Magnesian Limestone

Our first day in England we visited Hilton Castle in Sunderland and received a private tour, as my wife and brother in law are direct descendants of the Baron Hilton who built the castle.  Our tour guides were the former mayor of Sunderland and her husband.  Having an interest in construction I was curious about the stonework, in particular the type of stone that had been used to build the castle.  It was yellowish and mottled, almost as if with fossil impressions, which it was not.  The mortar joints were relatively large and some blocks had what appeared to be chisel marks on them.  Later I found out that this stone is called Magnesian limestone and occurs in a band from the area on the mouth of the river Wear to Nottingham in north-central England.  It is used in thousands of buildings in the area, including the oldest like Saint Peter’s church built in the Anglo Saxon period and the most complex like Durham cathedral built in the Norman period.

Not only was it the major component in many buildings, the coastline between the two rivers, the Tyne and the Wear, is made of it in cliffs about 50 feet high.  At the water’s edge are concretions called cannoball limestone and algae covered rocks also made of the same stone.

Durham

This is a view looking down from the main tower at Durham Cathedral.  The bend in the river Wear is visible beyond.

We drove to Durham from Sunderland in a rented car guided by GPS which drove us into the heart of the pedestrian city.  Fortunately it was early in the day and we managed to find a safe place to leave the car.  We walked through the plaza, which was full of vendors selling things to tourists and then we walked up the hill to the cathedral.  We toured the cathedral and afterwards walked to a pub called Ye Olde Elm and had a pint.

There is so much history on the grounds and buildings of this cathedral that I cannot begin to do it justice.  The principal story is of the founding of the monastery at Durham in 875 AD by monks fleeing repeated Viking attacks on their original location on the Island of Lindisfarne.  The legend is that they found the site of the cathedral on a peninsula in the Wear river after following a maroon cow and being unable to move the bones of their patron Saint Cuthbert once they had arrived.

Roker Pier and Lighthouse

My wife, her brother and our daughter recently traveled to Sunderland England to see my wife's family's ancestral castle in Sunderland England.  I would like to write a few blog posts about what we saw.

We stayed at the Roker Hotel overlooking the North Sea and the Roker Pier and Light house.  The Pier is a curving ribbon of granite ending in a two-toned granite lighthouse.  It is an amazing feat of engineering and took 18 years to build.   It stands against the ferocious winter storms protecting the mouth of the Wear river  which, at the time it was built, was the sight of great industries, coal shipments and shipbuilding.  It was started in 1885 when England was at the height of its imperial power and finished in 1903.  There is an opposing curved pier on the south side which was built after World War I.  The opposing pier is not as well done, a shabby sister to this one, perhaps symbolizing the ridiculous bloodletting of the war that undid Britain.

3/8/2019

We went to Brockton City Hall today to check on the zoning status of a house we were interested in.  Brockton is a city that today is principally known for its drug dealers and street shootings.  But the City Hall recalls a day when it was a prosperous, proud community, the capital of America’s shoe industry.  During the 1980s and 90s Dominican drug dealers carried on a lively trade in cocaine from the City of Brockton.  Today the immigrant community is largely dominated by Cape Verdeans who are generally hardworking and ambitious.  They may be the salvation of the city if it can be saved.  The geologic feature that gave birth to industry here was the small river that powered the shoe factories.  The river seems to barely exist today.  It is not a great transportation hub or desirable city center for food, restaurants and theaters so until something changes it may be destined to be a holding place for the poor.

We climbed the stairs to the Mayor’s office off the central rotunda, and then another level, all was in disarray.  The elevator was being rebuilt, there were a few workmen, a few office workers.  Usually in town and city halls most employees have gone home late on a Friday afternoon.  We were going to the top floor for the Building Department where a woman helped us find the information we needed.  Going up the stairs, first we came to the main floor where the mayor’s office is located.  Here, around the rotunda are the names of Brockton men who were killed or died in the Civil War.  There are marble reliefs of marching armies with generals at their head. And to the left, opposite the Mayor’s office is a hallway with grand pictures of scenes from the Civil war.  It is an imposing and awe-inspiring room which gives you the feeling of the importance and centrality of that war to the people of Brockton only a few generations removed, and it gives you the feeling of the vitality of the city at the time. 

