mental breakdown, at his sister Fani’s urging.

Above: Main building, Klinik Waldau, Bern

In his medical records it says: “The patient confessed hearing voices.”

Therefore, this can hardly be called a voluntary commitment.

He was eventually diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia.

While in the mental home, his state of mind quickly returned to normal, and he went on writing and publishing.

More and more, he used the way of writing he called the “pencil method”:

He wrote poems and prose in a diminutive Sütterlin hand, the letters of which measured about a millimeter of height by the end of that very productive phase.

Above: A magnified sample of Sütterlin writing

Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte were the first ones who attempted to decipher these writings.

In the 1990s, they published a six-volume edition, Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet (‘From the pencil zone’).

Only when Walser was, against his will, moved to the sanatorium of Herisau did he quit writing, later telling Carl Seelig:

Above: Main building, Klinik Herisau

“I am not here to write, but to be mad.”

Another reason might have been that with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, his works could no longer be published in any case.

In 1936, his admirer Carl Seelig began to visit him.

He later wrote a book, Wanderungen mit Robert Walser, about their talks.

Seelig tried to revive interest in Walser’s work by reissuing some of his writings.

After the death of Walser’s brother Karl in 1943 and of his sister Lisa in 1944, Seelig became Walser’s legal guardian.

Though free of outward signs of mental illness for a long time, Walser was crotchety and repeatedly refused to leave the sanatorium.

In 1955, Walser’s Der Spaziergang (The Walk) was translated into English by Christopher Middleton.

It was the first English translation of his writing and the only one that would appear during his lifetime.

Upon learning of Middleton’s translation, Walser, who had fallen out of the public eye, responded by musing:

“Well, look at that.”

Robert Walser loved long lonely walks.

Children discovered his frozen body, dead of a heart attack, in a snow-covered field, on Christmas Day 1956.

“Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff.

Colors are too sweet a muddle, nothing more.

I love things in one color, monotonous things.

Snow is such a monotonous song.

Why shouldn’t a color be able to make the same impression as singing?

White is like a murmuring, whispering, praying.

Fiery colors, like, for instance, autumn colors, are a shriek.

Green in midsummer is a many-voiced song with all the highest notes.”

The photographs of the dead walker in the snow are almost eerily reminiscent of a similar image of a dead man in the snow in Walser’s first novel, Geschwister Tanner.

Walser was better known in his lifetime than many other German-language writers, were known in their lifetimes.

“Each sentence has the sole purpose of rendering the previous one forgotten.” (Walter Benjamin)

W. G. Sebald has remarked that Walser’s writing “has the tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, events and things of which it spoke…

Everything written in these incomparable books has—as their author might himself have said—a tendency to vanish into thin air.”

Walser has disappeared from the consciousness of even German-language readers in this most modern of times.

But self-negation, a stepping aside out of the way, was his trademark.

Above: Robert Walser

Herisau, Switzerland, 16 June 2017

Today I followed the footsteps of Swiss author Robert Walser.

Walser wrote that “without walking I would have died” so Herisau commemorates him through the Robert Walser Path and a Walser exhibition in the Herisau Museum.

Above: Entry to Herisau Museum (top), Walser Exhibit (bottom)

This Path is the first literary path in Switzerland.

Walser struggled with psychological problems and spent much time at the Herisau Psychiatric Centre which he described as “a prison between the earth and sky.”

Happily one of his best works, The Walk and other stories is available in English.

Only in German, Carl Seelig’s Wanderungen mit Robert Walser gives a very personal glimpse into this troubled yet powerful Swiss writer.

To climb hills and walk the streets that a man largely ignored by non-German readers, this is not so terrible a plan, is it?

Today I followed in the footsteps of a different literary figure: Robert Walser, the Mad Poet of Herisau.

Above: Robert Walser Fountain, Herisau

I followed what may have been his last walk, visiting Klinik Haus 1 of the Herisau Psychiatric Centre where Walser spent the last 23 years of his life, the spot where his body was discovered on 25 December 1956, the grave where he was buried, the fountain built in his honour and the Robert Walser exhibition inside the Herisau Museum.

Above: Klinik Haus I (foreground), Klinik Herisau

The Path is much like Walser´s descriptions in “A Little Ramble”:

“I walked through the mountains today….

….the road was soft and in places very clean.

The walk on the wonderful road gave me more and more pleasure….

A village was especially beautiful with humble dwellings….

We don´t need to see anything out of the ordinary.

We already see so much.”

From “The Road”:

“….I do not know any more for sure what time it was, as the desire to take a walk came over me.

I put my hat on my head, left my writing room….and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street….

Above: Robert Walser

As far as I can remember as I write this down, I found myself, as I walked into the open, bright and cheerful street, in a romantically adventurous state of mind, which pleased me profoundly.

The world spread out before my eyes appeared as beautiful to me as if I saw it for the first time.

Everything I saw made upon me a delightful impression of friendliness, of goodliness and of youth.

I quickly forgot that up in my room I had only just a moment before been brooding gloomily over a blank sheet of paper.

All sorrow, all pain and all grave thoughts were as vanished, although I vividly sensed a certain seriousness, a tone, still before me and hehind me.

I was tense with eager expectation of whatever might encounter me or cross my way on my walk.

My steps were measured and calm, and, as far as I know, I presented, as I went my way, a fairly dignified appearance….

As I went on my way, like a better sort of tramp, a vagabond and pickpocket, or idler and vagrant of a sort finer than some, past all sorts of gardens planted and stuffed full with placid, contented vegetables, past flowers and fragrance of flowers, üast fruit trees and past beanstalks and shrubs full of beans, past towering crops of rye, barley and wheat, past a woodyard containing much wood and wood shavings, past juicy grass and past a gently splashing little warerway, rivulet or stream, past all sorts of people, and past a clubhouse decoratively hung with banners flying for a celebration or for joy, and also past many other good-hearted and useful things, past a particularly beautiful and sweet little fairy apple tree, and past God knows what else in the way of feasible things….

….all sorts of more or less beautiful pleasant thoughts continued to preoccupy me, since, when I´m out walking, many notions, flashes of light and lightning flashes quite of their own accord intrude and Interrupt, to be carefully pondered upon….

Without looking back….I walked on and soon afterwards, proceeding thus in the warm yielding air….

I came into a pine forest, through which coiled a smiling, serpentine, and at the same time roguishly graceful path, which I followed with pleasure.

Path and forest floor were as a carpet, and here within the forest it was quiet as in a happy human soul, as in the interior of a temple, as in a palace and enchanted dream-wrapped fairytale castle, as in Sleeping Beauty´s Castle, where all sleep, and all are hushed for centuries of long years.

I penetrated deeper, and I speak perhars a little indulgently if I say that to myself I seemed like a prince….

So solemn was it in the forest that lovely and solemn imaginings, quite of their own accord, took possession of the sensitive walker there.

How glad I was at this sweet forest softness and repose!

From time to time, from outside, a slight sound or two penetrated the delicious seclusion and bewitching darkness, perhaps a bang, a whistle, or some other noise, whose distant note would only intensify the prevailing soundlessness, which I inhaled to my very heart´s content, and whose virtues I drank and quaffed with due ceremomy.

Here and there in all this tranquillity and quietude a bird let his blithe voice be heard out of his charmed and holy hiding place.

Thus I stood and listened, and suddenly there came upon me an inexpressible feeling for the world, and, together with it, a feeling of gratitude which broke powerfully out of my soul.

The pines stood straight as pillars there, and not the least thing moved in the whole delicate forest, throughout which all kinds of inaudible noises seemed to echo and sound.

Music from out of the primeval world, from whence I cannot tell, stole on my ear.

Oh,thus, if it must be, shall I then willingly end and die.

A memory will then delight me even in the grave, and a gratitude enliven me even in death.

A thanksgiving for life and a joy at joy.

High up, a gentle rustling, whispering down from the treetops, could be heard.

“To love and to kiss here must be divinely beautiful.“, I told myself.

Simply to tread on the pleasant ground became a joy, and the stillness kindled prayers in the feeling soul.

“To be dead here, and to lie inconspicuous in the cool forest earth must be sweet.

Oh, that one could sense and enjoy death even in death!

Perhaps one can.

To have a small, quiet grave in the forest would be lovely.

Perhaps I should hear the singing of the birds and the forest rustling above me.

I would like that.”

Marvellous between trunks of oaks a pillar of sunbeams fell into the forest, which to me seemed like a delicious green grave.

Soon I stepped out into the radiant open again, and into life.

In the bright, hot midday sun I would stop for a moment to rest under a fir, beech, or oak tree, stretching out in the moss or grass…

But where am I?

Am I actually on a hike right now?

How is that possible?”

“Walk” was my answer.

I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world, without perceiving which I could not write the half of one more single word, or produce the tiniest poem in verse or prose.

Without walking, I would be dead, and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed.

Also, without walking and gathering reports, I would not be able to render one single further report, or the tiniest of essays, let alone a real, long story.

Without walking, I would not be able to make any observations or any studies at all.

Such a clever and enlightened man as you are, you may and will understand this at once.

On a lovely and far-wandering walk a thousand usable and useful thoughts occur to me.

Shut in at home, I would miserably decay and dry up.

Walking is for me not only healthy and lovely, it is also of service and useful.

A walk advances me professionally and provides me at the same time also with amusement and joy.

It refreshes and comforts and delights me, is a pleasure for me, and simultaneously, it has the peculiarity that it allures meand spurs me on to further creation, since it offers me as material numerous small and large objectivities upon which I later work at home, diligently and industriously.

A walk is always filled with significant phenomena, which are valuable to see and to feel.

A pleasant walk often teems with imageries and living poems, with enchantments and natural beauties, be they ever so small….

Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it, without this equally delicious and admonishing search, I deem myself lost, and I am lost.”

“The present time, surrounding you, singing and making noise, cannot be put down in writing in any satisfactory way.”

“It is as though you could hear Thought itself softly whispering, softly stirring.

It’s like the scurrying of little white mice.”

As I look outside my writing room window I see no scurrying white mice, but the thought of Walser softly whispers in my mind.

I wish to walk again, for like Walser felt without it:

I am lost.

Sources: Wikipedia / Benjamin Lerner, “Robert Waler´s Disappearing Acts”, The New Yorker, 3 September 2013 / Carl Seelig, Wanderungen mit Robert Walser / Robert Walser, A Schoolboy´s Diary / Robert Walser, The Walk and other stories / Robert Walser Zentrum, Robert Walsers Bücher zu Lebzeiten / Peter Witschi, Robert Walser: Herisauer Jahre (1933 – 1956) / Herisau Tourismus, “Robert Walser Pfad”

 

Canada Slim and the Dance Macabre

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 24 December 2017

Tomorrow is Christmas and I have yet to feel that Yuletide spirit.

Part of the problem is that I never seem to see the oft-promised peace on Earth and good will towards man.

Trump and his cronies have passed a tax bill that will hurt the most vulnerable members of American society.

Indonesia is arresting gays for the crime of not being straight.

Above: Flag of Indonesia

The war in Yemen continues causing untold amount of disease, devastation and famine.

Above: Flag of Yemen

Music is morbid, traumatized and defensive.

Lack of progress in holding bishops accountable for covering up sex abuse in the Church continues.

Above: Flag of Vatican City

Alarming cases of child malnutrition are reported in Venezuela.

Above: Flag of Venezuela

And these are just a few events being reported by the New York Times.

As I watched shoppers madly scramble to get Christmas gifts for their loved ones, the cynic in me wondered whether the gift giving is truly heartfelt or whether this generosity is an attempt to buy affection that had not been reciprocated the rest of the year.

Ignore friends and family all year, but hope that presents will redeem you in their eyes once again.

Above: Christmas gift-Bringers in Western Europe

As for those without friends or family….

They are invisible.

The homeless will still lack shelter, the unemployed will still lack a job, the lonely will still lack love this Christmas.

The Beatles once sang that “money can´t buy me love”, but is that true?

Money can buy friends, love, power, prestige, respect, happiness, can´t it?

So we are taught to believe.

And perversely we will sacrifice happiness, respect, prestige, power and love in pursuit of profit.

There was once a time when we believed that we could buy ourselves a stairway to Heaven or a get out of Purgatory free card.

Above: Purgatorio by Ludovico Carracci

And yet my cynicism disappears whenever I think about life beyond the headlines and outside of administrative offices.

For even in the wealthiest of nations there still exists places where money remains simply a means to an end rather than an end itself.

Take Switzerland, for example.

This is truly a land where profits predominate people, but step inside a religious institution and feel the faith and love.

Hop on a local transit bus or a Postbus and see everyday people living ordinary lives.

Visit a local museum and quietly marvel at the time and attention to detail put into every exhibit whether or not the museum is frequently visited or not.

Stroll through a Christmas market, and though those who run the stalls wish to make money for their efforts, the visitors to the market seem more relaxed than they would in an ordinary place of purchase.

The Christmas market visitor strolls rather than strides, observes rather than ignores what he/she isn´t looking for, converses rather than simply communicates only what is needed to be said.

Even in our wee Starbucks in Marktgasse there are two perspectives.

Management will bring pressure to bear on the baristas to sell, sell, sell.

But the wise barista knows that the hard sell only works a small percentage of the time, because the customers come to Starbucks to enjoy themselves in a coffeehouse.

As American a firm that this chain is, it is in old Europe.

Here folks want to sit in a Café and linger.

Above: Café Terrace at Night, Vincent van Gogh (1888)

They want to find a comfortable corner, a cozy niche, and quietly read a book, or study for their exams, or enjoy each other´s company.

Outside the winds of change toss and turn their lives, but inside a Café the visitor hopes to find an oasis of calm, a harbour of welcome.

The further removed from the day-to-day experience of a Café that management is, the less I feel connected to management.

Money is made from repeat business, the desire to return.

Repeat business is generated from the welcome the guest feels when he/she comes to my store, not from special offers or promotions.

The more management pressures staff to sell, the more pressure the customer feels from the staff that serve them.

The customer is reduced to being an entry on a balance sheet, rather than being the royal entity of the moment.

We are pressured by management if there is a line-up of people forced to wait for service to suddenly rush through our processes and yet somehow still sell, sell, sell the same amounts that normally require more effort on the part of the salesperson.

Yet compassionate friendly attention paid to each individual customer, with an occasional reassuring word to the folks waiting to be served that they are also important and that their patience is appreciated, goes further to keeping customers happy than a quick stressful promptness and dismissiveness to “keep the line moving” ever does.

Management only partially gets this.

The higher up the ladder, the less management understands this.

Management´s destination is the coffers of the company.

But the destination is only possible if the journey is successfully accomplished, if the customer looks forward to coming back to a place where they truly felt welcome.

This malaise felt in our wee Starbucks is a microcosm of what life is in Switzerland.

The Swiss, as a general rule, seem so focused on making money that they have forgotten that money may buy things, but things only distract – they don´t diminish unhappiness felt in a life offering nothing more than a fuller bank account.

The richer the country, the more miserable the people seem to be.

Yet beyond the banks and past the profits is a land of amazing vistas and panoramas so breathtakingly beautiful as to inspire poetry from a pauper and music from the mute.

It is easy to forget that outside the pellmell of the pursuit of profit that life, wonderful life, is waiting to be discovered in all of its subtle and savoury awesomeness.

Money cannot buy happiness nor guarantee salvation.

This message came crystal clear to my wife and I in an unexpected corner of the richest part of Italy this summer…..

Above: Flag of Italy

 

Clusone, Italy, 4 August 2017

Lombardy is Italy´s richest and most developed region.

Above: Lombardy (in red)

It has always been and still remains a commercial crossroads.

It has been coveted and controlled by the French and the Austrians and takes its name from the Lombards who invaded the region and took it from the Romans.

As a border region, accessible through numerous mountainous passes, Lombardy has always been vulnerable to invasion.

It has long been viewed by northern Europeans as the true capital of Italy.

Emperors from Charlemagne to Napoleon came to Lombardy to be crowned and northern European business magnates take Milan more seriously than Rome (much like they take New York more seriously than Washington, Toronto more seriously than Ottawa, or Zürich more seriously than Bern).

Lombardy´s landscape has paid the price for economic success.

Industry chokes the air, sprawls across the plains and spreads tentacles in all directions that it can.

Nonetheless the casual traveller can still find oases of calm and harbingers of welcome.

The upper reaches of Lombardy´s valleys remain unspoilt.

Even the most sophisticated and ultra modern towns and cities retain their serendipitous medieval cores boasting amazing art and architecture.

The stunning scenery and lush landscapes of Lombardian lakes subtly seduce the unsuspecting visitor.

Much like the Swiss, the Lombardians don´t have much time for life, being too busy making a living.

Milan is a workaholic factory of fashion and innovation, forever focused on the future, impatient with the present, dismissive of the past.

Above: Pictures of Milan (clockwise from top): Porta Nuova, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, La Scala, Sforza Castle, City Life Project, Arch of Peace, Milan Cathedral

The provincial towns are filled with folks focused on security and luxury and privilege.

These urban and urbane northern Italians are dismissive of the south and for them Rome is nothing more than a tragic complexity of errors.

The late 20th century has even seen the rise of a separatist political Party, the Lega Nord, demanding independence from Rome with rheotric suggesting that the North sustains the inefficient lazy South.

Industrial development has done a dastardly thorough job of ruining the landscape around Bergamo, but if the traveller pushes up the valleys things vastly improve.

To the northwest, the Val Brembana is fringed by a garland of mountains that have borne the tread of generations of caravans of mules bringing minerals from the rocks to the cities of the plains.

Here one can take the waters of San Pellegrino Terme, Lombardy´s most fashionable spa since the start of the 20th century, sleep in a grand hotel and play games inside the casino.

Above: Grand Hotel, San Pellegrino Terme

To the northeast, through and past the Val Cavellina ruined by small factories and characterless housing, the Valle Seriana is also overly developed and overcrowded with apartments appropriating forests and rivers reduced to streams by hydroelectric eyesores.

But in the upper reaches of the Seriana are still untouched stretches of unspoilt pastoral and wild paradise.

Clusone is the main stop, perhaps the only stop, worth making in the entirety of the Valle Seriana.

Above: Clusone in winter

It is a picturesque hilltop town well worth a wander.

This is a stroller´s town.

Visit the Church of St. Luigi, the Church of St. Anna, the Church of Paradise, the Church of St. Defendente, the Church of the Holy Trinity, the Church of St. Lucio and the Church of St. Mary Magdalene and St. Rocco.

Above: The Church of San Defendente

Linger in the Palazzo Comunale or the Palazzo Fogaccia or the Palazzo Marinoni Barca, the Palazzo Bonicelli della Vite, or the Palazzo Carrara Spinelli Maffei.

Above: Palazzo Fogaccia

With steep curving streets and shops selling sausage and cheese, Clusone is the kind of quiet town that invites lingering, where a person is encouraged to linger for hours over lunch and coffee, a place of peaceful contemplation.

In this town where time doesn´t matter, time is nonetheless carefully calculated and measured.

The Piazza dell´ Orologio is named for the fiendishly complicated 16th century clock on the tower of the Palazzo Communale.

Above: Piazza dell´ Orologio

If you have the time and the patience, you can work out the date, the sign of the zodiac, the duration of the night and the phase of the moon from the mechanical movements of the clock.

It takes time to understand time.

Then as you take time to contemplate time, climb upwards to the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta with its Oratorio dei Disciplini (the Oratory of the Disciples) that draws visitors from all over.

Above: Oratorio dei Disciplini

There is little of interest within the walls of the church, but the two 15th century frescoes on the church exterior more than compensate the weary walker for his trek up the hill.

The frescoes were painted by Giacomo Borlone de Buschis in 1485.

The upper fresco, The Triumph of Death, concentrates on the attitude of the wealthy towards death, with three noblemen returning from the hunt, discovering an open tomb containing the worm-infested corpses of the Pope and the Emperor, surrounded by snakes, frogs and scorpions.

A huge skeleton clothed in cloak and crown, larger than life, representing triumphant Death, balances on the edge of the tomb, while other skeletons take aim at people gathered around the tomb.

Death stands on a sepulchre around which the figures of a cardinal, a bishop, a king and a philosopher are offering her gifts.

These onlookers are incorruptible figures, uninterested in the bribes being offered them.

“Everyone dies and leaves the world, those who offend God leave bitterly.”

“For the love of God, don´t have fear to come to the Dance, but joyfully come and be happy.”

The lower fresco, The Dance of Death, continues the tale of morality and mortality, contrasting the corrupt upper classes with a procession of contented commoners, each dancing his way towards death quite happily unconcerned.

I am reminded of an old song I learned back in my high school days:

“Dance, dance, whomever you may be

I am the Lord of the Dance”, said the He.

“And I´ll lead you all whomever you may be

For I am the Lord of the Dance”, said the He.

