Morning commences with my hauling rocks out of the pool with a rake. After work, we take the bus to Narni, the geographical center of Italy, and one of it’s first republics, astride a deep, sullen valley. Narni was originally the roman province of narnia, and being that it provided inspiration for Lewis’ chronicles of narnia, I don’t believe I need to go into much in the way of detail in my description of how fucking pleasant it is. Just picture a bunch of fairytale towers and castles and curves and shit, and you pretty much get the idea. An actual sacricicial altar from immemorium, like a buoy announcing the town entrance. But no full throated lions. Brittney lives above an old archway, just beyond one of three enormous gates leading into the town, in an old guard tower redolent of eua du particular granny. It has winding stone stairs that lead nowhere! How awesome is that. We attend her wish for lunch, and meet Romano her lover along the way, who takes us to his favorite hillside resteraunt, loosely translated as The Embarrassed Chicken, for a proper Italian dining experience that leaves my mouth too full for small talk. Manfriccoli, that I may bathe in your soapy coils, lo it is far too cold out, so I shall merely eat you with bread.
After the initial test shoot, I get to pick up even more Albarran noise from a stylist in London. Back for further mining experiments…
and he likes my photos, thank blazes, so after a long tote of armor back from barcelona, I get to heave christiane and lily into a couple of pieces, for luck.
December is largely spent back in Clapham, back in the studio or hunkered down avoiding vast drifts of soggy snow. Did manage one day out to capture it, before continued hibernation.
these beautiful labyrinthes beckoning, the erasure of the hovering fog obliterates the sky, and I feel like a revenant floating along the canals, over bridges and against the crumbling brick edifices and shuttered windows. We become purposeful in our mapless abandon, wandering the alleys and arches until, after more than a single circle, we arrive on the hallowed st marks square. The basilica is monumental, a marble pastiche of venices forgotten glory, littered with pigeons that will acrobatically land on your shoulders should you proffer a crust. The florian coffee house, more than 350 years old, is a baroque masterpiece out of la traviata, which regrettably charges 8 euros for a latte, so I hearken to the shabbier shop nearby for a standing 2 euro capucchino. And here loiters the one drawback to this gilded city; the prices. Everthing is expensive, museum entries, coffee and pasta, and much as the masks and murano glass. There was a time in the city’s history that saw her cater to the poetic whims of the European aristocracy, beginning their grand tours of Italy, and it often seems the place has yet to escape from that decayed romance, to realistically grip the reality of dreadlocked American and canadian backpackers. Granted I’m somewhere betwixt, but I still don’t want to part with a tenner for a coffee the size of my cupped hand. Otherwise this city can be summed thus; it is a place more like an idyllic film set than an actuality but it is in fact, actualized. Tourists, students, gondoliers, fishermen and roving tat sellers rub against the frayed skirts of methuselan women leaning heavily on their canes, a patiose of every language echoes off the narrow alleys, and ocassionally,opera music seeps from brick sodden, baritone corners, and I forget my position in time, shuffling within an anachronism. And no cars! Just shouts and heavy footfalls, the rare propellored boat like a tempest along the quiescent canal. And yes, I stuffed my face full of dripping pizza yet again, for the 6th straight day.24th- the day spent wandering more canals, getting lost and found again, spying a cathedral in the mist lolling dangerously to the side. The exact same women we saw in Rome, have followed us here with their tin cups, crying alms in their scarves. Are you forced into penury here if you are female, abstractly Saracen and a wearer of head scarves? We eat a stunning meal of noble Venetian risotto doused liberally in seafood, and wash it into our canals with cool white wine. The room is cold when we return, and we draw a great curtain around the bed as whispers from the alley populate the air with ghosts.
I have a difficult time getting a fix on reaching the via appia; there is a different suggestion for every landmark, be it the catacombs, metulla’s tomb or aquaducts. I realize after 3 hours worth of walking on the jutting tufa that there is a good reason. That being, thanks to this highly informative metal plaque and map, that the road in question stretches along 3500 hectares of land, Asshole. We managed around 1000 before giving our feet up as lost. But made it to the old bit in the brochure before succumbing…. And then we walked all the way back, being unable to blag our way onto a bussload of Dutch invalids, and nowhere even near a metro. We join a later than usual train to Venice at 11pm, discovering our seats taken by an enormous Italian man reclining porpoise-likeover the entire row, spilling injudiciuosly out of his narrow shirt. A complaint to the conductor turns into a request for upgrade, and we land softly into our first class sleeper compartment, where christiane attempts actual use of the bedding, while I contemplate how best to straddle her face using the two parrallel bunks as a bolster. She thankfully recognizes the the unavoidable force Eros exerts over jungle gymnasium escapades, and the cost of the compartment is duly offset many orders of magnitude. We arrive in Venice just before 6, well rested for once, and worm our way through the labyrinth to the domus of an archeologist, a dear man named Diego who has agreed to host our brief invasion.
