• BEING:   Handwritten accounts, pen or pencil on paper, of a journey touching at Forestville, San Francisco, Milan, Naples, Minori & back. Note how early naiveté evolves into fuller comprehension. Views expressed are not necessarily those of the authors.
• ADVISORY:   Song lyrics may express rude ideas in rude language. If such displeases you, don't click on the song links below.
• NOTES:   These journal pages are still graphics-poor; the situation won't improve immediately, until after an image gallery happens. Links to relevant sites are embedded in the text. Your feedback is welcome.

Tues 27 March 2001 (S. Giovanni D.), Farewell Forestville

LEAVING HOME:   On the bus, cattle down the freeway towards SFO and an over-the-pole flight. A warm morning, wispy clouds over the bumpy velvet hills and hazy suburbs. The usual beggars at the offramps and intersections. Sonoma County is so familiar after a couple decades. Pierced people, plain people, painful people, paralyzed people. All the mechanisms of civilization are available for our use, except clarity.

Bus stop. Fliers loading. Women cabbies talking, hugging, peering, laughing. Those onboard are forested with pages, stories of fantasy and/or realitorested with pages, stories of fantasy and/or reality and/or instruction — words to help us perceive, believe, deceive, retrieve — then we occasionally glance out the windows to see the structures, landscapes, motorized motion, and more words pasted on surfaces. We've turned the landscape into a wordscape; the world, a page upon which we write the text of our humanity.

Next stop, the north side of Rohnert Park. All the commercial architecture here is Mediterranean-styled, with red-tile roofs, beige or rusty stucco, arches and arbors and shaded walkways, colorful awnings. Slightly crasser buildings are blocky, layered, 70's-modern or worse, big and little boxes showing excessive metal and glass and haste. Then beyond: hillsides whose orchards were uprooted, replaced with endless vineyards.

Across the Petaluma River, where ancient (for California) structures & devices line the west bank, and an encampment of tents and tarps nestles under the roadway. An informal village of non-taxpayers floats nearby in abandoned boats, roosts in old chicken condos, shifts their tentage from tree to culvert, or so I've read. No such accretions cluster around the vast corporate / professional / commercial / residential preserves a few miles further on, in wealthy Marin County.

Now across & along a few inlets, bays, fjords lined with water-lovers, water-livers, exclusive docks, houseboat villages, all below the fabulous villas crawling up the pricey hillsides. Now over the Golden Gate, one tug churning out into the mist, a few wakes washing against Alcatraz Island, and The City receiving us.

SAN FRANCISCO:   At the toll plaza, the stick-figure on one warning sign sports a hula hoop. Most pedestrians here aren't so equipped.

Transiting San Francisco induces more sensations and memories than can or should be documented here, as usual. Memes collide.

Southward becomes hazier, more concretized, less Italianate, a tendril of Angelopolis reaching ever on. Earlier, Mount Tamalapais hung over us like Vesuvius might; here, the East Bay hills and Mount Diablo are cloaked behind the moist miasma. And SFO looms monstrously. Happy Noon, good buddies!

THE PLANE:   The plane. Yes, well, the plane.

Sitting directly over the wing in a 767 there's little to see and much to hear, mostly deafening (the engines are just below us here). The food is good, companionship is amenable, the space is cramped except for those who commandeer entire rows as their beds. I think I never wish to fly again.

This is the longest single flight I've ever taken. I remember going non-stop from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, from McGuire AFB (New Jersey) to Germany and back, San Francisco to Honolulu and back; the other longer hauls all stopped at a hub somewhere. At least this is a little quieter and smoother than that ferry ride across the Bay of Fundy.

And this is my only European trip other than a jaunt to (West) Germany in a military transport jet in 1975, whereupon I rolled across that landscape in tracked vehicles and jeeps for a month, a rather different form of tour, eh?

Songs: BEAM ME TO ITALY
ANYTHING FOR YOUR LOVE

Wed 28 March 2001 (S. Sisto Papa), flying.

This isn't really an over-the-pole flight, but we're clipping lakes Tahoe and Superior and projected to cross Hudson Bay and the south edge of Greenland. Sunset fades from rosy to cyanotic on the quilted cotton-thatch cloud layer below. Elevation: 10100 metres (which I compute as being 33330 feet, but I could be wrong).

Full night. A light on the wing tip, a few stars above, clear skies all around. Below on the northern prairies, a scattering of lights, regularly-spaced light clusters (county seats?), the occasional smear of a larger city. Lutheran lights with a few Catholic candles or Baptist bonfires or Wiccan witchglows. Any glow will do. Anything to hold off the void, drive away the wolves and Wendigo and whatever else looms in the night.

Oops! We missed Lake Superior, we're over Huron now and we'll go feet-wet off Labrador, skirting Greenland by quite a bit. Bother. He haven't gone nearly north enough. It's stone black below, we aren't over the grid anymore, no lights but those we cary with us. We're still lit on the interior a bit, though...