But this is not only a place of Death, Clusone has been the birthplace of artists and athletes:

• Domenico Carpinoni (1566 – 1658), painter
• Cosimo Fanzago (1591 – 1678), architect / sculptor
• Antonio Cifrondi (1656 – 1730), painter
• Bartolomeo Nazari (1699 – 1758), painter
• Antonio Percassi, chairman of the Percassi Holding Company
• Attilio Rota, cyclist
• Paolo Savoldelli, cyclist
• Kevin Ceccon, race car driver

Domenico, Cosimo, Antonio C. and Bartolomeo are united in death, despite their accomplishments.

Antonio P., Attilio, Paolo and Kevin probably won´t live forever, regardless of what they do or don´t do.

We all do the Danse Macabre, no matter one´s station in life.

Above: The Dance of Death by Michael Wolgemut (1493)

Whether Pope, peasant or Emperor, King or kid, lazy or labourer, each day is a memento mori, a reminder of the fragility of our lives and of how vain and pointless are the glories of earthly life.

It is this equality in which I take comfort in.

I am destined to die one day, so I won´t have to endure living eternally while others die around me.

And, so far, man has yet to create a dystopian future where people stop aging but have clocks in their arms that determine how long they have to live.

I don´t want to know how much time remains on my life clock, for this uncertainty makes me appreciate every present moment as if it were my last.

At present, the rich cannot buy additional time, additional life.

Imagine if you can how truly horrific the scenario in the movie In Time would be if it ever became our reality instead of just simply entertaining science fiction.

A hell where time has become the universal currency, where the rich hoard time for themselves to live forever while constantly increasing the cost of living to ensure the poor die.

It is the miracle of birth that Christians celebrate this Christmas season, yet places like Clusone remind me that death, as painful as it is for those left behind to mourn the loss of the deceased, is in its own way also a miracle of sorts.

Without death, life loses its precious value.

Without death, pain is eternal and suffering endless.

Without death, a place cannot sustain a population that constantly increases without limits.

I don´t want to die, but I don´t want to live forever.

It is said by Christians that Christ came so that all who believe in Him might enjoy eternal life.

We fear death because we fear the nothingness of non-existence.

We tell ourselves tales, wrapped in religious impulse, that there is something somewhere somehow beyond life.

This idea of something beyond life reassures us that the inadequacies of life can somehow be recompensed in some alternate realm of being.

I for one will never discourage those from believing in what helps them cope with life and its eventual ending.

Perhaps this is what I can take away from Christmas this year….

In this celebration of new life and the promise of life eternal, let us appreciate this moment of life we are living now.

Then perhaps everyday will be a Christmas worth celebrating.

Above: Wikipedia / The Rough Guide to Italy

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canada Slim and the Royal Peculiar

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 22 December 2017

This week I returned back to work after being absent at home for the past two weeks.

It was a warm welcome with hugs and expressions of delight.

So much so that one witnessing customer commented:

“I want to work here!” 

Back home after work:

First World problems.

Ah, the problem of having too many choices!

I don´t own (and happily don´t owe) much in this world.

What I possess is an (over)abundance of books and DVDs for a man of my modest income.

If I had to estimate I would say that I probably have at least 1,000 or more DVDs.

Of these I would safely say that there are only about a dozen films that I find myself watching again and again.

For example, I recently watched for the nth time the 1974 Billy Wilder film The Front Page starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau.

Director Wilder, a newspaperman in his younger days recalled:

“A reporter was a glamourous fellow in those days, the way he wore a hat and a raincoat and a swagger, and had a camaderie with fellow reporters and with local police, always hot on the trail of tips from them and from the fringes of the underworld.”

Wilder set the movie in 1929, because the daily newspaper was no longer the dominant news medium in 1974.

(Even less so in 2017….)

The movie has reminded me of the old idea that there are basically only two types of people: those who make the News and those who follow the News.

Those who are remembered by history are those who have made history, who have made the News.

And if there is one place where a person´s legacy seems to matter is within the confines of a famous cathedral.

The decision to create a mausoleum or memorial for a person is determined by what the person accomplished in their life.

Especially for the Christian West it seems the bigger the mausoleum, the grander the grave, the more remarkable the memorial, the more attention and recognition is paid (or should be paid) to the legacy a person left behind.

The downside of this thinking is the presumption that those without a mausoleum, those lacking a memorial, those without a grave, must then be undeserving of respect, unworthy of memory, unloved and forgettable.

First World thinking and materialist obsessiveness carry on even beyond one´s life and onwards in the legacy of those who no longer live.

This kind of thinking was quite evident in our visit to London in October….

 

London, England, 24 October 2017

The Houses of Parliament overshadow a much older neighbour, Westminster Abbey.

Westminster Abbey has stood in London longer than any other building and embodies much of the history of England.

It was so named to differentiate it from the “east minster“, St. Paul´s Cathedral.

It is the finest Gothic building in London, the most important religious building in England, with the highest nave of any English church.

Over the centuries Westminster Abbey has meant many things to many people.

The Abbey has been the venue for every Coronation since the time of William the Conqueror (1028 – 1087)

It has been the site of every royal burial for some 500 years between the reigns of Henry III (1207 – 1272) and George II (1683 – 1760).

Scores of the nation´s most famous citizens are honoured here and the interior of the Abbey is cluttered with hundreds of monuments, reliefs and statues.

With over 3,300 people buried beneath the Abbey´s flagstones and countless others commemorated here, Westminster is, in essence, a massive mausoleum, more tourist attraction than house of God.

Would a modern day Jesus´ visit to this temple result in His repeating:

Above: Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple (El Greco)

“Make not My Father´s house a house of merchandise.” ?

Would the Black Adder of the first BBC series wherein his father makes him the Archbishop of Canterbury (Episode 3)(transplanted to today) gleefully rub his hands together at all the modern wealth to be generated by the faithful and the curious?

Above: Tony Robinson / Baldrick (left), Tim McInnery / Lord Percy Percy (middle), and Rowan Atkinson / The Black Adder / Prince Edmund / The Archbishop of Canterbury

“Holy Moses! Take a look!

Flesh decayed in every nook!

Some rare bits of brain lie here,

Mortal loads of beef and beer.”

(Amanda McKittrick Ros, “Visiting Westminster Abbey”)

No one knows exactly when the first church was built on this site, but it was well over a thousand years ago.

At its genesis, this area was a swampy and inhospitable place on the outskirts of London.

The church stood on an island called Thorney Island, surrounded by tributaries of the River Thames.

In 960, Dunstan, the Bishop of London, brought 12 Benedictine monks from Glastonbury to found a monastery at Westminster.

Above: Dunstan (909 – 988)

One hundred years later King Edward the Confessor founded his church on the site.

Above: Edward the Confessor of England (1003 – 1066), King (1042 – 1066)

Edward was driven from England by the Danes.

During his exile in Normandy, Edward vowed that if his kingdom was restored to him, he would make a pilgrimage to Rome.

When Edward did eventually reclaim his throne in 1042, there was so much unrest in the kingdom that he was advised not to make the perilous journey in case a coup occurred while he was away.

The Pope absolved Edward of his vow on condition that he raise or restore a church in honour of St. Peter.

Edward´s Abbey was consecrated on 28 December 1065, but the King was too ill to attend.

He died a few days later and was buried before the high altar.

The Bayeux Tapestry depicts Edward´s body being carried into the Abbey for burial.

After Edward´s death his reputation as a holy man grew.

Miracles were said to have occurred at his tomb.

In 1161, Edward was made a saint.

King Henry III held the Confessor in such reverance that he resolved to build a new shrine for Edward in a yet more glorious church.

Above: Henry III of England (1207 – 1272), King (1216 – 1272)

The new church was consecrated on 13 October 1269.

In 1539, England´s monastries faced a crisis.

Henry VIII had fallen out with the Pope because the Pope refused to annul the King´s marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Above: Henry VIII of England (1491 – 1547), King (1509 – 1547)

Henry declared himself supreme head of the Church of England.

In 1540, Henry dissolved the monasteries and seized their assets.

Westminster Abbey fared better than most religious houses, because of its royal connections, so instead of being stripped and aband0ned it was refounded as a cathedral, with a Bishop and a Dean.

In 1553 Queen Mary succeeded Henry´s son, Edward VI, and Roman Catholicism became once more the approved religion.

Above: Mary I of England (1516 – 1558), Queen (1553 – 1558)

Mary made the Abbey a monastery again and the monks returned.

Her successor, Queen Elizabeth I, who came to the throne just five years later, in 1558, reversed Mary´s changes and refounded the Abbey yet again, this time with a Dean and a Chapter.

Above: Elizabeth I of England (1533 – 1603), Queen (1553 – 1603)

The Dean was answerable to no one but herself as sovereign, and it is in this form, not subject to the jurisdiction of a Bishop, as are most churches, but as a special church under the Queen – an institution known as a Royal Peculiar.

During the English Civil War, which culminated in the execution of Charles I and the establishment in 1649 of Oliver Cromwell´s Commonwealth, the Abbey was damaged when Puritans smashed altars, destroyed religious images and the organ, and seized the crown jewels.

Above: Oliver Cromwell (1599 – 1658), Lord Protector (1553 – 1558)

The Puritans were keen to rid the Abbey of all symbols of religious “superstition”.

Although the Abbey escaped wanton destruction better than many churches, it still bears the scars to this day.

The Abbey faced new peril during the Second World War.

Westminster miraculously survived, although bombs destroyed parts of it.

Walk with me through the Abbey.

Edward the Confessor´s church was the first in England to be built in the form of a cross, with the North and South Transepts forming its arms.

Most visitors, as did my wife and I, enter the Abbey via the North Transept.

The first impression one gets is of the soaring height of the vaulting.

At 102 feet, it is the highest in Britain.

The rose window above the entrance dates from 1722 and depicts the Apostles, excluding Judas Iscariot.

The rose window in the opposite transept depicts a variety of religious and other figures.

The North Transept is also known as the Statesmen´s Aisle, because it is littered with overblown monuments to long-forgotten empire builders and 19th century politicians, including Prime Ministers Viscount Palmerston (1784 – 1865), Robert Peel (1788 – 1850), Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 1881) and William Gladstone (1809 – 1898) who are buried nearby.

Above: William Gladstone (1809 – 1898), UK Prime Minister (1868 – 1874 / 1880 – 1885 / 1886 / 1892 – 1894

Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder (1708 – 1778) is featured in a 30-foot memorial, buried alongside his son Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (1759 – 1806), who became Prime Minister at the age of  just 24 and whose monument is over the Abbey´s west door.

Above: William Pitt the Younger (1759 – 1806), Prime Minister (1783 – 1806)

The North Transept leads down to the crossing – the centre of the church.

To the west is the Quire – an intimate space forming essentially a church within a church.

This was where the monks worshipped and this is where the Choir sits for the eight regular Choral Services (Matins, Holy Communion (4x), Eucharist, Evensong and Evening Service) each week.

The Choir consists of 12 men, known as Lay Vicars, and 24 boys, who come from the Abbey´s own choir School, now the only school in England exclusively for the education of choristers.

In the Middle Ages the Quire was the scene of a horrible murder.

In those days criminals could seek sanctuary in the Abbey.

Once they were within the walls, the law could not reach them.

But in 1378 fifty of the King´s men, ignoring the right of sanctuary, chased a prisoner into the Quire.

One of the soldiers “clove his head to the very brains” and also killed a monk who tried to rescue the poor man.

From the Statesmen´s Aisle, go straight to the central Sanctuary, site of the royal coronations.

Look down at the floor.

This precious work of art is the 13th century (1268) Italian floor mosaic known as the Cosmati Pavement, which consists of about 80,000 pieces of red and green porphyry, glass and onyx set into marble.

The swirling patterns of the universe were designed to encourage the monks in their contemplation.

Look for the inscription in brass letters, which foretells when the universe will end – 19,683 years after the Creation.

On the north side of the Sanctuary is an important group of medieval tombs.

Nearest the steps is the tomb of Countess Aveline of Lancaster.

In 1269, aged just 12, she was married to Edmund Crouchback, the youngest son of Henry III, in the Abbey´s first royal wedding.

Above: Royal seal of Edmund Crouchback (1245 – 1296)

Aveline lived only five more years and died in 1274.

Nearest the altar screen is the tomb of her husband, who outlived his child bride by 22 years, dying in 1296.

Between husband and wife is the tomb of Edmund´s cousin Earl Aymer de Valence of Pembroke, who died in 1324.

These three tombs were originally beautifully coloured and decorated, so that in the candlelight they shimmered with an extraordinary luminescence now lost in time.

The elaborate gilded screen behind the High Altar once protected Henry III´s original altarpiece (“retable”), dating from 1270, the oldest oil painting in Britain and now on display in the Abbey Museum.

The Feeding of the 5000 is an exceptionally important work, and though the centuries have not treated it kindly, what remains gives a tantalising insight into what it must once have been like.

Behind the Altar is St. Edward the Confessor´s Chapel, the spiritual heart of the Abbey.

It was here in 2010 that Pope Benedict XVI, making the first ever visit of a Pope to the Abbey, prayed alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Above: Joseph Ratzinger (b. 1927), Pope Benedict XVI (2005 – 2013)

Around the shrine in the centre, which contains Edward´s body, lie five kings and four queens.

Here is the double tomb of King Richard II (1367 – 1399) and his Queen, Anne of Bohemia (1366 – 1394).

Above: Richard II of England (1367 – 1399), King (1377 – 1399)

They were married in the Abbey in 1382.

Richard´s body was not allowed to rest in peace.

In the 18th century someone drilled a hole on the side of his tomb through which visitors could put their hand.

A number of bones went missing, including Richard´s jawbone which was only restored to the corpse in 1906.

Here are also buried King Edward III (1312 – 1377) and his wife Philippa (1310 – 1369).

Above: Effigy of Edward III of England (1312 – 1377), King (1327 – 1377)

The Confessor´s devotee King Henry III has his tomb here as well – beautifully decorated, cast in bronze and gilt.

Here lie the remains of Queen Eleanor of Castille (1241 – 1290), first wife of Edward I.

Above: Statue of Eleanor of Castile (1241 – 1290), Queen (1272 – 1290)

And here lies Edward I (1239 – 1307), at 6 feet 2 inches, very tall for those days, hence his nickname Edward Longshanks.

Above: Edward I of England (1239 – 1307), King (1272 – 1307)

And seek here the tomb of Henry V (1387 – 1422) beside that of his wife Catherine de Valois (1401 – 1437).

Above: Wedding of Henry V and Catherine de Valois

Her coffin and corpse were in full public view for centuries.

Henry V was considered one of England´s greatest monarchs, a fine military commander and an outstanding statesman.

Above: Henry V of England (1386 – 1422), King (1413 – 1422)

(His archers beat the French at Agincourt.)

The English were devastated when he died suddenly in 1422, aged only 35.

He was buried in the Abbey on 7 November, “with such solemn ceremony, such mourning of Lords, such prayer of priests, such lamentation of the common people as never was before that day seen in the realm of England.”

The diarist Samuel Pepys, on a visit to the Abbey in 1669, kissed Catherine´s leathery lips, wrote:

Above: Samuel Pepys (1633 – 1703)

“This was my birthday, 36 years old and I did first kiss a queen.”

Henry and Catherine are now protected by an iron grille.

The chairs and footstools in front were given in 1949 by the people of Canada for royal use.

To the south of the Altar are the medieval seats (“sedilia”) for the priests.

Above their heads are the paintings of Henry III and Edward I.

To the west of the sedilia is the flat-topped tomb of Anne of Cleves, the 4th wife of Henry VIII.

Above: Anne of Cleves (1515 – 1557), Queen (1540)

There are more than 600 tombs and monuments in the Abbey, some of them quite massive.

Many people commemorated here are remembered because of their distinguished careers, but quite a few owe their presence in the Abbey more to their wealth or social status.

Today distinguished figures are still commemorated in the Abbey, but our tributes today are rather muted compared with the flamboyance of previous centuries.

The huge monument in the North Ambulatory to General James Wolfe (1727 – 1759) reflects the 18th and 19th centuries´ glorification of military figures, especially when they have died at the moment of victory.

Above: James Wolfe (1727 – 1759)

Wolfe was killed, aged 32, while fighting on the Plains of Abraham, Québec City, in order to capture Canada from the French.

His opponent, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, being French who also died on the Plains, is given no mention.

Above: Louis-Joseph de Montcalm (1712 – 1759)

Some of the best funereal art is tucked away in St. Michael´s Chapel, east of the Statesmen´s Aisle.

Admire the remarkable monument to Francis Vere (1560 – 1609), one of the greatest soldiers of the Elizabethan period, made out of two slabs of black marble, between which lies Sir Francis.

On the upper slab, supported by four knights, Francis´ armor is laid out, to show that he died away from the field of battle.

Near this a most striking grave, in which Elizabeth Nightingale, who died from a miscarriage, collapses in her husband Joseph´s arms while he tries to fight off the spear aimed at her by the skeletal figure of Death, who is climbing out of the tomb.

Above: Tomb of Joseph (1695 – 1752) and Elizabeth Nightingale (1704 – 1731)

In the North Ambulatory, two more chapels contain ostentatious Tudor and Stuart tombs.

One of the most extravagant tombs is that of Lord Hunsdon, Lord Chancellor to Elizabeth I, which not only dominates the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, it is, at 36 feet in height, the tallest tombs in the entire Abbey.

Above: Henry Carey, Lord Dunsdon (1526 – 1596)

From the second chapel, the Chapel of St. Paul, climb the stairs and enter the Lady Chapel (or Henry VII´s Chapel), the most dazzling part of the Abbey.

Begun by Henry VII in 1503 and dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Lady Chapel is beautiful, light, intricately carved vaulting, fan.shaped gilded Pendants and the statues of nearly one hundred Saints, high above the choir stalls decorated with banners and emblems.

Above: Henry VII of England (1457 – 1509), King (1485 – 1509)

George II, the last King to be buried in the Abbey, lies under your feet, along with his Queen Caroline – their coffins fitted with removable sides so that their remains can mingle.

Above: George II of England (1683 – 1760), King (1727 – 1760)

(Certainly a different idea of necrophilia…)

Beneath the altar is the grave of Edward IV, the single sickly son of Henry VIII.

Above: Edward IV of England (1442 – 1483), King (1461 – 1470 / 1471 – 1483)

Behind the Chapel´s centrepiece, the black marble sacrophagus of Henry VII and his spouse – their lifelike gilded effigies are perfectly obscured an ornate grille, designed by an artist more famous for fleeing Italy after breaking Michelangelo´s nose than for his own art: Pietro Torrigiano.

Above: Bust of Henry VII by Pietro Torrignano (1472 – 1528)

His funeral on 11 May 1509 was lavish:

“All the heralds cast their coats of armor off and hung them upon the rails of the hearse, crying lamentably in French – ´Le noble roi Henri le septieme est mort.´ – and as soon as they had done so, every herald put on his armor again and cried with a loud voice – ´Vive le roi Henri le huiteme.´”

Here one finds James I as well as James´ lover Duke George Villiers of Buckingham, the first non-royal to be buried in the Abbey.

Above: George Villiers (1592 – 1628)

Villiers was killed by one of his own disgruntled soldiers.

To the east the Royal Air Force Chapel: stained glass with airmen and angels in the Battle of Britain.

In the floor, a plaque marks the spot where Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell rested….

Briefly.

Until the Restoration, whereupon his mummified body was unearthed, dragged through the streets, hanged and beheaded.

To the north four maidens hold up a vast bronze canopy and weep for another of James I´s “favourites”, Ludovic Stuart.

Above: Ludovic Stuart (1574 – 1624)

Before descending the steps back into the Ambulatory, pop into the Chapel´s north aisle.

Here siblings and hated rivals in life now lie side by side reconciled in death, Elizabeth I and her Catholic half-sister “Bloody” Mary.

“All those who divided at the Reformation by different convictions laid down their lives for Christ and conscience´s sake.”

At the far end is Innocents´ Corner.

Here James I´s infant daughters lie: Princess Sophia who died aged 3 days (1607) and Princess Mary who died the same year aged 2 (1605 – 1607)

Set in the wall between the sisters is the urn containing the bones of the Princes in the Tower, Edward V and his younger brother Richard.

Above: Richard (1473 – 1483) and Edward V of England (1470 – 1483)

As you leave the Lady Chapel, look for the Coronation Chair, a decrepit oak graffiti-covered throne which has been used in every coronation since 1308.

It was custom-built to incorporate the Stone of Scone (the Stone of Destiny), a great slab of redstone which acted as the Scottish coronation stone for centuries before Edward I stole it in 1296.

William the Conqueror was crowned here on 25 December 1066.

Above: Coin of William the Conqueror (1028 – 1087), King (1066 – 1087)

It did not go well.

“When Archbishop Ealdred asked the English, and Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutences asked the Normans, if they would accept William as their King, all of them gladly shouted out with one voice, if not in one language, that they would.