I was introduced to Brockton in 1978.  I was 22 and I began working for a young carpenter, the same age who lived in Duxbury but had graduated from Brockton High.  The city was going to the dogs he said and they had moved east toward the coast and out of the city.  His family had immigrated from Sweden for work in the shoe factories.  His grandfather was a carpenter and had worked a lifetime in the city and taught him enough so that he could start his own business barely out of his teens.  His father had gone the public service route, probably beginning in construction and then becoming the building inspector and finally retired as the Postmaster General of Brockton.  My young employer went on to become a successful designer in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I, having just left the liberal institution of Umass Amherst was horrified at his attitude to the poor people on welfare who were moving into the city.  The last of the shoe factories were closing down then but many of his friends had jobs or were just losing jobs at shoe factories. 

I mentioned my Brockton experience to another friend and he recounted how he had been doing survey work within sight of city hall when a police officer came up to him and demanded to know where his ‘detail’ was.  It sounded as if the officer was shaking him down for money, he said.  The officer told him he had to have a f—ing detail and that just the other day a man had been shot to death on the bar on the corner of the street.  My friend begged off getting a detail but he remarked that the lot he was working on was littered with spent hypodermic needles.  He re-emphasized, “in sight of City Hall”. 

I have a few other memories of Brockton.  I was a substitute teacher briefly at Brockton High School.  It was the most highly regulated school I have ever been in, and probably for good reason.  I also have bad memories of a long ago divorce battle and the court house is something of a nightmare to pass by.

Driving through downtown the first thing you notice is that so many of the buildings are empty.  Many ex-industrial cities have become cultural meccas with trendy shops, restaurants, galleries and theaters.  No such thing is evident on a drive down Main Street Brockton.  Over regulation, high taxes, corruption, lack of good transportation into and out of the city, lack of a pool of educated workers, lack of safe, clean neighborhoods to live in and most of all lack of commerce and industry to create jobs all contribute to the demise of a once great city.  I do not know what can be done, but there is the potential to bring the city back to life if the right steps are taken and enough people are determined to make it happen and I know there are people who still believe deeply in Brockton and are proud of the city

A Legacy of Service

My grandfather was born in 1878 in Watertown Massachusetts.  He started out as a young man working as a plumber but at a relatively early age, around the turn of the century, he began a career as a fireman on the Watertown Fire Department.  Following him, my uncle Jim, my uncle Tom and my uncle John also became life-long members of the fire department.  Two other uncles, Ed and Bill were on the Police Department, housed slightly behind the Fire Department off of Main Street.

 My father's dream as a boy was to also be on the fire department.  He was intimately involved with the doings of the department throughout his childhood.  He went with my grandfather to the Brant Rock fire in Marshfield in the 1930s when a strip of grand hotels along the seawall burned to the ground.  He would even take me as a boy to see the big fires that were happening in town.  But my father was injured as a child and became legally blind in one eye.  He had to return three time to the army recruitment office before someone turned a 'blind eye' and let him in, but even then he was assigned to Graves Registration.  He never could pass the physical for the Fire Department, which he often told me was the greatest disappointment of his life.

Last week on FaceBook someone posted a newspaper clipping from 1940 of several firefighters being injured while searching a burning house for a child they thought was inside.  One of those injured was my uncle Tom, who I only remembered as an old man dying of emphysema in the 1960s.
I also remember my father telling me how one of his brothers had pulled a boy who seemed dead from the Charles river and had worked at resuscitating him long after he was told it was useless.  The boy revived and whenever that boy would walk past the fire station my father said his brother would break into the biggest smile.

Here is the clipping.

Old Quebec

Last July we drove up to Quebec City.  This is a picture of us with our tour guide who gave us a one hour guided tour of the city from a horse drawn carriage.