YOU ARE HERE:   This flight occupies a number of measurable dimensions, those of "x,y,z" space and "t" time, and "n" noise and "p" pain and "f" fatigue, and dimensions of taste and desiccation and distraction and fear, of light and dark, of proximity and irritation and amusement. Few of these dimensions have collapsed upon themselves.

The grid reappeared sparsely for awhile, ordered strings of bulbs lined at their own angles, then vanished again. We're alone in the sky, except for molecules, radiation, hopes, and tachyons.

Early morning over the North Atlantic. Midnite in my brain, my gut, without a real dinner. Bright puffy clouds stretching out below forever. Nightworms crawling in my ears, in my eyes. Other jumbo jets close enough to see. I hope they're not paralyzed too.

Now it's 7 AM in Milan but we're not there yet. No land seen yet. Far below, waves. Far above, the rest of the universe.

An hour later, an hour out of Milan, all below is cloudscape.

(utter exhaustion)

Nothing to see of Milan — rain, fog.

Thur 29 March 2001 (S. Secondo M.), aground in Minori.

Still utter exhaustion, but no longer desperation. Yesterday on the shuttle from Milan, some fragments of Italy's backbone were seen during our brief lucid moments. Then we flew among intricate clouds past looming Vesuvio (ve-SUE-vyo) into bright, warm Naples airport in the city's eastern suburbs. Everywhere blocks of apartments mix with farms, roadways, large and small industry, many of these buildings of imaginative design (to our gringo eyes) but worn. Livestock graze the autoroute margins and drainage channels, shops and homes and warehouses and greenhouses are jammed into every cranny. Most unpaved land is cultivated. No parks, forests, unused acres are visible.

Our van drove down the autostrada along the west-south base of Vesuvio, past Ercolana and Pompei (we'll tour their excavations later) to Angri, then over the Monti Lattari ('milk mountains', for the white limestone cliffs) to Maiori and Minori on the Amalfi Coast. This narrow twisting hairpin route climbs through a continuous realm of residences, businesses, farms. Village life is contiguous across the geography — every square meter is exploited. Chestnut rods support lemon-tree branches laden with softball-sized (and larger) fruit, a thatch is woven above the trees to protect from the elements and retain heat in these often-chilled hills. Streams cascade down chains of impoundments. Pedestrians and hurtling traffic of all sizes coexist heedlessly.

MINORI:   This morning we took the guided walking tour of a fragment of Minori (we missed last night's orientation talks — too wasted) and located a few essential vendors and places to congregate. These tour groups infuse ready cash into each shop we grace with a stop. The locals don't seem too annoyed by the gaggle of elderly schoolkids clustering around our matron, impeding traffic, peering curiously at the ancient compressed lifesystem.

At the 'downtown' intersection waiting for the bus to Ravello we see our first Italian traffic jam, caused by nothing discernible. Much shouting and gesticulation, a bureaucratic-looking cop overseeing the fun - he finally blows his whistle and traffic continues crawlingly.

(drizzlies this A.M. — yow)

RAVELLO:   This afternoon we do the tour of Ravello, a fabulous hill town, or at least the villas and 5-star hotels are fabulous. It's wonderful how infusions of foreign cash can improve the ambiance of a scenic site on an otherwise impoverished coast. (The major attractions in this ultra-resort are mainly products of wealthy enthusiasts over the last century or so, either restorations or fabrications.) Both the touched-up and newish villas & churches & cathedrals are quite beautiful, with intricate mosaics, and frescoes both extant and overpainted, and I guess all those whitewashed patches just mean that religious architecture may be regularly redecorated.

The up-and-down walled alleys are quite picturesque. From vantages atop the cliffs, in gardens or roadways or in glimpses between buildings, the vistas along the coast are indeed splendid. Hemispheres of sky, of sea, of land rising from the latter to the former with buildings inserted wherever possible on any viable ledge, and crops terraced into anything but the sheerest rocky cliffs.

The road from the edge of Amalfi's suburb Atrani into craggy Ravello, past unglamorous Scala (so named because until recently that town could only be reached by 'scaling' flights of steps on the walkway along the Dragon River, or so we were told) seems even more serpentine and constricted and deep-cut than most. It's a marvel of audacious engineering, a terror to Anglo-American eyes, gnawed into place to accommodate tourists for the last 1.5 centuries. Blame this all on Wagner, who wrote part of PARSIFAL here, and on other Northern and Western expatriates who've hailed the beauty in terms no brochure-writer could match.

Ha, the reason for that earlier road jam: traffic uphill from Minori was being held up because SIX tour busses in a row were looping down the wasp-wasted coabusesd. buses and large lorries occupy much of the breadth of these impossibly narrow ribbons of asphalt, often walled in deep cuts of coastal stone or snaking between buildings optimistically set on the margins of the world.

BUSES:   The giant buses are mostly German, their drivers Italian, their passengers Anglo-American and Teutonic and Gallic and Norse and Slavic, their opposing traffic inconsequential. Don't argue with a bus. Just slide past it when it slows down.