The armed guard (William´s Norman troops), hearing the tumult of the joyful crowd in the church and the harsh accents of a foreign tongue, imagined that some treachery was afoot and foolishly set fire to some of the buildings.

The fire spread rapidly from house to house.

The crowd that had been rejoicing in the church took fright and throngs of men and women of every rank and condition rushed out of the church in haste.

Only the Bishops and a few clergy and Monks remained, terrified, in the Sanctuary, and with difficulty completed the consecration of the King, who was trembling from head to foot.”

On 25 February 1308 Edward II´s ceremony was dominated by his boyfriend Piers Gaveston (1284 – 1312).

Above: Edward II and Piers Gaveston by Marcus Stone (1872)

“Seeking his own glory rather than the King´s”, Gaveston wore an outfit of royal purple, trimmed with pearls.

Nor should he have walked in front of the King in the procession, nor carried Edward´s crown.

The barons were so annoyed at Galveston´s presumption that there was talk of killing him on the spot.

Both Edward and Piers would be assassinated later.

Henry VIII was only 17 at his coronation on 24 June 1509.

He walked to the Abbey from Westminster Palace along a carpet of royal blue.

The crowd was so enthusiastic that they fell on the carpet and cut it up for souvenirs.

Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII´s six wives, was crowned Queen on 1 June 1533.

Above: Anne Boleyn (1501 – 1536)

The ceremony lasted 8 hours and at one point Archbishop Cranmer required Anne to lie on her face in front of the altar – not easy, when she was six months pregnant.

William III´s coronation in 1689 was spoiled by having his money pickpocketed.

Above: William III of England (1650 – 1702), King (1689 – 1702)

To the south is the Abbey´s most popular spot: The Poets´ Corner.

Above: Poets´ Corner with Shakespeare Memorial in the centre

The first occupant, Geoffrey Chaucer, was buried here in 1400.

Above: Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400)

When Edmund Spenser chose to be buried close to Chaucer in 1599, his fellow poets – Shakespeare among them – threw their own works and quills into the grave.

Above: Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599)

More than 100 poets, dramatists and prose writers are buried or commemorated here, as well as the composer George Frederick Handel.

Above: George Frederick Handel (1685 – 1759)

(Handel´s funeral on 20 April 1759 was supposed to be private.

3,000 people turned up.)

“Upon the Poets´ Corner in Westminster Abbey

Hail, sacred relics of the tuneful train!

Here ever honoured, ever loved remain.

No other dust of the once great or wise,

As each beneath the hallowed pavement lies,

To this old dome a juster reverence brings….”

Who decides who is to be immortalized in Poets´ Corner?

The Dean of Westminster consults his colleagues in the Chapter and in the literary world, before reaching a decision which, by law, is his alone to make.

It is rare for a recently deceased poet to be memorialized.

The longest period between a poet´s death and memorialization is 1,3oo years: Caedmon (657 – 680), regarded as the first English language poet.

Above: Caedmon Memorial, St. Mary´s Churchyard, Whitby

The Corner has become a Valhalla for poets and a place of pilgrimage for lovers of literature.

The Poets´ Corner´s most famous memorial is that to William Shakespeare, erected 124 years after his death.

Above: William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

His body remains in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, with the inscription:

“Good friend, for Jesus´ sake, forbear

To dig the dust enclosed here!

Blest be the man that spares these stones

And curst be he that moves my bones.”

Why tempt fate?

The Abbey recalls actors: David Garrick, Henry Irving, William Walton, Laurence Olivier, William Walton and Peggy Ashcroft.

Here one finds a controversy:

Ben Jonson was an arrogant man who did not suffer fools and frequently quarrelled with his fellow dramatists.

Above: Ben Jonson (1572 – 1637)

He lived apart from his wife, whom he described as “a shrew, yet honest.”

One of his plays caused grave offence by its lewdness and he was imprisoned.

He later killed a man in a duel and narrowly escaped the gallows.

As Jonson grew older he became fat and alcoholic.

He was too poor for a proper grave and said that a two-foot square would be enough for him.

And that´s what he got, as he was buried standing up.

His bones and coffin have been exposed three times since his burial.

His skull is missing.

Christopher Marlowe was memorialized 409 years after his death because it was felt the Poets´ Corner was already overcrowded.

Above: Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593)

Tennyson called Marlowe the morning star which heralded Shakespeare´s dazzling sun.

Another description called him “intemperate and of a cruel heart.”

In 1593, at a Deptford tavern in South London, aged 29, Marlowe was fatally stabbed above his right eye, over a bill for supper.

John Milton had to wait more than 60 years before being memorialized.

Above: Bust of John Milton (1608 – 1674), Temple of British Worthies, Stowe

Milton, famous for his Paradise Lost, could have used the title for his autobiography.

In 1642 he married.

She left him after a few weeks.

In 1648 he began to go blind.

By 1652 he had lost his sight completely, as well as his wife and his only son.

In 1656 Milton married again but she died shortly after giving birth to a daughter.

He was passionate about what he hated.

Anti-Catholic, he called for bishops to be executed and prophesied that they would spend eternity in hell.

Milton attacked the greed of the clergy, rallied against censorship and wrote passionately against the monarchy.

On the Restoration of the monarchy, Milton went into hiding, his arrest was ordered and his books burned.

He was imprisoned in the Tower of London but was later pardoned and released.

Charles II greatly admired Samuel Butler.

Above: Samuel Butler (1612 – 1680)

The King enjoyed Butler´s Hudibras so much that he never ate, drank, slept or went to church without having Hudibras beside him.

Despite the King´s adoration, Butler died penniless.

“While Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive

No generous patron would a dinner give!

See him, when starved to death and turned to dust

Presented with a monumental bust!

The poet´s fate is here in emblem shown

He asked for bread and he received a stone!”

Here one finds an impressive memorial to Matthew Prior, famous for sayings like:

Above: Matthew Prior (1664 – 1721)

“It takes two to quarrel, but only one to end it.”

“The ends must justify the means.”

“They never taste who always drink.

They always talk who never think.”

John Gay was said to be….

Above: John Gay (1685 – 1732)

“In wit, a man; simplicity, a child.”

On Gay´s monument, Alexander Pope wrote a long epitaph, but Gay had the last laugh for two lines are Gay´s not Pope´s:

“Life is a jest, and all things show it.

I thought so once, and now I know it.”

Poets´ Corner is a Who´s Who of the English dead: Longfellow, Wilde, T.S. Elliot, Lewis Carroll, Trollope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Keats, Shelley, Burns, the Bronte sisters, Thackeray, Gray, Goldsmith, Blake, Scott, Dickens, Lear, Browning, Brooke, Dylan Thomas, Auden….

Above: Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

(Charles Dickens was buried secretly on 14 June 1870 to avoid crowds, but so many wanted to pay their respects that the grave had to be left open for a time so the public could see him.)

Just to name a few….

Before you enter the Cloisters, check out the South Choir Aisle.

See the tomb of Thomas Thynne that shows how three thugs did him in.

Above: Tomb of Thomas Thynne (1610 – 1669)

Or consider the ironic fate of Admiral Shovell, who survived a shipwreck, was washed up alive on a beach in the Scilly Isles, only to be killed by a fisherwoman who wanted his emerald ring.

Above: Cloudesley Shovell (1650 – 1707)

Or that of the court portrait painter Godfrey Kneller who declared:

Above: Geofrey Kneller (1646 – 1723)

“By God, I will not be buried in Westminster – they do bury fools here.”

Kneller is the only artist to be commemorated in the Abbey.

Enter the Cloisters where Parliament once met, beneath the southern wall where the Whore of Babylon rides the scarlet seven-headed beast from the Book of Revelations.

See the Pyx Chamber which acted like a medieval high security safety deposit box.

Robbers broke in on 24 April 1303 and stole jewels and riches.

Some of them were hanged the following March.

The ringleader of the Pyx robbery was whipped and nailed to the door of the Pyx Chamber as a warning to others.

500 years later pieces of human skin could still be found in the door hinges.

Before you leave the Cloisters enter the Nave itself.

The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior with his garland of red poppies recalls the million British soldiers who died in World War One, with an equivalent number of women dying unmarried because there were no husbands for them.

A tablet in the floor near the Tomb marks the spot where George Peabody, the 19th century philantropist whose housing estates in London still provide homes for those in need, was buried for a month before being exhumed and removed to Massachusetts.

Above: George Peabody (1795 – 1869)

Peabody remains the only American to have been buried in Westminster.

Above the Nave´s west door, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger at just 25 teaches Anarchy while History takes notes.

With all I have described it certainly is no wonder why Westminster Abbey is so popular with tourists.

So much to see, so much to learn and yet Westminster left me with a sense of disappointment.

Not so much with the Abbey itself as much as what the Abbey represents.

Death has become a spectacle and a source of profit.

Does a life have no value if it is not commemorated grandly after death?

Does this mean that the Hindus value life less by burning the bodies of their dead?

And what of the poor who lie in anonymous mass graves unmarked and forgotten?

What of the millions who have died in war or in prison or by dread disease?

Did all these lives have no value because there are no markers to show where their bones are piled?

Does a life have no value if it is not historically significant?

Did all these lives lose their value once their bodies turned to ashes and dust?

I believe that the value of life is in the living, in the apppreciation of the moment, in the appreciation of the Now.

I believe that as long as my life is without extreme pain – physical or psychological – and I am not causing pain to others, then my life has value, at least to myself and hopefully beyond myself.

I don´t require assurance that my remains be assigned some grand memorial in some magnificent cathedral.

I don´t require a cemetery plot or even a funeral.

(Though a drinking party where folks dance with joy celebrating that they continue to live on without me would please me greatly.)

I don´t require a dim unprovable hope that some form of existence awaits me after death.

Am I suggesting that the visitor avoid Westminster Abbey?

No.

It is truly a magnificent structure and is peculiar in its own ways.

But I would be more satisfied with plaques that spoke to me of who a deceased person was, both as a person and someone who accomplished great things.

Epitaphs sound grandiose when read aloud but they speak little about what a person was like when they were alive.

Byron´s monument:  “But there is that within me whuch shall tire torture and time and breathe when I expire.”

But who was Byron?

Above: Lord George Byron (1788 – 1824)

T. S. Eliot: “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

Fine words, but what of the poet who wrote them?

Above: Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965)

Trollope: “Now I stretch out my hand and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words I have written.”

Wouldn´t it be more respectful to read the actual words Trollope wrote then to just simply view his gravesite?

Above: Anthony Trollope (1815 – 1965)

D. H. Lawrence is labelled as “Home sum! The adventurer…” and G. M. Hopkins as “priest and poet, immortal diamond”.

But these words say nothing of who these genetlemen were.

The honour is in appreciating them for what they wrote and the life captured within their words.

Otherwise despite the fine artistry of the graves of Westminster, without an appreciation of who the dead were, what lies beneath slabs of stone is nothing but dust and ashes and the merest whisper of existence.

It would be better to show those that we love that they are loved, rather than mourn their passage which our dead cannot appreciate.

Westminster shows me that death is the great equalizer of us all, no matter how one wishes to decorate the tombs of kings and queens or poets and generals.

If while I live, others are happy that I do so….

“Wouldn´t you like to get away?

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.

And they´re always glad you came.

You want to go where you know troubles are all the same.

You want to go where everybody knows your name.”

With a place like this, where everybody knows my name while I am still alive, I don´t need to be buried in some great cathedral.

A great grave doesn´t make a life great.

Great love does.                                                 

Sources: Wikipedia / The Rough Guide to London / Julian Beecroft, For the Love of London: A Companion / Nicholas Best, London: In the Footsteps of the Famous / Simon Leyland, A Curious Guide to London / Oliver Tearle, Britain by the Book: A Curious Tour of Our Literary Landscape / http://www.westminster-abbey.org

Canada Slim and the Battle for Switzerland´s Soul

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 18 December 2017

Battlefields can be deceptive when viewed long after the battles have been fought.

Take the example of Waterloo.

Above: The Battle of Waterloo, Belgium, 18 June 1815

Once the tourist gets beyond the huge pyramid and the facilities set up to view and visit it he/she finds him/her self in quiet tranquil dairy country.

(For a glimpse of today´s Waterloo, please see That Which Survives: A Matter of Perspective of this blog.)

Go to Battle, near Hastings, and beyond the markers that indicate that major events took place here in 1066 resulting in the Norman Conquest of England, it is difficult to picture these tranquil fields the scene of anything beyond a hiker´s pleasant place for a stroll.

Above: The Bayeux Tapestry, showing the Battle of Hastings, England, 14 October 1066

Yes, even today a few poppies grow between the crosses row by row in Flanders Field, the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting in World War One.

And while no birds sang back then, today ignorant avian creatures soar and swoop above farmers´ fields that have known the plow for centuries before and will probably know the plow for centuries to come.

It is difficult to understand the past through the eyes of the present.

It is difficult to understand the people of the past through our present perspectives.

As a resident in Switzerland these past seven years I find myself still waging an internal war within, between my preconceptions of the Swiss before I lived here and the reality and the history of who the Swiss actually are and how they got that way.

I once viewed the Swiss as nothing more than banking gnomes with the passion of dry toast, similar to the goblins that run Gringot´s Bank in the Harry Potter series.

My view later expanded to see the Swiss through the eyes of Johanna Spyri´s children´s classic Heidi and I began to imagine the rural Swiss as hayseed farmers leading processions of bell-ringing bovine over hills reminiscient of Salzburg, Austria, where Julie Andrews reminds us that those hills are alive with the Sound of Music.

Above: Swiss CHF50 commemorative coin (2001)

To be fair, Switzerland does indeed have bankers and farmers that partially validate my preconceptions, but the Swiss are so much more than these.

If we consider that two symbols of Switzerland are the Swiss Army knife and the Swiss Guard that protects the Pope, it might help us to view the Swiss militarily as well.

Today we view Switzerland simply as a place where conflicting groups go to Geneva, have a little chocolate, discuss a bit of politics, shake hands and sign treaties.

We forget that once the Swiss were considered the world´s fiercest warriors and that warring nations eagerly bought their mercenaries from Switzerland, for even then: Swiss meant quality.

We forget that had it been in Swiss nature to be conquerors beyond their frontiers and had they acted when they held military superiority, today´s political map might look quite different.

Little did I know as I followed the footsteps of religious reformer Huldrych Zwingli that I would encounter the very events that would determine Swiss independence from Hapsburg rule, compel the country to adapt a policy of neutrality and redefine the role of the Swiss mercenary.

Above: Huldrych Zwingli (1484 – 1531)

 

Glarus, Switzerland, 15 November 2017

The walk continues.

My little Zwingli Project begun a month previously has brought me here, back to the Walensee, a beautiful lake  – 24.1 square kilometres of mysterious water that never fails to capture one´s breath.

Above: Walensee and Kerenzerburg Mountain

I had already  walked from Zwingli´s birthplace in Wildhaus to Strichboden (13 km / 4 hours walk), to Arvenbüel (9 km / 3 hours walk), to Weesen (five km / 2 hours walk) and had learned and seen a lot.

(See Canada Slim and the Road to Reformation, ….and the Wild Child of Toggenburg, ….and the Thundering Hollows, ….and the Basel Butterfly Effect, ….and the Vienna Waltz for the events and background of the Zwingli Project in this blog.)

After a train to St. Gallen, another to Uznach and a third to Ziegelbrücke, followed by a bus to Weesen, I set off for Glarus, Zwingli´s first ecclesiastical post.

I walked past Weesen Harbour, the path clinging to the shoreline of the Walensee.

Above: Harbour, Weesen, Walensee

Summer had clearly abandoned the lake: no boats afloat, no campfires burning, no kiosks surrounded by clamouring kids.

I saw only the occasional woman or retired gentleman walking their dogs.

The path left the lake, climbed to the highway leading to Ziegelbrücke, clung to a bridge crossing the Linth Canal that goes to where the Promised Land of Zürich beckons, descended back to the lake through a campground to a second canal – the Escher.

I followed canal and towpath straight south, but less than a kilometre later the signage and my travelling companion guidebook failed me.

There were no signs and as beautiful as the ascent and the walk atop the mountains could have been, I lacked important information:

Were there cable cars, up the mountains, then, after hours of walking, back down the mountains, operating?

It was a workday and summer had long since passed.

If there were cable cars in operation, how passable were the mountains?

Were the paths blocked by snow?

Were trail markings still visible?

I decided to err on the side of caution and continued to follow the Escher Canal.

My guidebook ultimately leads the hiker to Glarus and my topographic map suggested the Canal continued straight south to Glarus, so – mountain views be damned – from the Canal I would not stray.

The territory I was walking through wasn´t so alien for me.

I had previously walked from where the Escher Canal (which manages the Linth River) begins in Linthal to Glarus.

I had taken a cable car from Linthal to visit the cars-free town of Braunwald.

Above: The village of Braunwald

I had ridden a Postbus from Linthal to Klausenpass and the Uri cantonal capital Altdorf.

Above: Klausen Pass

And to accomplish these adventures to and from Glarus and Linthal I had ridden the train a number of times from Ziegelbrücke.

(For a glimpse of this, please see Glarus: Every Person a Genius of this blog.)

 

According to the legend, the inhabitants of the Linth River valley were converted to Christianity by the Irish monk St. Fridolin, who, after founding Säckingen Abbey in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, decided to keep travelling and keep on converting those he met during his travels.

In Switzerland, Fridolin spent considerable time where he converted the landowner Urso.

Above: Fridolin (left), Urso (middle) and Landolf (right). Urso´s brother Landolf protests against his brother´s landholdings being passed to Fridolin,  so Fridolin resurrects Urso to confirm the land grant.

On his death Urso left his enormous landholdings to Fridolin, who founded numerous churches all dedicated to St. Hilarius (the origin of the name “Glarus”).

From the 9th century, the Glarus region was owned by Säckingen Abbey until the Habsburgs claimed all the Abbey’s rights by 1288.

St. Fridolin has never been forgotten.

Canton Glarus joined the Swiss Confederation in 1352.

On 9 July 1386, the Swiss Confederation attacked and conquered the Habsburg village of Weesen.

The following year Canton Glarus rose up against the Habsburgs and destroyed Windegg Castle.

In response, on the night of 21-22 February 1388, a Habsburg army attacked the village of Weesen and drove out the Confederation forces.

In the beginning of April, two Habsburg armies marched out to cut off Canton Glaurus from the rest of the Confederation.

The main Confederation army, with about 5,000 men, marched towards Näfels under the command of Count Donat of Toggenburg and the knight Peter von Thorberg.

A second column, with about 1,500 men under the command of Count Hans von Werdenberg-Sargans, marched over the Kerenzerberg Pass above the Walensee.

Habsburgian attempts to reconquer the valley were repelled in the Battle of Näfels in 1388, where a banner depicting St. Fridolin was used to rally the people of Glarus to victory.

The main army, under Toggenburg and Thorberg, attacked and captured the fortifications around Näfels.

As they retreated, the Austrian army spread out to plunder the villages and farms.

The Glarners then emerged from the snow and fog to take the Habsburg troops by surprise as they were preoccupied with looting.

The Battle of Näfels, the last major battle of the Old Swiss Confederation vs the Austrian Hapsburgs, fought on 9 April 1388, was decisive, despite the forces of Glarus being outnumbered 16 to 1.

2,500 Austrians died.

Only 54 men of Glaurus were killed.

The disorganized Austrians broke and fled towards Weesen, but the collapse of the bridge over the Linth River dropped much of their army into the water where they drowned.

In 1389, a seven years´ peace treaty was signed in Vienna.

Above: Monument to the Battle of Näfels (9 April 1388)

That same year, the first Näfelserfahrt (Näfels pilgrimage) to the site of the battle was held.

This pilgrimage, which still occurs, happens on the first Thursday in April in memory of this battle.

From that time onwards Canton Glarus has used the image of St. Fridolin on its flags and in its coat of arms.

I lingered in Näfels after an hour´s stroll along the Escher Canal.

I visited the Glarus Cantonal Museum in the Freulerpalast (Freuler Palace), the Church of St. Hilarius with the grave of General Niklaus Franz von Bachmann (1740 – 1831) who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, and the Battlefield Memorial.

Above: Freuler Palace, Näfels, Canton Glarus

The diverse history of the Canton is shown here with precious objects and paintings.

Here you can learn interesting facts on immigration and emigration, the practice of direct democracy and the Great Fire of Glarus.

(On the first Sunday in May, the Landesgemeinde brings out traditionally clad voters who publicly debate and decide politics in a manner rarely seen elsewhere.)

Above: Landesgemeinde Glarus

You can see the development of textile printing that once was the most important industry in Glarnerland, the military and defence of Glarus and the significance of the region in alpine ski sport.

(The Museum is open from 1 April to 30 November, 1000-1200/1400-1730.  Please see http://www.freulerpalast.ch.)