When I was a boy I had a book about the fur trade in Hudson's Bay that fascinated me.  I also remember a book in our home about the battle on the Plains of Abraham between Wolfe and Montcalm, which gave French Canada to England.  Later I read of the raids originating in Quebec on the New England Settlements by the Iroquois, and then of Benedict Arnold's journey up the Kennebec in December of 1775 to attack the city for the Colonial Army.  It has in a distant way always been tied to New England where I have lived all my life.  Where I grew up outside Boston, there was a large population of French Canadian immigrants who, in contrast to other groups assimilated so completely that they were almost indistinguishable from native borns,  save for their French names.

I took French in school and into college but, although I can read it pretty well, I can only piece together a few rudimentary sentences in real life.  Quebecois was unintelligible to me, to my great frustration at having wasted so many years studying French.  I imagine I could pick it up if I stayed here a year.  The French Canadians are adamant about sticking to their own language for fear of being swallowed up by the surrounding English speaking world.

It was a day long drive from the Boston area.  I looked into flying, because we only planned one weekend, but flying would have taken nearly as long as the drive because there were no direct flights.  I was used to driving from Vermont to Montreal and was always surprised how quickly the land leveled out after crossing the border.  The first time I did that I was 17.  Me and two friends bicycled from Watertown to Montreal.  The rural and mountainous land of northern Vermont suddenly gave way to tedious pedaling over flatland with open fields and rushing highway traffic.  The crossing near Shelbourne was different though.  The rolling green hills of the Green mountains continue for 30 miles or so before leveling out into the Saint Lawrence valley.

We had a good experience again with Airbnb.  We had a studio apartment with a private back yard for $70.00 dollars a night.  It was clean and private, although in a noisy part of the city, but we had been warned about that.

Shen yun at the Wang

December 30, 2017

We went to see Shen Yun at the Wang Theater in Boston last night.  The tickets were a gift from our son and his wife.  It was a cold night and I had a cold, but we enjoyed the show.  It was colorful to say the least.  The performers danced in brightly colored costumes in front of a color coordinated backdrop of spectacular scenery.  The dancers even had the ability to appear to walk into the backdrop and become animated action figures flying and leaping in the clouds and over mountains.
It struck me that no individual performer stood out from the rest.  They were either all male or all female and almost exactly the same age and build.  I found myself trying to fix on one person and follow them through the routine but it was easy to lose them.  They did a series of highly disciplined and highly coordinated dance routines each illustrating some story from Chinese culture.  Two of these vignettes illustrated the plight of Fa Lun Gong in China and told of the promise of salvation through this Buddhist offshoot religion.  In fact the entire show seemed to be primarily about promoting the religion.

The public relations people were as coordinated and disciplined as the dancers.  They had pictures taken of attendees smiling in front of a Shen Yun backdrop choosing people from the crowd as they entered the theater.  On the way out we were asked to make a few comments on a video camera interview.  We said nice things about the show, which were true.

I think I have to judge Fa Lun Gong from several perspectives, one being their opposition to the current Chinese government.  Apparently they are listed as a major terrorist organization and their performances are hounded by Chinese agents around the world.  Many members have been killed or imprisoned.  As a Christian, I see the religion as completely false and even dangerous.  And as an amateur historian, I am reminded that the biggest, most violent war in Chinese history, the Hong Qiu rebellion was started by a man who started a religion based on what he had learned from an American missionary.  The Boxer rebellion also was started by a quasi-religious group.  In conclusion, I admire them for standing up to the government, I reject their religion, and I think that the government of China has reason to fear them as more than just a religious group.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

Pisa

     We went to Pisa on a tour bus.  The land around the city is flatter than further inland, perhaps because it is built on the delta of the river Arno.  And the ancient-ness of the city is not as apparent as you drive in as it is in other cities.  There was no visible wall or dense city blocks along the highway we followed to the Leaning Tower and the Cathedral.  When we got to the destination, the cathedral and the tower and baptistry were surrounded by a grassy field, unlike Florence or San Gimignano where there is only stone underfoot.  And, in Pisa, the Tower and Cathedral do not feel as if they are part of the larger city, but feel separated from it and isolated.  These are all just impressions from a 2 hour visit with very little knowledge of the city’s history.