On somewhat-straight pitches the roadway is two narrow lanes, pinching down to just one (which wouldn't make a good sidewalk in California) as a blind turn approaches. These bends are provided with convex mirrors perched atop convenient structures. The buses blurt out their two-tone horn toots that echo musically up the hills and ravines, singing the hymn of motorized travel, sometimes sounding as duets when two such are near. Cars and buses, trucks large and small and mopeds, pedestrian and savvy dogs, all squeeze past one another with scant but usually ample clearance. Barely.

The older crowd in this tour bus was thrilled by the close encounters and taut squeeze-bys on the Ravello road, acting as though they were teenagers on an adventure ride in a huge theme park, squealing at the sweeping turns and near-collisions, laughing as mopeds and microcars zipped between head-butting goliaths, applauding the driver for his virtuosity and negotiating seemingly-impossible obstacles. Some even left tips. Good thing.

Fri 30 March 2001 (S. Amadeo), footsore in Minori.

WALKING:   This morning we inquired into the safety of walking the coast road (corniche) to Maiori (stay on the outer edge for visibility — and they don't want to hit you, it's bad for their insurance) and we learnt of an off-highway path over the hills. We decided on walking the corniche, which was just as well, as the over-the-hills route would have left us exposed to the storm that blew in directly.

The corniche east of Minori is briefly lined with green, flowery patches and arrayed with millstones, emblematic of the village's past. They claim that pasta was invented here. Cliffs drop straight down from the road to wave-crashed sea rocks. The road and inner embankment are reinforced by the 10-metre-high stone arches characteristic of the Costiera Amalfitana (Amalfi coast).

The point separating Minori from Maiori is surmounted by a recent (120-year-old) romantic 'castle' undergoing long-term and/or intermittent restoration efforts. Maybe. The road sweeping down past the breakwater and towards the longish beach esplanade of Maiori passes a 70-metre arched cave, now a car- and boat-park, guarded by two large lonely off-white dogs who gaze at us sadly as we pass.

Many dogs on this coast just sit along some roadside or other, watching the world go by.

MAIORI:   Maiori is mostly a new town, rebuild after being swept away by mudslides in 1954. Upper reaches are older-to-ancient, unregenerated, accessible only afoot.

Today (Friday) is market day here; a street-party flea-market fills a couple blocks downtown and continues up a cliff-climbing road around a school, up almost to the great Duomo (basilica). Vendors of toys, geegaws, clothes, shoes, see shoppers scuttling past and through their covered stalls in the now-sometimes-heavy rain. The peddlers of produce, nuts, spices, meat, cheese, do a brisk trade — and at prices a fraction of those of static overhead-ridden shopkeepers, that's no wonder. The fancy Italian foods so expensive in California are incredibly cheap here. Pass the prosciuto and peppers, eh?

The Duomo interior is part-restored (overpainted), part-original (glorious), and its museum of sacred art is closed today. Much of what we want to see is closed when we get there. Come back soon. And again. And again. Maybe get lucky.

After excellent pizza and salad at a covered main-road-side table, we walk back to Minori, greeting those guardian doggies as we leave Maiori. We're getting the hang of walking the roads here. Show no fear. Ever.

WEATHER:   Weather is unsettled here. Always carry raingear. Always.

Maureen goes back to the small excellent hotel to rest and write. I decide to scout out the path uphill to Ravello. At a shop there yesterday we thought we saw a trail guide we'd wanted — SUNFLOWER LANDSCAPES, SORRENTO AND THE AMALFI COAST, by Julian Tippett — which we'd ordered online some weeks ahead of time but was never delivered — but we weren't sure if it was the right one. We got back to the hotel, checked our notes, and yup, that's it. Well, we have to get it somewhere, and Ravello is a good place to start.

PATHS:   The climb was brutally steep but straightforward, a quarter-mile-high staircase past homes, farms, churches galore, villages, stupendous views, dogs curious-to-furious, cats wary-to-starey, and the VERY occasional other human being. I conversed with a few other strollers, drank a lot of water, attained Ravello on aching legs, learnt much.

These paths are everywhere. The Amalfi hills are webbed with stairways. Until the advent of motorcars, this path net hauled all the traffic of this ancient commercial realm nestled on sheer crags. Wide low steps of rock and concrete supported draft animals and their loads. Many of the walkways contain manhole covers — a sewer / stormdrain is just below. Street lights follow the public trails through groves and fields. Freshwater lines with frequent taps line the routes. The paths pass through entryways to chapels, homes, shops. The guide book claims this network is unique in the world, and is hardly used any more, save by ever increasing gangs of tourists.

DOWNHILL:   The return walk to Minori, via a slightly different and better informed route, was a bit easier than the climb, although not greatly speedier. Narrow and abrupt paved and cobbled walkways run between and tunnel under walls and buildings here in Minori and the other old coast and hill towns. The hill paths are just a continuation of these. Civilization, settlement are continuous across the terrain. Country, town, city seem to differ only in their density, only in the height and extent of cultivation and residence.