The towpath along the Escher Canal continues to Netstal, a town that lies beneath Wiggis Mountain where the Löntsch River (from the Klöntal) meets the Linth.

Above: Netstal

Here one finds both a Catholic and a Reformed church, a beautiful half-timbered house (the Stählihaus), a plaque on the side of the Ambühlhaus in memory of Battle of Näfels warrior Mathias Ambühl, and a memorial stone regarding an unfortunate mine launcher accident that took place on 15 December 1941 resulting in the loss of four soldiers´ lives.

Netstal was home to cartographer Rudolf Leuzinger (1826 – 1896), the youngest Swiss traitor ever executed Fridolin Beeler (1921 – 1943) and writers Ludwig Hohl (1904 – 1980) and Marcel Schwander (1929 – 2010).

In the 118 years between the Battle of Näfels and Zwingli assuming his post as priest in Glarus in 1506, Switzerland was far from being a peaceful place, for when the Swiss weren´t fighting against others they were fighting amongst themselves.

There had been the Appenzell Wars (1403 – 1428), war with Milan (1403 – 1428), the Basel War (1409), the annexations of Aargau (1415) and Thurgau (1460), the Raron Affair (1418 – 1419), the Old Zürich War (1436 – 1450), the St. James War (1445 – 1449), the Freiburg War (1447 – 1448), the Waldshut War (1468), the Burgundian Wars (1474 – 1477), the St. Gallen War (1489 – 1490), the Italian Wars (1495 – 1522) and the Swabian War (1499).

(The Swabian War is called the Swiss War by the Germans and the Engadin War by the Austrians.)

(For the fascinating story of the Burgundian Wars and how it lead to the Swiss being recognized as the militarily superior force in Europe, please see The Underestimated: The Bold and the Reckless of this blog.)

Often these wars were of Cantons seeking independence from Habsburg control and the Habsburg Empire seeking to regain it.

Bloodshed and violence were commonplace.

As previously mentioned in former blog posts, Zwingli had completed his studies in Weesen, Bern, Basel and Vienna, was ordained in Konstanz and celebrated his first mass in his hometown of Wildhaus, before his first ecclesiastical post in Glarus where he would remain for a decade. (1506 – 1516)

Above: Birthplace of Huldrych Zwingli, Wildhaus

It was in Glarus, whose soldiers were used as mercenaries throughout Europe, that Zwingli became involved in politics.

The hiring of young men to fight in other nations´ wars, including battles for the Pope, was one of the major industries for the Swiss.

During Zwingli´s pastorate in Glarus, the Swiss Confederation was embroiled in various campaigns with its neighbours: the French, the Habsburgs and the Papal States.

Zwingli placed himself solidly on the side of the Roman See.

In return, Pope Julius II honoured Zwingli by providing him with an annual pension.

Above: Giuliano della Rovere (1443 – 1513), “the Fearsome Warrior Pope” Pope Julius II (1503 – 1513)

Zwingli took the role of chaplain in several Swiss campaigns of the aforementioned Italian Wars.

The Italian Wars (also referred to as the Great Italian Wars or the Great Wars of Italy or the Renaissance Wars) were a series of conflicts from 1494 to 1559 that involved, at various times, most of the city-states of Italy, the Papal States, the Republic of Venice, most of the major states of Western Europe (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, England, Swiss mercenaries and Scotland) as well as the Ottoman Empire.

The Italian Wars are: the First Italian War / King Charles VIII´s War (1494 – 1498), ….

Above: Charles VIII of France (1470 – 1498), King (1483 – 1498)

(Charles VIII of France invaded Italy with 25,000 men, including 8,000 Swiss mercenaries.)

….the Second Italian War / King Louis XII´s War (1499 – 1504), ….

Above: Louis XII of France (1462 – 1515), King (1499 – 1515)

(Louis XII of France invaded Italy with 27,000 men, including 5,000 Swiss mercenaries.  Julius II became Pope in 1503.)

….the Third Italian War / the War of the League of Cambrai (1508 – 1516), ….

(The Pope hired 6,000 Swiss mercenaries in the War against the French.)

….the Italian War of 1521 – 1526, the War of the League of Cognac (1526 – 1530), the Italian War of 1536 – 1538, the Italian War of 1542 – 1546, and the Habsburg-Valois War of 1551 – 1559.

The attentive reader may note that I do not mention Swiss mercenary involvement in the last five Italian conflicts.

That is because three battles – one in King Louis´ War and two in the War of the League of Cambrai – would make the Swiss question themselves as regards to their military role and their allegiance to the Catholic Church.

While Zwingli was in Vienna, he probably had heard of the Treason of Novara in 1500.

King Louis XII of France had conquered the Duchy of Milan in 1499 with the help of Swiss mercenaries.

In the spring of 1500, Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, in his turn hired Swiss mercenaries in his bid to reconquer the Duchy.

Above: Ludovico Sforza (1452 – 1508), Duke (1494 – 1499)

The two groups of Swiss mercenaries found themselves on both sides of a conflict.

The two mercenary armies confronted one another at Novara, a city west of Milan.

6,000 Swiss under the command of Sforza defended the city, while 10,000 Swiss under the command of Louis laid siege to it.

A meeting of delegates from the Swiss soldiers´ individual cantons called for negotiations between the two sides in an attempt to prevent the worst case scenario of the Swiss being forced to slaughter one another, “brothers against brothers and fathers against sons”.

Louis agreed to a conditional surrender which would grant free passage to the Swiss abandoning the city, under the condition that Sforza would be surrendered.

However, the Swiss on Sforza´s side, under an oath of loyalty to their employer, decided to dress Sforza as a Swiss and smuggle him out of town.

On 10 April 1500, the Swiss garrison was leaving Novara, passing a cordon formed by the Swiss on the French side.

French officers were posted to oversee their exit.

As the disguised Sforza passed the cordon, one Swiss mercenary Hans Turman of Uri made signs giving away Sforza´s identity.

Above: Sforza handed over to the French

The Duke was apprehended by the French and died eight years later as a prisoner in the castle of Loches.

Above: Loches Castle

The French rewarded Turman for his treason with 200 gold crowns (corresponding to five years´ salary of a mercenary).

Turman escaped to France, but after three years he returned home to Uri.

He was immediately arrested for treason and executed by decapitation.

The Treason left a mark on the Swiss conscience.

Were they nothing more than men without honour, selling themselves to the highest bidder?

Was Swiss unity so cheaply sacrificed?

I am uncertain as to the exact demands required of an army chaplain in Zwingli´s day, but I suspect that in spite of his religious role he was expected to raise arms against the enemy when it was required, for it was in battle in Kappel am Albis in 1531 that Zwingli would meet his demise and Zwingli´s most prominent statue – at Zürich´s Wasserkirche –  shows him with sword firmly in hand.

Zwingli´s battle experiences would make him question the role of the Swiss as mercenaries which mainly enriched cantonal authorities.

On 6 June 1513, in the aforementioned city of Novara (Naverra) where the Swiss had gained the reputation of being treasonous, Zwingli was part of a force of some 12,000 troops that surprised the occupying French and soundly defeated them.

It was a shockingly bloody battle, with 5,000 casualities on the French side and 1,500 for the Swiss pikemen.

Above: The Battle of Novara, 6 June 1513

After the battle, the Swiss executed the hundreds of German Landsknecht mercenaries they had captured that had fought for the French.

Having routed the French army, the Swiss were unable to launch a close pursuit because of their lack of cavalry, but nonetheless several contingents of Swiss mercenaries followed the French withdrawl all the way to Dijon before the French paid them to leave France.

This one French defeat forced Louis XII to withdraw from Milan and Italy.

Did Zwingli witness these events and contemplate the morality of such actions?

The citizenry, Zwingli´s parishioners, remained loyal to the idea of fighting for the Pope until 13 September 1515….

16 km southeast of Milan is the town of Melegnano, then called Marignano.

This battle between the French and the Swiss would change everything.

The French army was composed of the best armored lancers and artillery in Europe and led by Francis I, newly crowned King of France and one day past his 21st birthday.

Above: Francis I of France (1494 – 1547), King (1515 – 1547)

With Francis were German Landknechts, bitter mercenary rivals of the Swiss for fame and renown in war, and late arriving Venetian allies.

Prior to Marignano there were years of Swiss successes, during which French fortunes in northern Italy had suffered greatly.

The prologue to the battle was a remarkable Alpine passage, in which Francis hauled 72 large cannons over new-made roads over the Col d´Argentiere, a previously unknown route on the French-Italian border.

Above: The village of Larche, France, and the Col d´Argentiere

This was, at the time, considered one of the foremost military exploits of the age and the equal of Hannibal´s crossing of the Alps in 218 BC.

At Villafranca, the French surprised and captured the commander of the Papal forces in a daring raid deep behind enemy lines, seizing Commander Colonna and his staff, 600 horses and a great deal of booty.

The capture of Prospero Colonna, along with the startling appearance of the French army on the plains of Piedmont, stunned the Papal allies.

Above: Prospero Colonna (1452 – 1523)

The Pope and the Swiss both sought terms with Francis, while the Pope´s Spanish allies en route from Naples halted to await developments.

The main Swiss army retreated to Milan, while a large faction, tired of the War and eager to return home with the profits of years of successful campaigning, urged terms with the French.

Though the parties reached an agreement that gave Milan back to the French, the arrival of fresh and bellicose troops from the Swiss cantons annulled the agreement, as the newly arrived men had no desire to return home empty-handed and refused to abide by the treaty.

Discord swept through the Swiss forces until Matthäus Schiner, Cardinal of Sion and archenemy of Francis, inspired the Swiss with a fiery speech, reminding them of what a smaller Swiss army had achieved against as powerful a French army at the Battle of Novara.

Above: Matthäus Schiner (1465 – 1522)

Schiner pointed out the enormous profits of victory, appealed to national pride, and urged the Swiss to immediate battle.

The Swiss encountered Francis´ forces at the little burnt-out village of Marignano on a featureless plain.

A treaty signed, the French were not expecting battle.

Francis was in his tent, trying on a new suit of armor, when scouts reported the coming of the Swiss.

The French army quickly sprang into action.

The fighting, begun at sunset of 13 September, continued until smoke and the disappearance of moonlight halted the battle during the darkest hours of the night.

At dawn of 14 September the battle began again.

Above: The Battle of Marignano (13 – 14 September 1515)

The midmorning arrival of the French´s allies from Venice turned the tide against the Swiss.

Their attacks repulsed everywhere, their ranks in bloody shambles, the Swiss grudgingly gave ground and withdrew.

The battle was a decisive victory for Francis, for even though the Swiss were heavily outnumbered and outgunned, they had proved themselves during the preceding decades and had habitually emerged victorious from the most disadvantageous situations.

“I have vanquished those whom only Caesar vanquished” was printed on the medal Francis ordered struck to commemorate the victory.

Considering this battle his most cherished triumph, Francis praised Marignano as the “battle of giants” and stated that all previous battles in his lifetime had been “child´s sport”.

This battle ended once and for all Swiss aspirations for conquest.

There never was any Swiss military offensive against an external enemy again.

After lengthy negotiations, a peace treaty between the Swiss and the French was signed in Fribourg on 29 November 1516.

This treaty would be known as the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, a peace that remained unbroken until the French invaded Switzerland in 1798 during the French Revolutionary Wars.

Zwingli was present at the Battle of Marignano.

He would witness the slaughter of 6,000 of his countrymen in the service of the Pope.

Above: Dying Swiss, Retreat from Marignano, by Ferdinand Hodler (1898)

In Glarus, there had been political controversy on which side the young men seeking employment as mercenaries should take service, the side of France or the side of the Papal States.

They wanted to prevent that men of Glarus took service on both sides of the war as had been the case at Novara in 1500.

Zwingli had supported the Pope before the Battle of Marignano, and even after the Battle, he opposed the peace with France and continued to support the side of the Papal States.

Since public opinion in Glarus had shifted towards a clearly pro-French stance, Zwingli was forced to abandon his position in Glarus, taking employment elsewhere at Einsiedeln Abbey.

Above: Einsiedeln Abbey

Based on his experience in the War, Zwingli became an outspoken opponent of mercenary service, arguing with Erasmus of Rotterdam that “war is sweet only to those who have not experienced it”.

Above: Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466 – 1586)

He returned from Marignano determined to abolish this mercenary practice of “selling blood for gold”.

Zwingli blamed the warmongery on the part of Cardinal Schiner for the disaster at Marignano and began to preach against the high clergy, the first sign of his radicalization that would culminate in the Swiss Reformation.

 

I continued to follow the Canal to the Canton Glarus capital also named Glarus.

Above: The City of Glarus

Of interest to the visitor are the Stadtkirche (city church), the Kunsthaus (art museum), the Anna Göldi Museum and the Cantonal library.

Above: Anna Göldi (1734 – 1782)

(Anna Göldi was the last person in Europe to be executed for witchcraft.)

(For the story of witchcraft in Switzerland, please see Five Schillings´ Worth of Wood of this blog.)

Though the Stadtkirche was once the church where Zwingli presided and is today a Reformed Church, there still seems to be no love lost for Zwingli.

Above: Stadtkirche, Glarus

I explored the church inside and out, but I could find no plaques or markers indicating that he had ever been here.

Glarus´ grudge towards Zwingli was neither forgiven nor forgotten.

Glarus was not shaped by Zwingli during his lifetime, but Glarus and Zwingli´s war experiences certainly shaped him.

I have always loved Glarus, this picturesque wee capital dwarfed by the looming Glarnsch Massif.

I have always loved Glarnerland, this tract of mountain territory with widely spaced settlements and very low-key tourism.

Isolation is attractive.

Sources: Wikipedia / Glarus Tourism / Josef Schwitter and Urs Heer, Glarnerland: A Short Portrait / Marcel and Yvonne Steiner, Zwingli-Wege: Zu Fuss von Wildhaus nach Kappel am Albis

 

 

 

Canada Slim and the Company Town

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 17 December 2017

Soon I will attempt to go back to work.

I have spent the last two weeks suffering from an extremely durable and nasty viral infection, aka the Man Cold, but finally I believe my return back to work on Monday will be successful.

I have remained indoors, have plied my body with all the medicine – placebos or not – I could, and have slept as much as my body has allowed.

I tried working last Sunday and suffice to say I was unsuccessful at keeping what should remain inside the body from coming out.

More detail is neither necessary nor desireable.

I have missed working.

The contact with others, the employment of my days in an useful effort, the desire to achieve as much as possible not only to the benefit of an employer but as well proof that I can be worthy of a paycheque….

I sincerely doubt that I will be singing a chorus of “Thank God It´s Monday” anytime soon, but I was never meant to spend my days and nights lying in bed or sprawling on a couch for too long a period of time.

Though I am gifted with a partner who makes a significant income, I still want to feel that my contribution to the household collective is at least appreciated.

As regular readers (both of them) of my blog know, I am a man of two paid professions….

I am a freelance teacher and a part time Starbucks barista.

And though the former position lacks job security and the latter lacks a vast salary, I am quite content to do both these jobs to the best of my limited ability.

I am happy to have employment, for I am no longer as young as I once was and ageism is truly a problem in Switzerland, especially for those with limited skills or limited qualifications.

I have thought about perhaps investigating other lines of work outside of gastronomy and teaching.

I don´t have to spend eight hours a day washing dishes or stripping fruit off an orchard.

If sufficiently motivated I could make my own opportunities and go in business for myself.

If I could find within myself the initiative, the determination, the creativity needed and could identify a popular need and exploit it….

Well, who knows what I could accomplish?

Perhaps with my travelling experience and wanderlust I could learn what items can be bought cheaply in one country and be sold profitably in another.

(Kinder eggs, because of the surprise within could injure a child if swallowed, are forbidden in the US.)

Or I could go to a place where crowds gather and offer them something that they desire: beer on the beach, warm cocoa for the ski slopes, (real) eggs for a political protest!

I have often considered travel writing for money, but I confess I desire a bit more financial security in the marital bank account before boldly going where no one has gone before and writing about it.

I am a talented singer, a legend in my own mind, but busking requires a kind of foolhardy courage that I lack.

Working for others in business and industry, though it shall never make me rich (unless I work on Wall Street – slim chance of that) does offer a steady income while a contract lasts.

My friends in Australia, highly skilled and talented individuals, have considered working for a company town, a town that operates oil rigs or deep mines way off in some remote area of Oz.

Their idea is not novel and I have heard of towns owned and operated by just one industrial organization, like Fort McMurray in Alberta.

But it wasn´t until this past summer I finally encountered a company town….

 

Crespi d´Adda, Italy, 4 August 2017

English language guidebooks often fail us when we travel the world, so, when we can, we also travel with French and German language guidebooks that often show us places that the Anglos fail to mention.

Beate Giacovelli´s 111 Orte am Comer See die man gesehen haben muss (111 places everyone must see at the Lake of Como) mentions this town as an UNESCO site worth a detour.

Now UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is, at present, quite a controversial topic for Americans at present.

Based in Paris, UNESCO´s declared purpose is to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through educational, scientific and cultural reforms in order to increase universal respect for justice, the rule of law and human rights along with the fundamental freedom proclaimed in the United Nations Charter.

Above: The Garden of Peace, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris

UNESCO has 195 member states, which now no longer includes the United States.

Above: UNESCO member states (green)

UNESCO pursues its objectives through five major programs: education, natural sciences, social and human sciences, culture and the communication of information.

UNESCO´s aim is to contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture and communication.

The United States and its present Administration have a tendency to pass laws and apply – or not apply – these laws whenever it suits America´s political interests.

Laws passed in Congress in 1990 and 1994 state that the United States cannot contribute financially to any United Nations organization that accepts Palestine as a full member.

UNESCO hasn´t.

Palestine has observer status only.

As a result the United States, under the Trump Administration, accusing the UN of having a bias against Israel and a favouritism towards Palestine, has decided to withdraw from being a member of UNESCO.

Certainly the fact that the United States owes the United Nations over 250 million dollars has no little part to play in this decision.

The State Department has suggested that the United Nations should be reformed and politics kept out of UNESCO, condemning, for example, the acceptance of Hebron and Jericho as World Heritage Sites because they lie within Palestinian territories.

Above: Jericho

There are, at last count prior to 2017, 1,052 World Heritage Sites around the globe in 165 countries.

814 are cultural sites that have historical or anthropological value.

203 are natural sites that include habitats for threatened species.

35 are a mixture of both cultural and natural.

229 of UNESCO sites have been identified by the World Wildlife Federation as significant for their natural value.

114 of these are threatened by industrial development, such as illegal logging, mining and petroleum production.

55 of these are listed as being in critical danger, some of them due to military conflicts.

For example, all six of Syria´s World Heritage Sites have been damaged or destroyed in the ongoing Syrian Civil War and the concurrent struggle against ISIS.

Above: Flag of Syria

Making a place a World Heritage Site does bring attention and pressure to governments to protect the area, but this same publicity can also cause an upswing in tourism leading to further degradation of a location.

To be selected, a World Heritage Site must be an already classified landmark, unique in some respect as a geographically and historically identifiable place having special cultural or physical significance (such as an ancient ruin or historical structure, building, city, complex, desert, forest, island, lake, monument, mountain or wilderness area).

The Site may signify a remarkable accomplishment of humanity and serve as evidence of our intellectual history on the planet.

The Sites are intended for practical conservation for posterity, which otherwise would be subject to risk from human or animal trespassing, unmonitored/uncontrolled/unrestricted access or threat from local administrative negligence.

Sites are designated by UNESCO as protected zones.

The six cultural criteria to qualify as a World Heritage Site – each Site must meet at least one of the criteria – are:

1. The site must represent a masterpiece of human creative genius and cultural significance.
2. The site must exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time, or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town planning, or landscape design.
3. The site must bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared.
4. The site must be an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural, or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates a significant stage in human history.
5. The site must be an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, land use or sea use which is representative of a culture or human interaction with the environment.
6. The site must be directly or tangibly associated with Events or living traditions, with ideas, with beliefs, or with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance.

The UNESCO designation as a World Heritage Site means that culturally sensitive sites are legally protected under the Geneva Convention which determines how war is to be conducted.

It is against the Geneva Convention to commit any acts of hostility directed against the historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural heritage of peoples.

It is illegal to use these sites in support of a military effort.

It is against international law to make these sites the object of reprisals or revenge.

Of all the UNESCO member countries Italy has the most World Heritage Sites: 51.

Crespi d´Adda, in the municipality of Capriate San Gervasio, in Bergamo province, 30 kilometres directly south of Lecco, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995.

Crespi d´Adda is an outstanding example of a 19th/early 20th century company town built in Europe and North America by enlightened industrialists to meet the workers´ needs.

Villagio Crespi, described as “an architectural jewel” and “the ideal worker´s town”, can be reached from the A4 Torino-Trieste motorway, taking the Capriate exit.

The nearest parking area, after the motorway bridge, is near the cemetery of Capriate San Gervasio.