      The tower is of course the site we all came to see and therefore spent little time looking at the cathedral and baptistry which are themselves wonders of architecture.  We did walk around them, missing the details, the interior, the history, until we reached the line to the tower itself where we had to empty our pockets for the guard .  This was totally unexpected and I exposed several hundred Euros to a crowd of people, something that I otherwise would never think of doing.  The tower itself really does lean, a lot.  When you are inside you feel disoriented because one is not accustomed to sizeable buildings pitching to one side.  The outside of the tower is a colonnade, or a series of stacked colonnades. Then there is a double marble wall with a spiral staircase winding up between them.  When we started up, I began to panic with solid marble to my left and right and people front and behind me.  Every once and a while there was a small opening in the wall to look out.  But I was sure for a minute that I would have to reverse course to keep from an attack of claustrophobia.  I took a deep breath and went on.  Italy is a place  of many stairs and much climbing. The steps themselves, made of white marble, had hollow footsteps worn into them.   At the top were bells and  tourists.

    The inside of the tower is hollow.  And running up one side of the inner wall is a stainless steel channel.  I wondered if this had been used to try to straighten out the tower.  I also noticed that, tucked between some nearby buildings and behind a wall, there was a massive device that looked like it had been used to pull the tower into a more plumb orientation.  The steel on the inside must have been used to add some tensile strength, otherwise pulling on the top might have toppled the entire tower.  

The Cathedral of Santa Maria Del Fiore

The Marble Cupola Above the Dome

     The cathedral in Florence is everything it was said to be and more.  The city is small enough and walkable enough and Il Duomo, is large enough that its presence dominates everything.  It, and the campanile by it, is so big and every facet of its immensity covered with so much detail that it is impossible to take it all in as one integrated object, as one building.

     We marveled at the outside and toured the inside.  The altars get lost in the space, the floors are intricately designed marble, the ceiling of the dome is a fresco of heaven and hell.  Although very much the architectural style of a Catholic church, it has a secular feel.  People are not there to be close to God, they are there as tourists, as we were, to gawk at the feats of renaissance man.  The walls are lined with gospel scenes and saints but also with frescoes and murals and coats of arms devoted to the wealthy merchants who built the cathedral as a mark of their own success and standing amongst the city states of Italy and the rest of Europe. 

     I have to give credit to the men who built it, not just to the designers and the financiers but to the masons, carpenters, wagoneers, metalsmiths, laborers, because I know what it is to execute the design of another, what it is to work daily in all kinds of weather at repetitive, difficult, physical tasks, to solve mechanical problems as they arise, to put your hands to the blocks of stone, to smell the mortar and hear men admonishing, encouraging, cursing one another as the building goes up.  I know what it is to be totally absorbed in the completion of a mechanical task, to craft it with your hands to an ideal cradled in your mind.  I wanted to know how they did it.

     The highlight for me was the climb to the top of the dome.  You start by going up a circular stone stairway for, (here I am guessing at heights and dimensions), several hundred feet to emerge at the edge of an octagonal drum on which the dome itself is built.  From this height you can look down into the main part of the cathedral to see tourists, already small and distant  and you can look up at the ceiling inside the dome to see high above the opening to the cupola, itself the size of a small building. 

     From here you climb inside the double layered dome up another stairway where you can see some of the internal structure.  Most of the structure is buried in the mass of masonry under your feet.  Your head brushes against the outer dome and occasionally you pass a small window looking out on Florence.  Each time you are a little further from the ground.  At the top you climb out onto the base of the cupola.  You cannot go inside the cupola which opens downward into the church ,just walk around it on the edge of the roof.  At the very top there is an eight foot diameter brass ball which is big enough to stand inside of but actually gets lost in the enormity of everything else.  

Montepertuso

     

     We woke up in our house high above Positano to another beautiful day.  We went to the café Il Pertuso for coffee and then took the bus into town,  In town there were many tourists, many giftshops, yachts and one navy patrol ship in the harbor.  I learned some new italian words; moglie, spiaggia.   I had my first look at a newspaper since we left.  There was another shooting, this time of 5 police officers keeping watch on a parade of protesters.

     

     Another hot, hair-raising ride back to Monte Pertuso from the center.  We ate again at the local   restaurant near the apartment.  It was La Festa de la Madonna, church bells rang and fireworks went off.  They were shot from the cliff side at 3 locations above us and exploded high over our heads where we were eating.  The flashes lit the face of the mountain and the white stone mixed with the red green and  blue of the fireworks as part of the display.

     

     The next day I climbed up to the hole in the mountainside that gives Monte Pertuso its name and saw the remnants of the rocket launchers.  I had climbed a long flight of stone stairs through terraced gardens to a well-worn forest trail until I came out at the puncture in the mountain.  From there, there was a rusted steel ladder that climbed to the top of the needle-eye.  I thought that might be the very top, but later when I looked at the entire mountain from below, I saw that it was just the beginning of the mountain which kept ascending far beyond that.

Firenze

We arrived in Florence in the afternoon and took a taxi from the train station to our Airbnb apartment.  Our hostess who arrived on a motor scooter about ten minutes after we did was named Monica.  She took me up to the fourth floor of the building where there was a small but clean and modern apartment looking out on the building across the narrow cobblestone street.  Pam had walked up to a little store and returned with the fixings for mozzarella salad.  We called out the window for her to come up.

 

      Florence was the one city I wanted to see having read the story of the building of the cathedral  Brunelleschi’s Dome  by Ross King.  The streets are narrow,  paved with basalt stones and open into spectacular piazzas, each one with architecture and art you couldn’t dream existed.  Cars are banned or limited throughout most of the city.  There are small family owned grocery stores and little restaurants in every conceivable corner of the city.   There are fantastic, enormous, intricately carved doors everywhere as if each local renaissance merchant had to outdo the other with the size of his entry door and its knockers.

Venezia

     We arrived in Venice on Trenitalia.  Our instructions from our airbnb host were to take the water bus to San Marco square.  Of course, like any American, I know what Venice is, but not really.  I realize this when I see it.  It has become more of a tourist attraction now than a city, but the depth of history here is evident at every turn.  Piazza San Marco, I thought was just another piazza.  As I struggled across it with our suit cases in tow, chasing the fast walking host and my wife, I realize that this is no ordinary piazza, even by Italian standards. 

     I remember reading once that Venice was founded by  Romans fleeing the advancing armies of Attila the Hun in the fifth century.  I knew it was sinking and that it was built in the water, and that there were gondolas.  I did not know that it breaths power and wealth. Its glory is that of another age, but it still stands.  It could be Disney World, but it is not.  It was not built to be a tourist attraction.  It was for centuries the heart of a dynamic creative and prosperous economy and society. 

     

We only planned one night in Venice.  Our main destination was Florence.  We arrived late in the day and checked in just after dark.  There were boats and gondolas just outside the windows.  Trash, we were told was picked up in the morning by a boat.  And we were told by our host that in a real high tide the first floor would fill up with water, at least up to small internal dams just inside the doors. 

     

We went out to find a place to eat knowing nothing about where we were, except we knew how to find our way back to Saint Mark’s square.  We found an osteria and The food was good and we sat for a while and had a bottle of wine.  The head waiter talked to us for a while.  He was Philipino but spoke English, Italian, Spanish, French and some German, as well as Tagalog. We had heard him easily slipping into the language of whatever table he was working on.  He told us he owned land in the Philippines and supported most of his family at home.  He planned to retire there someday. 

     

     The next day we had an outdoor breakfast in Saint Mark’s square and marveled at the architecture.  About midday we caught the train to Firenze.  It is interesting pulling out of the dense and ancient city of Venice, crossing over water for a ways and seeing the industry and shipping spread out over the wide Adriatic coast, with all of Europe to the immediate north and all of Italy to south.