Upon leaving your vehicle, get ready to take a step back in time.

The town is a pedestrians only zone.

Set your time machine to 1877, the year Crespi d´Adda was founded.

This excellent example of a company town is nearly intact, as though it has always been preserved under glass inside a museum.

Cristoforo Crespi, a textile entrepreneur from Busto Arsizio with a brilliant vision and a strong will, founded this village.

Above: Bust of Cristoforo Crespi (1833 – 1920), Crespi d´Adda

After several years of searching without success, Crespi found this desolate and untamed area near the Adda River and decided to build his cotton mill here.

Above: The cotton mill, Crespi d´Adda

The Adda provided the water necessary to produce energy for the plant and the nearby towns provided an abundant labour force.

In 1877 the creation of the town began.

The river was diverted, a turbine plant constructed, a spinning department built, 5,000 spindles installed, residences for the workers built, and important services (cafeteria, cemetery, clinic, hotel, school, shops and theatre) provided.

Above: Village school, Crespi d´Adda

Above: The church of Crespi d´Adda

Above: The Cooperativa di Consumo store, Crespi d´Adda

The village of Crespi d´Adda was the first village in Italy to have modern public lighting.

Production in the factory began on 25 July 1878.

The factory quickly expanded and in 1886 the first workers´ houses were built.

In 1889, Cristoforo Crespi´s son Silvio became manager of the cotton mill.

Above: Silvio Crespi (1862 – 1944)

With the support of renowned architects and engineers, Silvio designed the village according to a symmetrical layout, creating different zones dedicated to production, family life and community life.

Crespi d´Adda in its day represented new trends in social thinking and scientific advancement.

Silvio rejected the idea of large multiple occupancy blocks in favour of single family homes, each with its own garden.

Above: A factory worker´s house with garden

Silvio saw gardens as conducive to harmony and a defence against industrial strife.

His policy worked.

In the fifty years of Crespi management there was no strike or any other form of social disorder within the village.

The workers´ houses are lined up along parallel roads to the east of the factory.

A tree-lined avenue separates the production zone from the houses, overlooking a chessboard road plan.

The village´s fortunes depended entirely on the factory.

The worker´s lives were inextricably bound to the Crespi family who provided services and assistance.

Therefore, right from the start, the organization was rigid, both inside and outside the factory.

With various peaks and valleys, the village continued to thrive until the end of the 1920s, but political changes (the rise of fascism), new industry trends and the Great Economic Crash of 1929 brought the Crespi family to the verge of collapse.

In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Crespi family sold the village.

Other managers took over while other changes and opportunities altered the social and economic fabric of the village.

In 2003 the factory closed.

No more smoke emerges from the tall chimney stack that dominates the town.

Today the village is inhabited by a community descended from the original 3,200 workers.

Here the visitor can wander the streets of Crespi d´Adda and see the residential houses, the management villa-castle, the doctor´s house and the priest´s house, the church and the washhouse, the recreational club and the hotel, the school and the hospital, the public bath and the cemetery.

Above: Crespi Castle, Crespi d´Adda

Above: The wash house, Crespi d´Adda

Crespi d´Adda is open during the work week from 0900 to 1230 and on the weekend from 1000 to 1230 during the months of July and August.

Multilingual tours are available if prebooked before arriving on site.

Crespi d´Adda, a model village, a self-contained community, a company town, is not unique in Europe.

The concept of a model village was first developed in England, where at least 29 villages of a similar design once existed.

Six could be found in Ireland, one in Scotland and two in Wales.

On the Continent, the Stadt des KdF-Wagens near Wolfsburg was built for the Volkswagen factory.

Spain has the model town of Nuevo Baztan outside of Madrid.

Faraway New Zealand´s South Island has Barrhill.

Americans certainly will recognize the idea of company towns for it possesses one of the world´s oldest: Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, built and operated by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (1818 – 1964).

Above: West Hazard Street, Summit Hill, Pennsylvania

Traditional settings for company towns have often been where extractive industries such as coal, metal mines and lumber had established a monopoly.

In the former Soviet Union there were several cities (atomgrads) of nuclear scientists (atomicals), particularly in the Ukraine.

Above: Former Soviet atomgrad Krasnokamianka, Ukraine

Catalonia has a high density of company towns, known locally as industrial colonies.

These one hundred industrial colonies are small towns created around a factory, built in a rural area and therefore separate from any other population.

Each colony typically houses between 100 and 500 inhabitants.

At their peak there were over 2,500 company towns in the United States, housing 3% of the American population.

The French city of Le Creusot, the German cities of Ludwigshafen, Wolfsburg and Leverkusen and the Japanese city of Kitakyushu are all company towns.

Similar to Crespi d´Adda, Derwent Valley Mills in Derbyshire, England, is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Above: Arkwright Masson Mills, Derwent Valley, Derbyshire, England

The wife and I wandered the streets of Crespi d´Adda by ourselves.

No one on the roads, no visitors at the visitors centre, the restaurant´s only guests doubled by our arrival.

The buildings were locked, the locals away working in other towns and cities.

No babies cried, no children played in the streets, no animals crossed our path, no birds sang.

It was eerie, almost spooky, as if we were participating in some nightmarish scenario from the Twilight Zone TV series.

The town was empty and silent.

No one moved in it.

No lights on in the houses, no phones rang, no doors opened.

Beds empty and cold, no water running, only the barely perceptible hum of electricity in wires above our heads.

The cemetery was only different from the village in that the resulting silence was explainable by the lack of the living.

Above: Cemetery of Crespi d´Adda

A town where residents remained from cradle to grave now lies barren and bare, devoid of delight, empty of enthusiasm, yet not collapsing from neglect.

No houses are in need of repair, no weeds grow in sidewalk cracks, all is aligned as perfect as a picture.

It was a Friday, a workday.

Does the village resurrect itself on the weekend?

Do the residents hide themselves during visiting times only coming out when everyone else has left?

I am not sure.

We arrived when the village officially opened for the day and left when it closed.

The day was hot and humid.

I am reminded of the band America´s song “A Horse with No Name”:

On the first part of the journey
I was looking at all the life
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings
The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz
And the sky with no clouds
The heat was hot and the ground was dry
But the air was full of sound…..

After nine days I let the horse run free
‘Cause the desert had turned to sea
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings
The ocean is a desert with its life underground
And a perfect disguise above
Under the cities lies a heart made of ground
But the humans will give no love

And that was what Crespi d´Adda seems to have lost: a sense of love.

The visitor is a spectre, a ghost, a mere footfall.

Crespi d´Adda is well preserved.

Its impact is its silence.

I wonder if Crespi d´Adda will ever go back to work.

Sources: Wikipedia / Beate Giacovelli, 111 Orte am Comer See die man gesehen haben muss / http://www.crespidaddaunesco.org

 

Canada Slim and the City of Peace

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 16 December 2017

It´s easy to criticize.

Especially when a leader is such an easy target.

Donald Trump is such a man.

Above: Donald Trump (born 1946), 45th US President since 20 January 2017)

Last week the Donald announced that he would move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, acknowledging that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

Above: The US Embassy, Chancery Building, Tel Aviv

The 45th President used words such as “we acknowledge the obvious”, “a recognition of reality”, and “the right thing to do”.

Now it is my normal gut reaction to distrust anything that Trump says or does, but this particular policy merits a closer look, for (and I hate to admit it) this diplomatic decision not only has its failings but surprisingly its merits.

Though I have yet to visit this Holy City, this City of David and Solomon, this City of Peace, Jerusalem has always held a strong place on my bucket list of places to visit before I die.

Above: Scenes of Jerusalem: Jerusalem Skyline, an Old City souq, Mamilla Market, the Knesset, the Dome of the Rock, the Tower of David and Old City Walls, the Western (Wailing) Wall

Friends of mine have visited Jerusalem and the movie Kingdom of Heaven (2005) sparked within me a renewed interest in the City.

Jerusalem, Israel´s ancient and enigmatic capital, has always been one of the world´s most fascinating cities, one of the holiest, one of the most beautiful, and one of the most coveted and disputed cities.

Now if you, the casual observer, listen to most media channels, (with the notable exception of America´s Pravda: Fox News), one perceives a sense of international outrage at this sudden provocative move on the part of the United States.

The European Union, the Organisation of Arab States, ISIS, Hamas, Russia, the Pope, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, Germany, and even non-confrontational Canada and Switzerland have all expressed fears and concerns that Trump might be opening the gates of hell, a wave of Islamic violence, a kiss of death in the peace process.

But we forget that Trump´s announcement is actually not a new one.

In 1992, Bill Clinton expressed his Administration´s intentions to move the US Embassy.

Above: Bill Clinton (born 1946), 42nd US President (1993 – 2001)

On 23 October 1995, the US Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act for the purposes of initiating and funding the relocation of the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

But there exists within American law the option to delay the application of an Act, a presidential waiver that comes up again and again every six months.

Presidents have hesitated on implementing the Jerusalem Embassy Act because of the region´s volatile and conflicting interests.

In 2000, George W. Bush announced the government´s renewed intentions to move the Embassy.

Above: George W. Bush (born 1946), 43rd US President (2001 – 2009)

Twice in 2008, Barack Obama expressed his belief that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and thus embassies should be located there.

Above: Barack Obama (born 1961), 44th US President (2009 – 2017)

In June 2016, Donald Trump signed a six-month waiver on the oft delayed Jerusalem Embassy Act.

Last week, he became the first President to not sign it.

His critics says that Trump´s decision was an unstrategic move, political pandering to his fundamental Christian and Jewish supporters on the eve of an important election in Alabama, a slap in the face to Palestinians and the peace process, strengthening Islamic extremism.

Trump´s supporters herald his decision as being the will of the American people, that he acted with courage, that he “moved the ball forward” in a process that had been too long stalemated and stagnant.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledges the negative backlash to Trump´s determination to move the Embassy, viewing it as “short term pain for long term gain”.

Above: Rex Tillerson (born 1952), 69th US Secretary of State

The government of Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are delighted with this latest American move, for the US Embassy will become the first, of the 84 nations with diplomatic presence in Israel, to have its embassy in Jerusalem rather than Tel Aviv.

Above: Benjamin Netanyahu (born 1949), 9th Israeli Prime Minister (1996 – 1999 / 2009 – )

(The international community, other than the United States, the Czech Republic and Vanuatu, does not recognise Jerusalem as Israel´s capital, and neither the Czech Republic nor Vanuatu have embassies in Jerusalem.)

Now the question you may be asking at this point is:

Isn´t Jerusalem already the capital of Israel?

This depends on how a capital is defined and who defines it.

The State of Israel maintains its primary government institutions in Jerusalem.

All branches of the Israeli government are located in (West) Jerusalem, including the Knesset (Israel´s parliament), the residences of the President and the Prime Minister, and the Supreme Court.

Above: The Knesset, West Jerusalem

For Israelis, Jerusalem remains their eternal and undivided capital, as if the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Turks, British and Jordanians had never existed.

For Israelis, the capture of Jerusalem and making it Israel´s capital by King David in 997 BC and the building of the Great Temple by his son and successor King Solomon, mean that Jerusalem is the destined heart of the nation.

In their minds the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 was simply a confirmation of Israel´s right to existAbove: The flag of Israel

But it was the manner in which Israel was established and maintained that has a number of people question Israel´s right to exist.

Because of the history that has led us to this point the international community of nations have refused to acknowledge that Israel even has a capital.

Few accounts written prior to the Roman era can be considered absolute facts and millennia-old events are constantly being reinterpreted to fit current political agendas.

So let´s fast forward a few thousand years to the modern conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians.

As stated above, Jews claim the right to live in the lands now known as Israel based on a historical lineage stretching back to David and Solomon.

Taken to the extreme, some Israelis claim that God gave Israel to the Jews and that the land is theirs by divine right.

The Palestinian claim is based on centuries of occupancy from the ascendancy of Islam in the 7th century until the 20th century.

Above: Flag of Palestine

Some Palestinians suggest that they are descendants of the Philistines from whom the precursors of David took the land after the death of Moses.

Conflicts over whose land is it date back to the rise of Zionism in 19th century Europe.

In his 1896 book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), Austrian journalist Theodore Herzl, widely regarded as the founding father of Zionism, determined that the Jews would never be accepted in Europe and had to establish their own homeland.

Above: Theodore Herzl (1860 – 1904)

In 1897 Herzl organised the first International Zionist Congress in Basel, which resolved that “the goal of Zionism is the establishment for the Jewish people of a home in Palestine.”

Waves of Jewish immigrants began making their way to Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany.

Sultan Mehmed V declared a jihad (holy war) calling on Muslims everywhere to take up arms against Britain, France and Russia.

Above: Mehmed V (1844 – 1918)

To counter the Sultan, the British negotiated an alliance with Hussein bin Ali, the Grand Sherif of Mecca.

Above: Hussein bin Ali (1853 – 1931)

In 1916 Hussein agreed to lead an Arab revolt against the Turks in exchange for a British promise to make him King of the Arabs once the conflict was over.

The British never had any serious intention of keeping their promise.

At the same time they were negotiating with Hussein, they were holding talks with the French on how to carve up the Ottoman Empire.

And Britain also promised the Zionist movement the Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917) that would view in favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

Above: The Balfour Declaration, a letter written by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community

In the wake of World War I, these lands passed into British hands and were named the British Mandate of Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan.

Having taken control of Palestine in 1918, the British were put pressure to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration to the territory.

With tensions rising between Palestine´s Arab and Jewish residents, the British refused to do this and placed strict limits on the number of new Jewish immigrants.

Several plans to partition Palestine were proposed during the 1930s and 1940s, but World War II put an end to all such discussion.

When the War ended, Britain again found itself under pressure to allow large-scale Jewish immigration, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust (1941 – 1945).

Above: Jews arriving at Auschwitz, German-occupied Poland. Most were sent straight to the gas chambers.

The Arabs, feeling betrayed by the British and their broken promises, revolted against the British in 1936 causing much widespread violence

Seeking to comprehend the cause of the Revolt, the Peel Commission (also known as the Palestine Royal Commission) concluded that Jews and Arabs wanted to govern the same land and they recommended that both the Jews and the Palestinians be granted their own separate nations while keeping Jerusalem and access from there to the Mediterranean under Mandate control.

The British offered the Arabs 80% of the disputed territory and the Jews the remaining 20%.

Despite the tiny size of their proposal, the Jews decided to accept this offer.

The Arabs rejected the recommendations and resumed their violent rebellion.

In 1947, the British government announced it would withdraw from Palestine, stating it was unable to arrive at a solution acceptable to both Arabs and Jews.

The Palestine problem was handed over to the newly created United Nations to solve.

Above: Flag of the United Nations

The UN adopted Resolution 181 to partition Palestine with an independent Palestinian state, an independent Jewish state and the City of Jerusalem under an international trusteeship system, similar to how Berlin would be subdivided after the War.

The Jews accepted the partition and declared the founding of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948.

The Arabs did not and war broke out immediately with Egypt, Iraq, Jordan Lebanon and Syria defending Palestinian claims.

The Arabs were humiliatingly defeated.

Nonetheless Jordan would maintain control over the West Bank (territory west of the Jordan River) including Jerusalem.

Recriminations from this defeat and the refugee problem it created led to revolts in Arab countries.

King Abdullah of Jordan was assassinated in 1951.

Above: King Abdullah I (1882 – 1951)

In July 1952 a group of young officers toppled the Egyptian monarchy.

By 1954 Gamal Abdel Nasser became Egypt´s acknowledged leader.

Above: Gamal Nasser (1918 – 1970), 2nd Egyptian President (1956 – 1970)

After facing down the combined powers of Britain, France and Israel over the Suez Crisis of 1956, Nasser emerged as the preeminent figure and a central player in the politics of nationalism, socialism and decolonisation that gripped the Arab world.

Arab opposition to the creation of the state of Israel again came to a head (helped by Nasser´s fiery speeches) in 1967.

In May 1967, the Egyptian army moved into key points in the Sinai Peninsula, announced a blockade of the Straits of Tiran, effectively closing the southern Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat.

Egypt, Jordan and Syria were at war with Israel.

Israel responded on 5 June 1967 with a pre-emptive strike that wiped out the entire Egyptian air force and within six days the war was over with Israel the stunning victor.

When the Six Day War was over Israel had seized all of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank including East Jerusalem with its Old City from Jordan.

This annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel has yet to be recognised by many of the world´s states.

About a third of Jerusalem is settled by Palestinians, some from families that have been in the Holy City for centuries.

The Knesset was divided in two as to what to do with the lands recently conquered:

• Return the West Bank to Jordan and the Gaza Strip to Egypt in exchange for peace, or….
• Give the conquered territories to the region´s Arabs so that they might build their own state there.

Neither initiative got very far.

A few months later the Arab League met in a summit in Khartoum, Sudan and issued their famous Declaration of the Three No´s:

1. No peace with Israel
2. No recognition of Israel
3. No negotiations with Israel

Above: The Arab League (all coloured countries), signatories of the Khartoum Declaration (green and blue), signatories who later recognized Israel (blue)

Again the Palestinian two-state solution was once again rejected by the Arabs.

By 1971, preparations were well underway for the next Middle Eastern war.

Egypt, Jordan and Syria were constantly under pressure from their citizens to recover the land lost in 1967.

On 6 October 1973, Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal, taking Israel almost entirely by surprise, as the country was at a standstill, observing the holy day of Yom Kippur.

When the Yom Kippur War ended in late 1973, Israel was again victorious.

However the early defeats of Israel at the start of the war left the Jewish state less certain of its defences and resulted in negotiations with Egypt that led to the 1978 Camp David Agreement and peace between Egypt and Israel.

Above: Flag of Egypt

A peace that the rest of the Arab world never forgave Egypt for doing.

During the 1970s and the 1980s, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) committed many acts of terrorism, while much of the world watched in horror, condemning the Palestinians for their ruthlessness.

Above: Yassir Arafat (1929 – 2004)

But in 1987 the Intifada (popular uprising) pitted stone-throwing Arab youths against well-equipped Israeli soldiers.

The resulting images seen worldwide on TV news did much to resurrect international sympathy for the Palestinians.

The 1991 Gulf War between the US and Iraq brought about a renewed dialogue between Jews and Arabs both desperately seeking approval from the international community.

Above: Flag of Iraq

While the US bombed Iraq, it encouraged Israel to exercise military restraint in order to maintain a shaky anti-Iraq coalition that included Saudi Arabia.

Israel suffered Iraqi missile attacks against it without responding.

On 13 September 1993, deputies from both Israel and the PLO signed a Joint Declaration of Principles outlining Israeli withdrawl from Jericho and the Gaza Strip and authorising limited autonomy for the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Above: Map of areas controlled by the Palestinian National Authority

PLO leader Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, resulting in the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank handed over to PA rule.

Above: Yitzhak Rabin (1992 – 1995), 5th Israeli President (1974 – 1977 / 1992 – 1995)

In May 1994 both parties signed the Cairo Accord.

By 1995 Israeli troops had been withdrawn from most of the West Bank.

The peace process went forward, despite the assassination of Rabin by a disgruntled Jewish extremist on 4 November 1995.

Attempts by the new Prime Minister Shimon Peres to carry on the peace process were frustrated by terrorist activities by the extremist organisation, Hamas (Harakat al-Muqaama al-Islamiya).

Above: Shimon Peres (1923 – 2016), 9th Israeli President (2007 – 2014), 8th Israeli Prime Minister (1977 / 1984 – 1986 / 1993 – 1996)

In 2000, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat met at Camp David to discuss an alternative two-state solution.

Above: Ehud Barak (born 1942), 10th Israeli Prime Minister (1999 – 2001)

Barak offered Arafat a separate Palestinian state, all of the Gaza Strip, 94% of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Arafat rejected the offer.

In the words of US President Bill Clinton:

“Arafat was here 14 days and said “No” to everything.”

Instead a bloody wave of suicide bombings, a new Intifada, was launched, resulting in thousands of deaths and injuries, on buses, in wedding halls and pizza parlours.

Israeli voters were fed up with the failed peace process.

While most Israelis and Palestinians continued to support the cause of peace and the creation of a Palestinian state, from late 2000 to early 2002, tit-for-tat violence escalated, with suicide bombers targeting Israeli civilians and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) pummeling Palestinian targets, including Palestinian civilians, on the West Bank and Gaza.

For Isreal the breaking point came on 27 March 2002, when a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 26 people and injured 150 at a Passover dinner at the Park Hotel in Netanya.

Above: The site of the Passover Massacre, ten years later

At this point, both sides rejected a new Saudi peace proposal that supported the Arab nations´ diplomatic recognition of Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state on the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

In the days that followed, hopes of a negotiated settlement crumbled in the face of escalating violence from both sides.

In 2005, Israel unilaterally left the Gaza Strip leaving the Arabs complete control there.