Vesuvius

After leaving Pompeii, the tour bus drove us up Mount Vesuvius.  The bus has to make dozens of hairpin turns on a narrow road going up the side of the mountain.  When you are approaching the turn you do not imagine that it would be possible for such a long bus to make it around, but it does every time, occasionally having to force other vehicles to back up out of its way. 

     The buses let the tourists out at a base station where a rocky trail begins which goes up to the rim of the volcano.  It is a hot, dry and pretty steep  trail that goes up in three stages.  At the end of each stage there is a little refreshment stand and some shade.  Looking down one can see the city and the Bay of Naples and , off in the distance the Amalfi peninsula.  On the flank of the present volcano a great ring of lava fields spreads out from the volcano.  The remnants of the old base of the much larger volcano that exploded in 79 A.D.are still are visible. 

     The crater is about a half mile wide, hundreds of feet deep and almost perfectly cone shaped with a floor that looks like you could build a house on it or plant a garden.  Flowering plants and grasses grow around the rim and down inside.  It is said that steaming vents can often be seen but we did not see any the day we were there.  The trail follows the rim about half way around the lower side.  The higher side looks extremely dangerous without a trail or safety railing.  The sides drop straight down and there are places where you can see material has broken off and fallen.  I do not know what geo-physical dynamic creates the perfectly cylindrical shape or the flat plug at the bottom.  And I do not know what it would look like to see that enormous shape fill up with lava before it broke through one of the sides and poured down the mountain.  Evidence of such lava flows are all around.    

Pompeii

                                                      The Amphitheatre in Pompeii

Before we left for Italy, we arranged online for two all day bus tours through a website called Viator.com.  Two days after arriving in Rome we took the metro from our apartment to Piazza del Popolo where several groups waiting for bus tours were gathered under the Egyptian obelisk in the center of the Piazza.  After we had assembled we walked out of the main gate to the roadway and boarded a bus for Pompeii.

     Driving south from Rome the mountains on either side of the highway become noticeably drier, trees giving way to bushes.  The towns seem grafted onto the mountainsides while the broad central valley where the highway is is empty except for industrial buildings and farmland.  We stop for coffee in Cassino at a café with the famed Abbey in view above us.  Our tour guide tells us that the Americans destroyed the Abbey in WWII because they thought the Germans were there, but that it was full of war refugees. 

     We drove on until we got to the ruins of Pompeii.  It is bigger than I expected, acres and acres of buildings and roads, and people that had been buried in ash by the volcano Vesuvius which stands dramatically over the city.  The buildings, according to our guide, exhibit a mix of Greek and Roman construction, as it was initially a Greek ruled area then a Roman city.  You walk the streets from house to house, shop to shop.  There is an area where gladiators were trained, an amphitheater and a great rectangular town commons ringed with collonaded buildings.  The streets are paved with basalt blocks with raised sidewalks also of basalt on either side.  There are crossing areas of basalt stepping stones with the grooves of chariot wheels worn between them.  There are even white reflective stones woven into the pavement designed to reflect the light from torches attached to the walls of the buildings and light the way for night travel.  They had underground sewage, running water in lead pipes, heated floors, and bathhouses.  It is truly like stepping into a city that has been abruptly abandoned and being able to walk into the houses of even the most wealthy and powerful.  You can picture the hustle and bustle of a city, all the business of life taking place on these streets and within these walls, because so much of it is still here including the bones of the dead and the empty jugs once filled with wine or oil.  

Rome

The first thing I noticed about Italy flying into Rome’s Fiumicino airport, (I first tried to remember this as Foo Man Chu airport, but now know it means little river in Italian),   were the umbrella pines and the wheat fields below.  The airport is well outside the city center.  One remarkable thing about Italy is that the cities are densely packed very often within ancient walls and in between the cities is open countryside with no suburban sprawl. 

Our Airbnb host sent a friend to pick us up and bring us into Rome.  The driver’s name was Danielle.  He spoke almost no English but he was friendly and we tried to converse in my broken Italian and his broken English.  It was about a 45 minute ride on fairly conventional, open highways until we reached the city where the streets are narrow and confusing, at least to us.  We drove down a street, paved with stone that ran along a massive wall that ran as far as we could see.  Our apartment was half a block off this street. 

The Mura Aureliane, or Aurelian’s wall gave us our first impression of Rome.  It is massive, maybe 50 feet tall with stone houses and towers on top, and trees and bushes growing out of the cracks.  The entrances to the city through the wall are worthy of an empire in its glory.  The wall completely encircles the old city. 

The Termini station was a ten minute walk along the wall from where we were.  From here you could take a train to another city or get on the subway system to go anywhere inside Rome. 

 Our first full day we used the Metro to explore the city.  We first went to the Colosseum where there were hundreds of tourists waiting in line and many guide businesses who would sign you up to cut the line and give a guided tour of both the Colosseum and the Forum.  We paid them maybe forty Euros for each of us.  Our first guide spoke pretty good English and she  brought  us into the Arena explaining many things as we walked along listening to her on little disposable earphones.  These tours are useful if you have no idea at all where you are or what you’re looking at, which essentially, at least I, did not.  If I went back, I would first read about these places, make notes about what I wanted to  see, buy the tickets in advance and then explore on my own.   But, all in all, the tours were not bad. 

The Colosseum itself is of course, an impressive work of engineering and design.  It is however dark.  And I say this in both senses of the word.  The old stone, except where it has been cleaned, is blackened, and inside between the outer wall of arches and the inner wall of arches it is also dark and dreary.  The viewing areas look out onto the maze of rooms that had been the staging area for the spectacles that took place above on a wooden floor which had been covered with sand to absorb the blood, (thus the word arena, its first meaning is sand).  Here the crowds could watch gladiators fight to the death or see criminals being fed alive to starving lions and tigers.  It is thus perhaps the world’s largest monument to the brutality of mankind.

The Colosseum is within site of the Palatine hill and the Roman Forum.   These are the ruins of the heart of the Roman empire that date from 600 BC to 700 AD.  The Forum is hard to describe.  It is as if someone had taken the buildings of a thousand years of imperial Rome and dumped them together in a junkyard.   

Using Uber

Positano

We used Uber for the first time in Rome when we were leaving the  train station to go to our next scheduled stop in Positano.  It was a hot day, and, although the station wasn’t far from our apartment, we had some heavy luggage to carry so we decided to try it.  I didn’t know the difference between Uber Black and the other choice, Lux?  So I chose Uber Black.  A few minutes later a polite and helpful driver showed up named Massimo in a black BMW with air conditioning.  It was definitely a comfortable ride and  not too expensive. 

In Positano we tried to call another Uber car but none were available.  I am not sure if some cities don’t ban them.  We ended up taking the bus.

On our way home from Boston’s Logan airport we again called for an Uber to take us back to the South Shore.  This time only Uber Black was available, again the ride was comfortable and the driver arrived in a fairly short time.  But the charge to my credit card was over $137 for a 35  minute ride. A taxi would have been cheaper.

We had mixed success with taxis.  We had just dragged our luggage up several hundred steps from the waterfront in Positano to where cars were and were walking down the street somewhat lost when a taxi stopped and picked us up.  He took us up to Montepertuso, he knew exactly where it was from one word from me.  He spoke no English.  The charge, as he took care to show me on his meter, was 37 Euros for a 15 minute ride which he and I both knew was highway robbery, but we had no choice and paid it. 

We used taxis twice in Florence with pretty good results.

The key to using either taxis or Uber is to have an alternative and also to have an idea of what they will charge before you get in.  One tour driver advised us to always put the charge on the meter if it was a taxi because if you ask how much to get to a place the driver is likely to high ball it.  This did happen to us once in Rome when we took a taxi home one night and I readily paid what he said it would be.  Another night, we did the same thing on the meter and it was much lower.  That however did not hold true in Positano.