Instead of developing the territory for the benefits of its citizens, the Palestinians turned Gaza into a terrorist base, firing thousands of rockets into Israel, launching more than 100 rockets a month.

In 2006, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip voted Hamas into their parliament.

Above: Logo of Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement)

With Fatah (the political party founded by Arafat) getting nowhere in the peace process and Israeli settlements sprouting up like mushrooms, Gazans voted for Hamas.

The two Palestinian governments would split Palestine, resulting in the PA governing the West Bank and Hamas the Gaza Strip.

In 2008, Israel tried yet again.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went even further than Barak had but including additional land to sweeten the deal.

Above: Ehud Olmert (born 1945), 12th Israeli Prime Minister (2006 – 2009)

Like Arafat before him, the President of the PA Mahmoud Abbas turned the deal down.

Above: Mahmoud Abbas (born 1935), 2nd President of Palestine since 2005

Each time Israel has agreed to a Palestinian state, the Palestinians have rejected the offer, often violently.

In 2012, the UN General Assembly granted Palestine non-member observer state status, acknowledging the de facto existence of the nation.

In May 2015, the Vatican officially recognised the state of Palestine along with 135 UN members that acknowledge Palestinian independence, yet there still remain countries (the US, Israel, Canada, the UK, Australia, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Japan and Mexico) that won´t recognise the legitimacy of an independent Palestinian state with its 4 million inhabitants.

Above: Flag of the State of Vatican City

Yet again the problem has remained that two groups won´t share the same land.

Disputes over water rights, occupation of land, freedom of movement and mutual security suggest that reconciliation is unlikely in the near future.

If Israel just allowed the Palestinians to have a state of their own, there would be peace in the Middle East, so say UN delegates, European ambassadors and most college professors.

But it seems that the problem isn´t so much Israel´s refusal to recognise a Palestinian state as it is the Arab world´s refusal to recognise a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Israelis have pretty much abandoned the idea that compromise is possible with the Palestinians, so there has been much expansion of Jewish settlements in the east of Jerusalem and other occupied territories.

These settlements are seen as illegal under international law, but Israel disagrees.

International lawmakers are saying that any change in the status of Jerusalem can only be the result of a negotiated peace process, so, for now, all countries with embassies in Israel keep them in or near to Tel Aviv and just have consulates in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is home to sacred relics, historic figures and holy sites shared by the world´s three largest monotheistic faiths.

Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, traded hands dozens of times and currently exists in a really contested legal status.

The city we see today is very different from the city of old.

The Jerusalem of the Bible is what we refer today as the Old City, part of occupied East Jerusalem.

These are the holiest of the Holy Lands: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall and the Al Aqsa Mosque.

The Wall and the Mosque share an area known as the Temple Mount.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre holds two of Christianity´s holiest sites:

Above: Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Old City, East Jerusalem

• Calvary, considered the place of Jesus Christ´s crucifixion
• The Empty Tomb, where Jesus is said to have been buried and resurrected

In the entrance is the Stone on which Jesus´ body was washed after His death on the cross.

To the right is Golgotha, where He was crucified between two thieves.

Below is the crypt in which Jesus was lain before His resurrection.

On the walls leading to the crypt are countless little crosses carved by pilgrims during the Crusades.

Six religious orders share custody of the Church: Ethiopian Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox.

To prevent disputes, each order manages its own section based on the Status Quo issued in 1852.

The Church keys however are entrusted to a Muslim family, who have been opening and closing the doors every day for many generations.

Judaism sees the Temple Mount as its holiest site and the place which mostly holds God´s divine presence.

The Western Wall´s proximity to the original Temple Mount makes it a place of prayer and pilgrimage for thousands of faithful.

Above: The Western Wall, East Jerusalem

Finally the Al Aqsa Mosque, considered the third holiest site in Islam, sits atop the Temple Mount, known as Haram al Shareef in Arabic or the Noble Sanctuary.

Above: The Al Asqa Mosque, Temple Mount, Old City, East Jerusalem

It is the site where the Prophet Muhammed travelled to from Mecca before ascending to Heaven in what the Islamic faith refers to as the Night Journey.

These sites have lured pilgrims and historians for many generations and have a special place in the hearts of billions around the world.

Before the Six Day War there were five distinct districts that made up the Old City: the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the Moroccan Quarter and the Jewish Quarter.

In the weeks after the Six Days War Israeli forces occupied the Old City and bulldozed the ancient Moroccan Quarter to make room for access to the Western Wall.

Under international law, none of this land belongs to Israel, but still they have been controlling the City for the last 50 years.

To live in East Jerusalem must be challenging for the foreigner of a non-religious bent, for on Fridays Muslim shops are closed, on Saturdays (Shabbat) Jewish establishments are closed and the Christians close theirs on Sundays.

Getting around is also an experimental experience, for Jerusalem has two parallel transportation systems: Israeli buses that go everywhere except the Arab quarters and Arab minivans that operate only in the Arab quarters.

Every apartment has its own black painted, owner-labelled water tank hooked up to solar panels on the roof.

Most expats prefer to live in the Palestinian part of Jerusalem, creating a strange mix of palatial homes set in the midst of garbage and debris.

East Jerusalem is Paradise compared to other areas of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

For example, in Gaza there is only one crossing into Israel, yet Gazans are never allowed to leave.

It is strange to think that 1.5 million people live behind a wall that they can never go beyond.

By comparison East Jerusalem has 70 checkpoints and more than 600 closed crossings.

On maps one finds a green line dividing the City.

The famous Green Line was pencilled on a map at the end of the first Israeli-Arab War (1948) by generals from both sides, dividing the territory between the new Israeli nation and a future Palestine.

This armistice line is still at issue in peace agreements and negotiation talks.

This line is a high separation wall.

This wall is a symbol of oppression, restricting the Palestinians´ freedom of movement in their own land.

The occupation is seen by many as not only destroying Palestinian society but damaging Israeli society as well.

The border patrols wear black, the army is in green, special forces wear berets.

Graffiti covers some walls.

The visitor steps around concertina wire and wades through piles of trash in some places.

The Israeli settlements within Palestinian territory are modern, like rich Swiss cities on poor Bangladeshi land.

The West Bank is divided into three areas: A, B and C.

Above: Map of the West Bank

Area C is under the full control of the Israeli army.

Area B is under partial Israeli control.

Area A (less than 10% of the territory) is under Palestinian control, but this control is only theoretical as almost every night the Israeli army enters Area A to search, arrest and interrogate residents.

Israel is a democracy for Jews, but not for the Arabs within its borders.

The UN sees nothing.

Some folks say that Jerusalem is like a wife, in that you can´t share her.

But I think the problem is not so much that neither Jew nor Arab wish to share, but rather their mutual fear and distrust of one another makes even wishing for peace the act of a madman.

Perhaps the madness of Trump is the only solution for the eternal insanity that infects Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Send a madman to solve an insane problem?

I would like to visit Jerusalem, Israel and Palestine one day, to see history that never died.

I would like to climb ths Stairs of the Scales of Souls and sit under the Dome of Learning on the Temple Mount.

I would like to walk through Damascus Gate and shop on The Cardo.

Above: The Damascus Gate

Oh, to stand on the left and watch the faithful Jews gather at the Wailing Wall, or to imagine Christ´s procession, cross heavy on his shoulder, upon the Via Dolorosa – the sorrowful way.

Above: The Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem

Oh, to climb the Tower of David or ride the Time Elevator.

Above: The Tower of David and the Old City walls

Oh, to stand in the Garden of Gethsemane and watch the sun rise, or to stand upon Golgotha and contemplate the power of belief that a crucified condemned criminal could save the world through His sacrifice.

Above: The Garden of Gethsemane, Jerusalem

To barter for bargains in the colourful and bustling Mahane Yehuda and quietly stare at the ultra-orthodox in the Me´a She´arim district.

To have one´s soul cry at the inhumanity of humanity in the Holocaust Museum on Mount Zikaron and realize that there are some lessons that history unfailingly repeats in the guises of order, security, religion or race.

There is more to Israel, more to Palestine, than Jerusalem.

To float on the Dead Sea, to dance in Tel Aviv, to ponder the prophecy of Megiddo, to marvel at the Baha´i who respect all religions yet are unloved by those they respect, to see the vast expanse of the Negev Desert and the lush mountains of the Golan Heights and the coral beaches of Eilat.

Above: The Dead Sea

Above: The Negev Desert

Above: The Golan Heights

Above: North Beach, Eliat

To join a part of the unholy throngs of uncomprehending tourists trampling through ruins as if seeing the past will somehow redeem the sins of the present.

I´m a little bit crazy that way.

Sources: Wikipedia / Lonely Planet Middle East / Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City

 

 

Canada Slim and the Queen´s Horsemen

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 13 December 2017

There are moments in life – and isn´t travel truly a microcosm of life? – when a person realizes that his internal indecisiveness on certain issues will always remain.

“Do I contradict myself? 

Very well, then I contradict myself. 

I am large. 

I contain multitudes.”

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass

Above: Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

I find myself particularly contradictory when I visit places that remain ruled as monarchies, duchies or principalities.

Do people actually need a monarchy?

To maintain the life and lifestyle of someone such as Queen Elizabeth II of Britain and the British Commonwealth is horrendously expensive.

Above: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (born 1926, reigning since 1952)

For example, a seven-day visit to Canada by Her Majesty will cost both British and Canadian taxpayers undisclosed millions of British pounds and Canadian dollars to ensure that Her Person is protected, that strict protocols are followed and that She will appear regal and majestic wherever She goes.

To the average Joe like me, all that is seen seems to be naught but pomp and ceremony, and if hard pressed to define exactly what it is a monarch, especially one in a constitutional democracy, actually does with his/her working day I would be at a loss to explain it.

As Head of State, we are told that Her Majesty is meant to be the last bastion of sober second thought before a bill can be approved as law.

As Head of State, the Queen´s very presence commands reverance and respect as it is presumed that She has spent Her entire life preparing Herself for Her role, while Prime Ministers generally only learn how to do their jobs once they have acquired them.

As an English Canadian I have often defended the Queen as a sign of tradition, if for no other reason than to annoy French Canadians who lean more towards France´s republican system of government simply because they are French.

I dare say that Her Majesty may brave a cold Ottawa winter´s day, but She would be most foolish to attempt a warm summer´s night in Chicoutimi, Québec!

If the mosquitoes didn´t get Her, the mobs of disgruntled Francophones would!

In my lifetime, Her Majesty has visited Canada at least ten times.

Since 2000, members of the Royal Family other than Her Majesty have visited Canada at least 50 times.

Somehow I never seem to get an invitation to these events.

And the only correspondence I might expect from the House of Windsor might be a card of congratulations for reaching my 100th birthday if I am resident in a Commonwealth country at the time.

Above: Member states of the British Commonwealth (green)

My wife, my own personal Queen, She Who Must Be Obeyed, remains extremely unsupportive as to my chances.

I have resigned myself to never meeting Her Majesty for I lack, and – short of events I cannot foresee – will continue to lack, both fame and power meriting time with Her Majesty.

I am a commoner.

My eating habits find wild animals gathering to watch the spectacle.

My clothing choices would hurt the eyes of the blind.

My education enables me to tie my shoes without consulting a manual.

My salary and bank account are envied only by the homeless.

My voice would stop traffic and I have a face perfect for radio.

Still I am sure that the invitations simply got lost in the mail.

Yet there´s a part of me that would be absolutely thrilled if I ever did have a chance to spend time with royalty, for though I know rationally that their consumption of Ricola cough drops would cause them to fart as they cause me to do, and that they are mortals such as I am, they exist in a stratosphere far elevated and far removed from my own.

Sometimes I think that Americans are so obsessed with their movie and music stars to the degree that they are, because in their heart of hearts there remains a regret that the Revolution cost them the right to have regents.

Say what you will about this collection of interbreeding overprivileged misfits, the Royal Family captures our hearts and imagination simply because they are the Royal Family.

Yet the socialist within, the wee anarchist beneath, wonders how truly deserving they are of such attention and admiration.

This conflict, this whirling dervish of devilish contradiction, was quite strong during our London visit….

London, England, 24 October 2017

To visit London is to be bombarded and blitzed by reminders royal.

From the National Portrait Gallery – a sort of two dimensional, high browed Madame Tussaud´s – with propaganda pictures of kings and Queens since Tudor and Stuart times, to the parade of palaces that seem to be found everywhere one goes, London is a royal place.

Palaces, though I will visit them out of obligation to seeing them where I happen to be, generally leave me cold, for I simply cannot imagine living in such decadent luxury while there exists so many others less fortunate.

I did not visit Buckingham Palace.

Above: Buckingham Palace

I did not join the throngs of tourists watching one of the two Changing of the Guard ceremonies outside this Palace.

To be fair, I had seen the Changing of the Guard both in Quebec City´s Citadel and on Ottawa´s Parliament Hill, so I honestly don´t expect there to be any significant differences between these and London´s.

Above: Centennial Flame / Centre Block, Parliament Hill, Ottawa

Avoiding things royal in London actually takes a concerted effort.

We started the day with good intentions.

We began our tourist day, after breakfast at our Paddington B & B and the Tube to Charing Cross, by walking from Trafalgar Square to St. James´s Park and the Churchill War Rooms (which I highly recommend).

(For more on the Churchill War Rooms, please see Canada Slim and the Right Man of this blog.)

Trafalgar Square is London´s finest architectural set piece and one of the easiest parts of London to reach most of London´s major sights within a half-mile of each other.

Above: Trafalgar Square

So, yes, this is a well-trodden tourist centre.

As one of the few large public squares in London, Trafalgar Square has not only been a tourist attraction but as well it has often been the focus for political demonstrations for over a century and a half.

The Square has seen Bloody Sunday (13 November 1887) when hundreds of demonstrators were injured, and three killed, by police.

It has seen anti-apartheid demonstrations and Poll Tax riots, but on this day the only mob is that of tourists seeking to see Nelson´s Column, which commemorates the one-armed, one-eyed Admiral who defeated the French at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 but paid for it with his life.

Above: Battle of Trafalgar

Even though his sandstone statue atop the Column is three times lifesize, it appears miniscule when compared to the massive height (151 feet) of the Column itself.

Above: Nelson´s Column, Trafalgar Square

Above: Nelson´s statue atop his Column

Everyone knows the four bronze lions that guard the base of Nelson´s Column, but few people realise that the lions appeared 25 years after the Column was built.

The Column itself was completed in 1843 and William Railton´s design included four lions to set it off, but a lack of funds and arguments over the choice of sculptor delayed the project.

The Board of Works in charge of the whole monument finally chose Sir Edwin Landseer – a controversial choice.

Above: Sir Edwin Landseer (1802 – 1873)

Even though Landseer was Queen Victoria´s favourite painter with an unrivalled reputation for painting animals, he had never sculpted anything.

The project was further delayed by Landseer´s health problems so that four years after accepting the commission he was still drafting sketches.

He asked to be supplied with copies of casts of a real lion made by the Art Academy in Turin.

He spent hours studying lions in the London Zoo.

Finally he asked the Zoo for a dead lion as a studio model, but had to wait two years for one to die.

Unfortunately the lion started to rot before Landseer could finish the work, so he had to improvise, using a domestic cat as a model for the paws and a dog for the tongue.

These hybrid lions were finally installed in 1868.

On the southeast corner of Trafalgar Square is Britain´s smallest police station, unseen by the hordes of tourists posing before Nelson´s Column, a one-man sentry box fashioned from a hollowed-out granite lamp post.

The secret police box was installed by Scotland Yard in 1926 so that the cops could keep an eye on the demonstrators and agitators who routinely gathered in the Square.

With narrow slits for windows and claustrophobic proportions, this human CCTV camera was equipped with a telephone with a direct line to Canon Row Police Station in case things got out of hand.

Originally installed in 1826, the ornamental light on the top would flash whenever the police officer trapped inside picked up the telephone, alerting his fellow officers in the vicinity to come to his rescue.

Today, the lookout post is used to store street cleaning equipment.

The only clue that links this post to the police is a faded list of bylaws hanging outside.

For the record, offences in Trafalgar Square included feeding the birds, camping, parking a caravan, public speaking, playing music, washing or drying clothes, exercising, bathing, boating or canoeing in the fountains, flying a kite or using any foot-propelled device – unless you have written permission from the Mayor.

(The devil in me would love that challenge!)

(As previously mentioned Trafalgar Square is named after the Battle of Trafalgar when 33 English ships defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet of 41 ships.)

We followed The Mall – London´s nearest equivalent to a Parisian boulevard – through the Admirality Arch….

(The Admirality Arch, once the official residence of the First Sea Lord overseeing all maritime operations, then an extension building of the Cabinet Office (2000 – 2002), and finally Prime Minister Tony Blair´s Strategy Unit (2002 – 2010), is now a property of real estate developer Rafael Serrano who is presently converting the building into a luxury Hotel slated to open in 2020.

The Arch has often been used for ceremonial affairs such as royal weddings and coronations, state funerals and Olympic Games processions.)

….to the Victoria Memorial – King Edward VII´s 2,300 ton marble tribute to his Mama, at 25 metres/82 feet the tallest monument to a monarch in England….

Above: The Victoria Memorial, London

…..to St. James´s Park.

The 23 hectare / 57 acre St. James´s Park is the oldest of London´s parks, having been puchased by Henry VIII in 1532, and drained and turned into a deer park by James I in 1603.

Above: St. James´ Park Lake, looking toward Buckingham Palace

It was redesigned and opened to the public by Charles II, who used to stroll through the grounds with his mistresses and courtiers, feed the ducks and even take a dip in the canal.

By the 18th century, when some 6,500 people had access to night keys for the gates, the Park had become a byword for robbery and prostitution.

Diarist James Boswell was among those who went there specifically to be solicited “by several ladies of the town”.

Above: James Boswell (1740 – 1795)

From the diary of James Boswell:

25 March 1763: 

As I was coming home this night, I felt carnal inclinations raging through my Frame.  I determined to gratify them.  I went to St. James´s Park and like a brute I picked up a whore.  For the first time did I engage in Amour which I found but a dull satisfaction.  She who submitted to my lusty embraces was a young Shropshire girl, very good-looking.

The Park was a busy place in the 18th century.

Travelling condom salesmen did a roaring trade.

The condoms were made of animal gut, intended to protect men from venereal disease rather than to prevent pregnancy.

Giacomo Casanova frequented the Park in the same year as Boswell.

Above: Giacomo Casanova (1725 – 1798)

Casanova went to the Park “to watch the great beauties parading”, but was disconcerted to see People defecating in the bushes instead.

Today the banks of the tree-lined lake are a favourite picnic spot for the civil servants of Whitehall and an inner-city reserve for wildfowl, which flock to West Island and Duck Island.

James I´s two crocodiles left no descendants, but the pelicans (which have resided here since a pair was presented to Charles II by the Russian ambassador in 1664) can still be seen at the eastern end of the lake.

Here there are exotic ducks of every variation imaginable.

Just in time for the twelve days of Christmas (26 December – 6 January), the visitor can find many more than two calling birds, six geese a-laying and seven swans a-swimming, but, alas, no turtledoves, no pear trees for partridges, and no French hens, as far as fowl and feathered life goes in the Park.

The Canadian in me was thrilled to see Canada geese in the Park.

Surprisingly some writers have seen fit to use the Park as the setting for battles:

In Charlie Higson´s post apocalptic young adult horror novel The Enemy, two groups of children battle for control of the Park after a worldwide sickness has infected adults and turned them into zombies.

In Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett´s Good Omens, the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crawley frequent the Park and feed the ducks.

Our walk led us to the abovementioned Churchill War Rooms, but after leaving this excellent Museum we quickly became disoriented – fresh air smells funny! – and somehow found ourselves at the Household Cavalry Museum.

Above: The Household Cavalry Regiment building

Thus my internal conflict regarding the Monarchy began….

During the day two mounted sentries and two horseless colleagues are posted at the Horse Guards Building.

The sentries are part of the Queen´s Life Guard, provided by the Household Cavalry Regiments, who are more than just the Changing the Guard´s ceremonies (for 350 years) but are actual fighting soldiers who have served and fought for England since the Restoration (1660), in the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-1674) , the Glorious Revolution (1688), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), the Seven Years War (the world´s first global conflict)(1756-1763), the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Anglo-Egyptian War (1882), the Second Boer War (1899-1902), both world wars (1914-1918/1939-1945), the Falklands War (1982), the Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001), the Gulf War (1990-1991), the 2003 invasion of Iraq and various operations in Afghanistan, Cyprus and Northern Ireland.

The years after the English Civil War (1642-1651) saw King Charles I (1600-1649, King: 1625-1649) executed….

(The black dot over the number 2 on the Building´s clock face denotes the hour at which he was executed in 1649.)

….and Oliver Cromwell replace him as Lord Protector of a republican Commonwealth (1653-1659).

Above: Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658, Lord Protector: 1653-1658)

Upon Cromwell´s death, his Commonwealth failed and in 1660, King Charles II returned to England in triumph.

Above: Charles II (1630-1685), King: 1660- 1685

Just before his Restoration, the King created a mounted bodyguard which would expand and incorporate other regiments to form what we recognise today as the Household Cavalry Guards.

Back in Charles II´s day, the King insisted that he be regularly accompanied by one of the Guards wherever he went.

While Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II remains as the Household Cavalry´s Colonel-in-Chief, I am not privy to whom guards Her security these days.

Back of the Horse Guards Building, which remains a military headquarters commanding army units in London, is the Household Cavalry Museum.

Here you can try a trooper´s elaborate uniform, complete a horse quiz and learn about the regiments´ history.

See swords and walking sticks, playing cards, paintings and uniforms, skulls and prosthetic legs, cuirasses and chocolate boxes, trophies and medals, trumpets and drums.

Learn of men of legendary status:

Colonel John Manners, the Marquess of Granby: He carried passionately about the welfare of his soldiers and was compulsively generous.  In 1760, in the Battle of Warburg, he led 8,000 men to victory over a French army three times larger.  His headress lost in the Battle, he saluted his commander bare headed, highly unusual at the time.  The Household Cavalry have the unique privilege in the British Army of saluting without headdress.

Above: John Manners (1721 – 1770)

Colonel John Shaw: At over 6 feet, 3 inches / 1.9 metres and weighing 95 kg / 210 lbs, he earned money as a prizefighter.  At the Battle of Waterloo, he smashed at the enemy´s faces using the hilt of his sword as English swords were shorter than the French´s.  Then he killed more of the enemy before his sword broke and valiantly fought on with only his helmet as a weapon until he fell in battle.  His skull is on display at the Museum.

Above: The Battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815

Colonel Fred Burnaby: An enormous and very strong man, he once carried two ponies down the stairs of the officers´ mess in Windsor, a pony under each arm.  He travelled to Khiva, deep in the Tsar´s troubled Asian territories, because the Russians had forbidden foreigners from going there. The book he wrote became a best seller.  He campaigned in Bulgaria, joined a revolt in Spain, crossed the English Channel by balloon, and was both a journalist and politician. Lionised by his soldiers, he was not meant to have been in the Sudan when he was killed at Abu Klea in January 1885.  He met his end in a manner in which he would have approved, facing overwhelming odds in hand to hand fighting.

Above: Fred Burnaby (1842 – 1885)

Colonel David Smiley: He was parachuted behind enemy lines many times in eastern Europe and Asia.  It is suggested that both Ian Fleming´s James Bond and John le Carré´s George Smiley were modelled after the Colonel.

Above: David Smiley (centre)(1917 – 2009)

These stories are just a sampling of the courage, professionalism and distinction shown by soldiers in all military services in all nations, but of course this Museum focuses on the men (and women?) of the Household Cavalry.

Above: Logo of the Household Cavalry Regiment

With the stables immediately adjacent, it´s a sweet-smelling place(!) and you can see these beasts of burden in their stalls through a glass screen.

The horses are big: a minimum height of 5 feet, 4 inches / 1.65 metres high at the shoulder.

Bought as four or five year olds, most of them are black.

Only the trumpeters ride white steeds.

From arrival to taking part in ceremonial occasions, the training of a horse takes six months.

The horses are exercised each morning, compete in annual competitions and are given holidays (“sent out to grass”) twice a year.

Horses generally retire at around 18, though some serve into their 20s.

As fascinating as the history of the Cavalry is and as much as a spectacle of colour and pagentry that the Changing the Guard ceremony is, I could not stop thinking about the endless amount of money and effort that goes into maintaining the mounted tradition: 280 horses, an army of riding instructors, farriers (horseshoe blacksmiths), vets, saddlers, tailors, musicians (kettle drummers and trumpeters) and cavalry men.

I thought of the many countless hours of preparation that are needed for a Parade: the polishing of breastplates, helmets and swords; the scrubbing and whitening of buckskins, gauntlets, belts and slings; the cleaning and polishing of jackboots; the grooming of the horses; the polishing of saddles; then inspection of the troop with obsessive-compulsive attention to detail adhering to the highest possible standards of perfection.

The combined weight of the horse´s equipment and the mounted rider´s gear is 62 lbs / 28 kg, an unforgiving and punishing practice for both man and beast.

It makes me question the sanity of a man who chooses to join the Household Cavalry.

How cruel it is to have the sentry boxmen remain motionless and emotionless for an hour at a time!

Where is the logic, the sanity, the humanity in this activity?

All in the name of honour and tradition or simply base entertainment for tourists?

It makes me question the assumption of privilege and pomp of individuals whose only claim to honour and respect was the accident of being born into the right family.

How deserving is a person of a palace or crown, of the sacrifice of young persons´ lives and vitality to ensure that the royal is treated better than a commoner?

Are the lives of the common people improved by the gleam of metal spokes on royal carriages, the sheen of horse flesh, the precision of military movement and spectacle?

As much of a show that the mounted ceremonies offer the throngs of tourists, is it worth all the work and expense that these ceremonies cost?

I do understand and sympathise with the need for military forces.

I do understand the need to protect both heads of government and heads of state.

But I must admit I remain dissatisfied at the alarming discrepancy the royal lifestyle has when compared to the average commoner.

I can appreciate that royals are trained to serve, but excess displays of wealth and privilege make it seem that the world exists to serve them instead.

I can accept that there will always be people better than me, but by the same token there are some things I am better at than others.

I can learn from others and others can learn from me.

I can appreciate that the recognition of quality and talent should exist, but I rally against the idea that these fortunate few are thus somehow superior to everyone else, that we are somehow less worthy of our existence than they are of theirs.

As a Canadian I can appreciate when talented Canadians are recognised for their contributions to society, but singers, for example, insult their public admirers when they have ostentatious homes and weddings or act as if the laws and mores of society somehow do not apply to them, as in the case of Celine Dion or Justin Bieber.

I respect Her Majesty Elizabeth II and her wisdom in her role as the world´s longest serving monarch, but the price tag is too damn high.

I felt nothing but sadness for the sacrifice of the Household Cavalry – a sacrifice unceasing since 1660 and one ongoing unceasingly.

The horses are beautiful, the soldiers proud, the gestures meaningless.

I guess tourists shouldn´t think too much.

Sources: Wikipedia / Google / The Rough Guide to London / Nicholas Best, London: In the Footsteps of the Famous / Rachel Howard and Bill Nash, Secret London: An Unusual Guide / Simon Leyland, A Curious Guide to London / http://www.householdcavalrymuseum.co.uk

 

 

 

 

Canada Slim and the Vienna Waltz

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 9 December 2017

There are moments when one has to accept one´s limitations.

For example, the wife and I were asked to attend her employer´s Christmas Party yesterday evening, but neither one of us was healthy (or motivated) enough to attend.

I have been home all week when I would have rather been working, but it is hard to be a barista or teacher when one has lost his voice.

The demands of work and other personal responsibilities limit my ability to travel very far at present, so some of the places where I would like to visit I cannot visit due to both the constraints of limited time and money to do so.

As regular readers (both of them!) of my blog know I have been retracing the life and “footsteps” of Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli (1484 – 1531).

Above: Huldrych Zwingli

(See Canada Slim and the Road to Reformation of this blog.)

I wrote about walking from Wildhaus to Strichboden to Arvenbuel to Weesen.

(See Canada Slim and the Wild Child of Toggenburg and Canada Slim and the Thundering Hollows of this blog.)

I wrote that Zwingli was born in Wildhaus and was first educated in Weesen (1489 – 1494)

Zwingli then completed his secondary education in Basel (1494 – 1496), then five years later returned to Basel to complete his Master´s Degree at the University of Basel (1502 – 1506).

I did not walk to Basel, but having frequently visited and worked in the city I felt that my readers would still like a glimpse of the place.

(See Canada Slim and the Basel Butterfly Effect of this blog.)

But what of the years (1496 – 1502) between Zwingli´s Basel educational periods?

Well, Zwingli was sent to Bern, the Swiss capital, and stayed with the humanist Henry Wölfflin.

The Dominicans in Bern tried to persuade Zwingli to join their order and it is possible that he was received as a novice, but as both his father and uncle disapproved of such a course of action, he left Bern without completing his Latin studies.

Zwingli then enrolled in the University of Vienna in the winter semester of 1498 but was expelled, according to the University´s records.

Zwingli´s activities in 1499 are unknown, but history records that he re-enrolled in the summer of 1500 and continued his studies until 1502, after which he transferred to the University of Basel.

After Basel, Zwingli would be ordained in Konstanz, celebrate his first mass in Wildhaus, and then take up his first ecclesiastical post in Glarus.

The walking tourbook Zwingli- Wege mentions Bern, Vienna and Konstanz, but the authors do not extend their book´s walks to these three cities.

As far as I can tell there is little celebration of Zwingli´s life in Bern, Vienna and Konstanz.

And even though Zwingli´s time in Glarus is definitely noteworthy, it isn´t until he began his reformatory crusade for change in the Church in Zürich do the Swiss take much notice of the man.

As I have written of both Bern and Konstanz in the past within this blog, I want to speak of Vienna, not so much in regard to Zwingli but in regards to the wisdom of spending time in this place.

(For stories about Bern, see Capital Be and Canada Slim in the Capital of this blog.)

(For stories about Konstanz, see Konstanz: City of Shattered Dreams?, Flames and Broken Promises, and Canada Slim and the City of the Thousand of this blog.)

Above: View of Vienna (Wien) from the Stephansdom (St. Stephen´s Cathedral)

Vienna, Austria, 2 October 1998

It was my second adventure travelling about Europe, and, as a result of my first adventure, this time I was not alone.

Accompanied by the woman who would one day become my wife, Ute and I travelled by train and bus from Freiburg im Breisgau in southwestern Germany´s Black Forest, north to Strasbourg, Heidelberg, Trier and Köln (Cologne), east to Nuremburg, Praha (Prague) and Kutná Hora, south to Ceske Budojovice and Cesky Krumlov, and finally southeast to Wien (Vienna) arriving by overnight train.

The journey to Vienna had been, for the most part, pleasant, filled with discoveries and missteps as are common to any long adventure spent together.

The arrival to this imperial city started poorly.

I had gotten into my head that Vienna was a place where I was expected to wear a suit.

Somehow I convinced myself that Vienna was an élite environment that would not accept me unless I was wearing a suit.

Said suit had lain balled up at the bottom of my backpack, but at the crack of dawn I rolled it out, put it on and waited for us to arrive.

A sudden braking of the train caused me to split wide open the crotch of my suit trousers, putting me in a frightfully ugly and grumpy mood.

My Ute is never one to let an ugly mood go to waste and she responded in kind, so perhaps it was a mixed blessing that we spent our nights in Vienna in separately segregated youth hostel beds.

And though we would later argue yet one more time during our sojourn there, we were generally happy together in this romantic city of hidden courtyards, mysterious cellars and forgotten cemeteries, of Harry Lime (The Third Man) and Mozart (Rock me, Amadeus!), of Schubert, Strauss and Freud, of Marilyn Monroe and Karl Marx, of Vivaldi and 007, the blue Danube and the kaleidoscope of colour that is the Hundertwasserhaus.

Above: Hundertwasser, Vienna

Vienna conjures up a myriad of memories: impressive imperial palaces and dictatorial failed artists, coffeehouses crammed with cakes and customers, baroque mirrors and angelic choirboys, Art Nouveau architecture and Klimt canvasses, horsedrawn fiacre carriages and lovely leaping Lippanzer stallions.

This is also a city of music: a Strauss waltz, a cathedral choir, an organ recital, an opera performance, a celebration of the talents of Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Liszt and Mahler, a litany of life, melodies of magic.

Above: Johann Strauss II Monument, Stadtpark, Vienna

As is normal in any relationship of two or more travelling companions, there must be a certain amount of give-and-take for harmony to happen.

And I must confess I was searching for the poetry of Canadian balladeer Leonard Cohen to be reflected on the streets of Vienna.

Above: Leonard Cohen (1934 – 2016)

“Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women.”

Ah, the things men do to woo women….

The Neidhart Frescoes show a thief groping beneath a woman´s skirt, while another uses snowballs to win the favours of a peasant girl.

Ah, the things men do to escape women….

The Kornhäusel Tower was designed by architect Josef Georg Kornhäusel (1782 – 1860) as a refuge from his nagging wife, having a retractable iron staircase from the first floor rather than a conventional doorway at street level.

Above: Kornhäuselturm, Vienna

“There´s a shoulder where Death comes to cry.”

On 15 March 1938 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler came to Vienna to proclaim the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria.

Above: Adolf Hitler, Heldenplatz, Vienna, 15 March 1938

Within days Vienna´s elegant Hotel Metropole at Morzinplatz was commandeered as the regional headquarters of the Nazi secret police and Heinrich Hemmler´s henchmen began rounding up opponents of National Socialism: Fascists, Communists, Jews, men, women and children for interrogation, torture and dispatch to concentration camps.

Above: The former Hotel Metropole, Vienna

Above: Monument to the Memory of the Victims of the Gestapo, Morzinplatz, Vienna

“There´s a lobby with nine hundred windows.”

A lobby is a place where people wait.

Kaballah (Jewish mysticism) teaches that this earthly existence is a lobby where we wait for the “world to come”.

Kaballah also teaches that there are 900 – yes, exactly 900 – potential types of death for a human being.

This refers not to the manner or cause of death, but to the inner experience of the person who is dying and the different experiences of death vary in degree of gentleness or painfulness.

The most gentle & peaceful death is referred to as “the kiss”, or “the kiss of Shekinah” and is described as feeling like a hair being pulled from a cup of milk.

The most painful death is described as feeling like a spiked ball at the end of a hairy rope being pulled out of the person’s throat.

Vienna is a city where some people still keep a separate savings account in order to ensure an appropriately lavish funeral.

Above: Grave of Ludwig von Beethoven (1770 – 1827), Zentralfriedhof, Vienna

Vienna´s chief cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof is one of the biggest in Europe, larger than the entire Innere Stadt, and with a much bigger population – 2.5 million – than the whole of the city (1.8 million).

Above: Grave of Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897), Zentralfriedhof, Vienna

It even has its own bus service to help mourners get around the cemetery.

Above: Grave of Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828)

Opened in 1874, at the height of Viennese funereal fetishism – when having eine schöne Leich (a beautiful corpse) was something to aspire to, the Zentralfriedhof is still very much a working graveyard.

1 November / All Saints´ Day sees up to a million Viennese make the trip out here and leave candles burning in remembrance on virtually every grave.

And here the music is buried along with its decomposing composers: Beethoven, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Wolf and the entire Strauss clan.

Or could the 900 windows be more pedantic and simply be Vienna´s first skyscraper, the 16-storey, 50-metre high Hochhaus, built in 1932?

Above: Hochhaus, Herrengasse, Vienna

“There´s a tree where the doves go to die.”

A cross where the King of Peace was crucified?

Stephansdom, a cathedral that has dominated the Viennese skyline for centuries and an obvious military target that has endured two Turkish sieges, Napoleonic bombardment, American bombers and Russian artillery.

Above: St. Stephan´s Cathedral, Vienna

Despite the tourists, it is still very much a place of worship.

The Pötscher Madonna, an object of great veneration even today, wept tears from her unusual large eyes during the Battle of Zenta against the Turks in 1697 and in so doing miraculously secured victory against the invading infidels.

Above: The Pötscher Madonna, Stephansdom, Vienna

In the Apostles´ Choir is the glorious red marble tomb of Emperor Friedrich III (1415 – 1493) with the Emperor´s mysterious acronym AEIOU (Alles Erdreich ist Österreich Untertan / The whole world is subject to Austria.)

Down in the catacombs, around 16,000 locals are buried here, their bones piled high in more than thirty rooms.

“There´s a piece that was torn from the morning and it hangs in the Gallery of Frost.”

A reference to Sisi (1837 – 1898), a young girl torn away so soon in the morning of her life to become Empress Elisabeth to the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I and whose life and love were lynched to death by her loveless husband and his control freak mother?

Above: Empress Elisabeth of Austria

Married at 16, her mother-in-law Sophie denied Sisi any privacy by choosing her ladies in waiting for her, denied Sisi any love by having her children removed from her care as soon as they were born.

Above: Archduchess Sophie of Austria (1805 – 1872)

Later, Elisabeth would tell her daughter:

“Marriage is an absurd institution.

 

Above: Sisi´s husband, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria (1830 – 1916)

At the age of fifteen you are sold, you make a vow you do not understand, and you regret for thirty years or more that you cannot break it.”

By 1860, Sisi had suffered enough.

She abandoned her children and husband and fled to Madeira for six months.

She then spent the rest of her lonely life travelling around Europe, crisscrossing the Continent, never staying in one place too long and went on endless cruises.

Sisi sought solace in fencing, hiking and horseback riding and in the preservation of her beauty.

When her cousin, King Ludwig, and then her only son Rudolf, committed suicide within a few years of each other, she became convinced that she was mentally unstable.

Above: Photos of Prince Rudolf (1858 – 1889) and his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera who died together in a suicide pact in the Meyerling Hunting Lodge in the Vienna Woods

From then on, she dressed only in black and carried a black fan to hide her wrinkles.

“When we cannot be happy in the way that we desire there is nothing for it but to fall in love with our sorrows.”

By 1897, Elisabeth´s health began to deteriorate rapidly – a condition partly brought on by anorexia – to the extent that she could barely walk.

Despite her poor health and her obsession with madness and death, few would have predicted her final demise.

On 10 September 1898, the Empress was assassinated by an Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, on Lake Geneva.

Thousands turned out for Sisi´s funeral in Vienna.

Above: Sisi´s funeral procession, Vienna, 17 September 1898

She is buried in the basement vault of the Capuchin Church beside her estranged husband and her suicidal son, amongst other royal remains – some with death´s heads emblazoned on their coffins.

Above: Tombs of Sisi (left), Franz Joseph (centre), Rudolf (right), Kaisergruft (Imperial Crypt), Capuchin Church, Vienna

It is a gallery of glorified ghosts, a chamber of frost, a cold place indeed.

“There´s a concert hall in Vienna where your mouth had a thousand reviews.”

Could Leonard have meant the Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera), which opened in May 1869 with a performance of Mozart´s Don Giovanni?

Above: The Staatsoper, Vienna

“There´s a bar where the boys have stopped talking.

They´ve been sentenced to death by the blues.”

Surveys have shown that the vast majority of Viennese are safely tucked up in bed by as early as 10 pm.

Nonetheless it is still quite possible to keep partying around the clock in Vienna.

Vienna´s late night bars are concentrated in three main areas, the most famous being the Bermuda Triangle, which focuses on Rabensteig, Seitenstettengasse, Ruprechtsplatz and the streets around.

If I was searching for a blues bar, the Bermuda Triangle is where I would look.

“There´s an attic where children are playing, where I´ve got to lie down with you soon, in a dream of Hungarian lanterns, in the mist of some sweet afternoon.”

The attic of the body is the mind and who we are psychologically is often formed by the events of our childhood.

Few people are as intimately associated with Vienna as Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939), for though he was born in Freiburg in Moravia and died in exile in London, in the intevening 83 years he spent most of his life here.

Above: Sigmund Freud

The father of psychoanalysis was the first to come up with having patients discuss their problems while lying down on a couch.

Freud´s The Interpretation of Dreams contains two revolutionary ideas:

1. All dreams represent the fulfillment of wishes.
2. The functioning of dreams provides systematic evidence of the unconscious.

Sigmund Freud moved to the second floor of Berggasse 19 in 1891 and remained there until 4 June 1938 when he and his family fled to London.

His apartment is now a place of pilgrimage, even though Freud took most of his possessions with him into exile.

His hat, coat and walking stick are still here.

There is movie footage from the 1930s, but the only room with any original decor, any ancient atmosphere, is the waiting room with odd oriental rugs, a cabinet of antiquities and some burgundy furniture sent back from London by his daughter Anna after the War.

Rooms of photographs and Freud-inspired art and a library are all that remain of eight decades of living in Vienna.

“And I´ll dance with you in Vienna….

….Take this waltz. 

Take this waltz. 

It´s yours now.

It´s all that there is.”

We would visit the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, have lunch at the University Mensa (cafeteria) and supper at the Restaurant Marché Mövenpick and coffee at Café Bräunerhof with Parisian style snooty waiters in penguin tuxedos.

Above: Austrian Parliament, Vienna

We would tour Parliament and watch horses perform ballet at the Spanische Reitschule (Spanish Riding School).

Above: The Spanische Reitschule, Vienna

The King of the Waltz, composer Johann Strauss the Younger (1825 – 1899) lived on the first floor of Praterstrasse 34 from 1863 until the death of his first wife, the singer Jetty Treffz, in 1878.