The Ferries

Montepertuso

At the Naples waterfront, I felt like such a tourist, we bought tickets for the next ferry in an hour, but the vendor said if we ran we could catch the one leaving now which was just leaving.  Pam ran ahead.  I pulled the luggage scrambling after her.  She just managed to stop them from pulling up the gang plank without us.  This ferry was going to Sorrento which was on the way to our destination at Positano.  We were inside and it was hot, the windows barely opened.  It was not what I expected but it got us to Sorrento where we caught another ferry for Capri.  Capri was an unanticipated stop for us.  We had to leave the ferry and wait on the dock for the ferry to Positano.  There were a lot of wealthy tourists and young tourists.  There were pleasure boats in the harbor, hotels clinging to the hillside above the docks and farther up on the white cliffs there were villas precariously perched on the edges of the rock.  The tip of the island that we passed on the way out heading to Positano, had a monument high on the peak of the cliff.   I learned later that it is a statue of the Virgin Mary which is part of a church built on old Roman ruins. 

Passing along the Amalfi coast was one of the best parts of our trip.  The sea is beautiful and feels deep and massive, more so than I thought an arm of the Mediterranean possibly could.  White cliffs ring the whole Amalfi peninsula and built along the waters edge on are stone fortress-like towers.  We wondered if they were from Roman times or from the days when Amalfi was an important trading center. We sailed into Positano at the end of the day when the entire town is in the shadow of the mountains.

We left Positano several days later.  Our Airbnb house was in Montepertuso, right next to the Catholic church.  When we left we waited with our luggage for the bus down the mountain to the beach.  It came and we could barely fit it was crowded with so many people but the driver urged us to get on. We did. 

On the beach we bought tickets for the ferry to Salerno.  This ferry skirted the southern coast of the mountainous peninsula, stopping at the town of Amalfi.  In the middle ages Amalfi was a major trading port.  Today it is a major tourist destination.  It too is built on the sides of the mountains which soar overhead.  From there to Salerno, the land flattens and commercial ships begin to appear outside the port.  We walked with our luggage from the docks about a block into the city to find the train station to catch a train to Venice.

Love Songs of Asia

Do not believe that ink is always black,
     or lime white, or lemon sour;
You cannot ring one bell from two pagodas,
You cannot have two governors for the city of Lang Son.

I found you binding an orange spray
     of flowers with white flowers; 
I never noticed the flower gathering
     of other village ladies.
Would you like me to go and see your father and mother?

                                                      Song of Annam

This is one of my favorite books of poetry.  It is a book of sensuous, passionate love songs and poems from Afghanistan, Persia, Vietnam translated, I believe,  by a young British official posted in Afghanistan during World War I.  His name was E Powys Mathers.  I found this book in the Duxbury library years ago.  I recently remembered it and ordered it online.

Love Songs of Asia

Do not believe that ink is always black,
     or lime white, or lemon sour;
You cannot ring one bell from two pagodas,
You cannot have two governors for the city of Lang Son.

I found you binding an orange spray
     of flowers with white flowers; 
I never noticed the flower gathering
     of other village ladies.
Would you like me to go and see your father and mother?

                                                      Song of Annam

This is one of my favorite books of poetry.  It is a book of sensuous, passionate love songs and poems from Afghanistan, Persia, Vietnam translated, I believe,  by a young British official posted in Afghanistan during World War I.  His name was E Powys Mathers.  I found this book in the Duxbury library years ago.  I recently remembered it and ordered it online.

Juan Rulfo is so Strange

I was squatting on a rock, not doing anything,
only sitting there with my pants down 
so they would see me like that and wouldn't come near me.

Yo estaba acuclillado en una piedra, sin hacer nada, 
solamente sentado alli con los pantalones caidos 
para que ellas me vieran asi y no se me arrimaran.
                                                
                            Juan Rulfo, Anacleto Morones

I just finished reading El Llano en Llamas by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.  These stories are fascinating, very Mexican, creepy, Poe-like.  He only wrote two books, the other was Pedro Paramo a short novel with strange distortions of memory and mixing of the real and the supernatural.  Always grim, fatalistic, morbid, but these are stories with characters, motives, plots and mood that transcend common writing.