Today´s Strauss Museum contains a room with ceiling cherubs, a grand piano, an organ and a standing desk.

There are dance cards and ball pendants which were kept as mementoes of the evenings tripping the light fantastic.

Strauss is, of course, best known for having written Vienna´s signature tune, An der schönen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube), but he also composed stirring tunes such as the Revolution March and the Song of the Barricades.

His operatta, Die Fledermaus (The Bat), written to take Viennese minds off the economic crash of 1873, was another huge success.

Freud would have had a field day had he taken Johann Junior on as a patient.

Johann Strauss the Elder (1804 – 1849) began his career serenading diners in Viennese restaurants, however it was in the dance hall of Zum Sperl that Johann Senior made his mark as a band leader, conducting a frentic mixture of dances, orchestral fantasies and somber melodies.

Above: Johann Strauss the Elder

Papa Strauss´ gypsy-like features and wild, vigorous conducting style became very popular in Vienna and he and his orchestra would gain fame touring Europe.

However Strauss Senior´s touring took a toil on domestic life and he created a public scandal in 1842 when he left the Family home and moved in with a young seamstress, who bore him several illegitimate children.

Strauss Junior, the eldest son, followed in his father´s footsteps, writing his first waltz at the age of six, though his father wished for him to become a banker.

Above: Johann Strauss the Younger (1825 – 1899), photo taken by Fritz Luckhardt

Father and son soon became rivals, both musically and politically, with son surpassing father in fame.

Despite their rivalry, father and son were quite alike, for Johann Junior was a difficult character like his father and something of an outsider.

And like his father, Johann Junior caused a scandal, divorcing his second wife Lili in order to marry his mistress.

What would Freud have thought?

 

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 9 December 2017

Cohen sings when I remember Vienna and think of my emotions towards my wife then and often now:

Take this waltz.

Take this waltz with its “I´ll never forget you, you know!”

….And I´ll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moss.

And I´ll yield to the flood of your beauty my cheap violin and my cross.”

I no longer wanted “some hallway where love´s never been”, or to simply be “on a bed where the moon has been sweating”.

O, my love.

O, my love.

Take this waltz. 

Take this waltz. 

It´s yours now.

It´s all that there is.”

I would like to return to Vienna, not to visit the non-descript Zwinglikirche, but to walk on fog-filled streets to pay my last farewell to the impatient young man I was, his coffin lowered into the frozen ground of his impatience.

To perhaps pass him by with incredulity or perhaps no recognition of my present self in his past features, just other stranger on the Strand.

But for now we walk in the cold Swiss air, our freezing breath on the window pane.

Lying, waiting.

I am a man in the dark in a picture frame, so mystic and soulful.

Memory stays with me until the feeling is gone.

The waltz is weaving.

The rhythm is willing.

Cold, empty silence?

Cold grey sky?

These mean nothing to me.

Oh, Vienna.

“Slow down, you crazy child.

You´re so ambitious for a juvenile.

But then if you´re so smart,

Tell me why you are still so afraid.

Where´s the fire?

What´s the hurry about?

You better cool it off before you burn it out.

You got so much to do and only so many hours in a day.

But you know that when the truth is told

That you can get what you want

Or you can just get old.

You´re gonna kick off before you even get halfway through.

When will you realize….

Vienna waits for you?

….Slow down, you crazy child.

Take the phone off the hook and disappear for awhile.

It´s alright you can afford to lose a day or two.

When will you realize….

Vienna waits for you.”

Sources: Wikipedia / Lonely Planet Austria / Lonely Planet Central Europe on a Shoestring / The Rough Guide to Austria / Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate, Introducing Freud: A Graphic Guide to the Father of Psychoanalysis / Graham Greene, The Third Man / Duncan J. D. Smith, Only in Vienna: A Guide to Unique Locations, Hidden Corners and Unusual Objects / Leonard Cohen, “Take this Waltz”, I´m Your Man / Billy Joel, “Vienna”, The Stranger / Ultravox, “Vienna”, Vienna

Canada Slim and the City of the Thousand

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 7 December 2017

First impressions are lasting.

And one rarely gets a second chance to make a “first” impression.

Today, despite my desire to remain abed at home and nurse my damnably durable cold – with all its joyless aspects of stuffed nose, scratchy throat, hoarse voice, congested chest, sinus headaches and resulting sleepless nights and exhausted days – I need to emerge from my cold-induced hibernation and seek supplies of food and medicine for both myself and the wife.

I will go to Konstanz, Germany, a half-hour distance from home, to buy these goods, but visiting Konstanz will not be a hardship for me, for the moment I laid eyes on the city ten years ago I liked it.

Above: Flag of Konstanz

I love its well-preserved Altstadt.

As Konstanz straddles the Swiss border on the southern side of the Lake of Constance (Bodensee), the likeable University town came out of World War II almost unscathed, ensuring the survival of the Altstadt.

Though Konstanz has Roman origins, it has a medieval feel to it.

I love Konstanz´s waterfront that hugs the Rhine and overlooks the Lake – a pleasant promenade that lovingly links aged buildings, gorgeous greenery and startling statues.

The southern end of the promenade with its clattering sails of the yacht harbour and several old warehouses that have been converted into a casual restaurant and shopping district ….

The Council Building (Konzilgebäude), a conference and concert hall that healed the Great Schism in the Catholic Church by replacing three popes with one (1414 – 1418)….

Above: The Konzilgebäude, Konstanz

Imperia, the imposing nine-metre high rotating statue of a voluptuous prostitute holding men, be they Emperor or Pope, in the palms of her hands….

Above: Imperia, Konstanz

The Island of Constance with another statue, this one commemorating airship inventor Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838 – 1917), near a former Dominician priory and now a five-star hotel….

Above: Zeppelin Monument, Konstanz

The conical red-tile 15th century Rheintorturm (the Rhine Gate Tower) and the Rheinbrücke (Rhine Bridge) where the Rhine meets the Lake….

Above: Rheintorturm, Konstanz

The Münster (cathedral) built of soft sandstone in a regal romantic melange of elegant Romanesque and serious Gothic styles where pre-Reformation Czech religious reformer Jan Hus (1370 – 1415) stood trial and was sentenced to be burnt to death….

Above: Konstanz Münster

His museum, the Hus Haus is surprisingly interesting if a person lingers long enough to discover why Hus was a man truly before his time and a figurehead of Czech identity….

The alarmingly modernist Kulturzentrum am Münster with ever-changing exhibits contrasts with the Rosgartenmuseum, the town´s history museum in an old butchers, grocers and pharmacists guidhall whose greatest treasure is Ulrich Richental´s Chronicle of the Council of Konstanz, a beautifully illustrated work including an extremely graphic rendition of the burning of Hus.

The State Archeological Museum (Archäologisches Landmuseum) with proud lions´ heads, deities and sea leopards from Roman times, along with a local 15th century merchant ship and some canoes from 650 AD….

But none of this would appeal to me had my first impression of the place been negative, for a rejection of Konstanz would probably have meant a rejection of nearby Münsterlingen Thurgau Kantonspital (Cantonal Hospital) where my wife works and the adjacent village of Landschlacht where we have resided these past seven years.

It was easier to explore the area because our first impressions of the area were positive.

We found out this summer that the opposite effect is also true…..

 

Bergamo, Italy,  3 August 2017

It should have been love at first sight, and maybe for others it can be, but for us….

Not so much.

I was expecting there to be love, after all Bergamo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it reminded me of my favourite Canadian city Quebec City with encircling city walls and an upper and lower town.

Above: Sunrise over Bergamo Alta

Bergamo is the second most visited city in Lombardy.

I expected a humane and compassionate welcome as Bergamo is a humane city where the 2017 43rd G7 Summit on Agriculture was held, committing the Group of Seven to reduce hunger for 700 million people worldwide by 2030, to strengthen cooperation for agricultural development in Africa, to combat food waste and to ensure price transparency.

And, surely, I thought, things in Bergamo had changed since Mary Shelley´s visit in 1840:

Above: Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley (1797 – 1851)

 

Bergamo, 10 September 1840

“It was a pleasant but warm drive.

Oh, how loath will the Austrian ever be to loosen his grip of this fair province, fertile and abundant in its produce, its hills adorned with many villages and sparkling with villas.

These numerous country houses are the peculiarity and beauty of the region,….rendered gay by numerous villas, each surrounded by grounds planted with trees, among which cypresses rise in dark majesty.

The fields were in their best dress, the grapes ripening in the sun, the Indian corn – the second crop of this land of plenty – full-grown, but not quite ripe.

Variety of scene is so congenial that the first effect of changing the mountain-surrounded, solitary lake for the view of plain and village and widespread landscape, raised my spirits to a very spring tide of enjoyment.

We were very merry as we drove along.”

 

Bergamo, 3 August 2017

Up to this point Mary Shelley could have been predicting our future as we drove from Lecco to Bergamo via Highway 342.

The weather was hot and humid, but air conditioning is a wonderful invention.

Austria was indeed reluctant to loosen their grip on its Italian possessions and the residents of Bergamo would achieve eternal fame in their struggle to be free from their domination.

The cultivated fields were still growing and the countryside still sparkles with the villages and houses Shelley described.

And Ute (my wife) and I were in fine spirits as we anticipated our arrival in Bergamo.

 

Bergamo, 10 September 1840

“There is a fair at Bergamo.

It has lasted three weeks and the great bustle is over.”

 

Bergamo, 3 August 2017

There is a festival in Bergamo happening now and it is a Friday night in this festival, though what festival is actually being feted remains unclear.

There is a great bustle all around us and our GPS is distinctively unhelpful and the German translated from his voicebox seems to say:

“Dude, I´m just as lost as you are.”

Once again, our relationship is being tested St. Malo and Dublin style – cities where we navigated streets of no particular logic and fought divorce court angerly, blaming one another for the fine mess we had landed ourselves in.

Above: St. Malo, France

Above: Grafton Street, Dublin, Ireland

We arrived at twilight and it would not be for several hours until we found ourselves a place to park and the location of our hostel type bed and breakfast.

This was coupled with the fact that Ute was breaking the cardinal rule of travelling with a man:

Never let a man grow hungry.

We drove around and around, in and out through Bergamo Bassa – modern lower town – and Bergamo Alta – medieval upper town – in search of parking spots and our bed for the night.

Above: Sunset over Bergamo Alta

We had telephoned and text messaged our hosts a dozen times and we were reassured (falsely) repeatedly that we would easily find a parking spot near the B & B and that the B & B was child´s play to find.

I lost count how many times we seemed to follow the same hill road up into Bergamo Alta, the same crooked alleyways where pedestrians gave us annoyed looks, the same hill road down to Bergamo Bassa.

I can´t calculate the frustrating amount of times we argued about logic versus law, that surely the B & B would not suggest we drive into Bergamo Alta if driving there was not allowed versus her unwillingness to receive traffic fines for illegal entry down signposted forbidden streets.

Did we retrace our routes and our arguments a dozen times?

Twenty?

A hundred?

A thousand?

We were tired and tense.

I was hungry and grumpy.

Ute mentally murdered me a million times.

I silently questioned her sanity several times more.

Three (or was it four? five?) hours later, after we wished death or divorce upon one another, we found a parking spot on the aforementioned, much revisited, hillside road connecting lower with upper Bergamo.

By this point in time we no longer cared if we were allowed to park there or not.

Carabineri, fine us, don´t fine us, unless you tow us, we shall park here.

We climb and weave, climb and weave, through back streets to main streets, dragging far too much luggage with us, for Ute feared that our car might be broken into.

After all, husbands are horses, aren´t they?

Mere beasts of burden?

We arrive at the address and struggle to gain entry.

I am drenched in sweat, my stomach bitterly complains, and my mind rebels against the situation.

We gain entry and find keys waiting for us as per instruction, but no one greets us.

There is no sympathy, no congratulations or commisseration.

There is no air conditioning nor a surplus of electrical sockets for adequate universal light in our room.

Air circulation is open windows allowing bugs to share our bed or a metal fan whose rattle and clatter can be heard and felt within our bones.

Above: Bergamo Alto seen from above

 

Bergamo, 10 September 1840

“We had been told that the inns are bad.

I do not know whether we have found admission into the best, but I know we could scarcely anywhere find a worse.

The look of the whole house is neglected and squalid.

The bedrooms are bare and desolate and a loathsome reptile has been found on the walls.

The waiters are unwashed, uncouth animals, reminding one of a sort of human being to be met in the streets of London or Paris – looking as if they never washed nor ever took off their clothes, as if even the knowledge of such blessings were strangers to them.

The dinner is inedible from garlic.

Of course, the bill tomorrow morning will be unconscionably high.”

 

Bergamo, 3 August 2017

We had not been told that Bergamo was in festival mode when we arrived, so it dawned on us how fortunate we were to have booked the B & B months before or we might have found ourselves sleeping in the car.

Our B & B, buried in a back courtyard on Via Colleoni, is perfectly situated within the old town between the Citadella and the Piazza Vecchia, but I cannot find much else positive to praise about our accommodations.

I would not go so far as to suggest that the place is squalid but it did not feel welcoming.

The bedroom was devoid of affection and desolate of affectation, but reduced to beggary as circumstances found us this evening we should have been more grateful.

We weren´t.

I am not certain whether it was the ongoing festival or the fact it was Friday night or whether it was customary for restaurants to be open late, but we found a restaurant open at 10:30 pm on the same street as our B & B.

The waiters and waitresses of Ristorante Damimmo did not seem to be unwashed, uncouth animals, but they also did not seem overly welcoming.

Dinner was edible but not palatable.

For the wife, neither mood nor cuisine induced an appetite.

Especially when we were presented with a bill that was unconscionably high.

We returned to the B & B as dissatisfied as when we first arrived.

The humidity and hot tempers vented made for a long uncomfortable night.

Bergamo, 4 August 2017

A restless night led to an early rising before the scheduled hours of breakfast.

We both awoke with the feeling that Bergamo had failed us and that we desired to linger here as little as possible.

We would wander the streets of Bergamo Alta until it was time to return for breakfast.

Now it must be said that early morning in a city is a fine time to go wandering, for an awakening city seems at its most natural then.

Above: Bergamo Alta

Even though most establishments are closed and few people populate the streets, early morning walking feels like the city is our private playground.

Medieval Bergamo Alta clings to a hill 1,200 feet above the Lombardy plain.

It is one of northern Italy´s loveliest city centre, a favourite retreat for the work-weary Milanese who flock here at weekends seeking solace in the fresh mountain air, seductive lanes and the lively easy going pace of the place.

Bergamo Alta is filled with houses and palaces of fancy Gothic design.

The ring of gated walls are worn, mellow and overgrown with creeping vines and defiant charm.

These walls resisted army after army of invaders who vaingloriously spent themselves without success until the French (ah, those clever French) victoriously stormed the city in 1796, ending centuries of Venetian rule.

Piazza Vecchia is enclosed and encased by an envelope of harmoniously hugging houses with wrought iron balconies and hosting cafés and restaurants and by the palatial Palladian-style civic library.

Above: Piazza Vecchia, Bergamo Alta

Stendhal enthusiastically dubbed the square “the most beautiful place on Earth”, and, to be fair, it is certainly a striking open space to behold, with the Palazzo della Ragione stretching across the Piazza, lending an operatic stage ambiance especially at night under moonlight and lamplight.

Above: Piazza Vecchia at night, Bergamo Alta

Above: Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo Alta

Court cases were once heard here under the open arcades that form the ground floor, and, following the inevitable guilty verdict, condemned criminals were exhibited here.

The Piazza itself was the scene of joyous celebration in 1797, when the French (ah, those clever French) formed the Republic of Bergamo.

A Tree of Liberty was erected and the square, carpeted with tapestries, was transformed into an open air ballroom in which – as a symbol of the new democracy – dances were led by an aristocrat partnered with a butcher.

We gazed upwards at the massive Torre Civica (or Torre del Companone) with its 15th century bell that tolls every half hour.

Above: Torre Civica di Bergamo

We walked through the Palazzo arcades to the Piazza del Duomo and visited both the Duomo and the Chiesa Santa Maria Maggiore.

Santa Maria Maggiore is a rambling Romanesque church sheltering slews of saints lost amid overabudant over-ornamentation of too much gild, too much paint and statues too ignored.

Above: The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (background) and the Cappella Colleoni (foreground)

Here in this church, a monument to a local legend….

Gaetano Donizetti, the Bergamo-based composer of highly popular romantic comedies with memorable melodies and predictable plots, who died from syphilis here in 1848, is the town´s most famous son.

Above: Gaetano Donizetti (1797 – 1848)

His death caused massive grief.

Above: The tomb of Gaetano Donizetti

His groupies stamped their feet and smashed lyres in misery over the event.

The church is as glitzy as Gaetano was.

This is akin to a cathedral in Vegas remembering Liberace.

Above: Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919 – 1987)

But class will out, as the Cappella Colleoni next door clearly overshadows the Chiesa in grandeur and extravagance.

This connecting chapel is pastel-coloured marble and twisted columns and mosque-like dome.

Bartolomeo Colleoni, a Bergamo mercenary in the pay of Venice, commissioned the chapel with frescoed ceiling and gleaming gilded equestrian statue.

Above: Bartholomeo Colleoni (1400 – 1475)

Above: Equestrian statue of Colleoni, Cappella Colleoni

Colleoni´s coat of arms on the gate bears a much rubbed third testicle which is supposed to bring the rubber luck.

But biologically true or not, I am not certain how lucky Colleoni´s third testicle was for the man, nor whether I really want to rub another man´s testicles for luck.

And more oddness nearby at the Baptistry outside the Aula della Curia (“the Bishop´s Court”)….

Above: Il Battistero, Bergamo Alta

More frescoes, these of the life of Christ, but one scene quite strange….

Christ judges the damned while holding a dagger, like the sword of Damocles, in his teeth.

Our guidebooks informed us that these places would not open so early.

No one asks for money nor prevents us from taking photos.

There are no worshippers nor clergy about and yet the doors yawn wide open inviting the curious.

The Via Colleoni slowly wakes with pastry shop personnel placing in window displays trays of chocolate and sweet polenta cakes topped with birds.

The Luogo Pio Colleoni is not yet open, so Colleoni´s Bergamo residence is denied us.

Above: Il Luogo Pio Colleoni, Bergamo Alta

Once this was also the headquarters of a charitable institution set up to provide dowries for poor women, for the Venetians ruled that no woman could marry without one.

For why marry a woman if there is no profit in the practice?

The Citadella is also denied us.

Above: Citadella Bergamo

Where once a military stronghold occupied the entire western headland, now remains only buildings housing a small theatre and two museums: archeology and natural history.

Bones interpreted in Italian only, our guidebooks inform us.

But the views of Bergamo Basso and the plains of Lombardy below justify the walk.

There is much we will not see, much we will not learn, in our haste to leave Bergamo and its negative first impact upon us.

We do not learn about the Thurn and Taxis dynasty who are credited with organizing the world´s first modern postal service.

We do not hear about the exploits of the Thousand, many from Bergamo, who aided Giuseppe Garibaldi in liberating the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and bringing it into the reunified Italian fold.

Thus the reason why Bergamo is the Citta dei Mille, the City of the Thousand.

We do not see the tomb of Enrico Rastelli, a highly technical and world famous juggler who lived and died in Bergamo.

Above: Enrico Rastelli (1896 – 1931)

We may have seen but did not identify which of the paintings in Santa Maria Maggiore were done by Giovanni Cavagna or by Francesco Zucco or by Enea Salmeggia, for the surprise accessibility to the church had us feeling paranoid expecting to be evicted at any moment.

No Bergamese bergamask dancing as practiced by Nick Bottom in William Shakespeare´s A Midsummer´s Night Dream or incorporated into Debussy´s Suite Bergamasque.

Above: Scene from A Midsummer´s Night Dream, in centre wearing the head of an ass, Nick Bottom

No one tells us at breakfast back at the B & B that the famous American electrical engineer and professor Andrew Viterbi was born in Bergamo and somehow it seems the hodge podge assortment of visitors, some from France (ah, the clever French), could not explain Viterbi´s Algorithm better than I can understand it.

Above: Andrew Viterbi

(I don´t.)

Despite the ratio of women at breakfast greater than the men no one speaks of Bergamo´s late Mariuccia Mandelli, one of the first female fashion designers to create a successful line of men´s clothing.

(Am I the only one who reads Wikipedia?)

There are perhaps a thousand reasons to linger in this town, a thousand beautiful things to behold in Bergamo.

But first impressions are lasting and the welcome mat was amiss.

We return back to our car, I once again a heavily laden beast of burden.

No traffic ticket nor broken windows greet us and the car is where and how it should be.

We pack up the car and drive away.

We are soon a thousand metres away and eagerly increase this distance a thousandfold.

Ciao, Bergamo.

Sources: Wikipedia / Google / The Rough Guide to Germany / The Rough Guide to Italy / Lonely Planet Italy / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy