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The quickie report on Italy, with snapshots:
( Montefollonico )
( Toscano )
( Venezia )
( Firenze )
( Roma )
There's more I'd like to record about the trip, and so much more I'd like to say, about adventures in communication and about people we met and about trying to read Calvino's Invisible Cities in the original in Venice and about cultural subtleties and culture clash in unexpected places and all kinds of things. But this is the gist of the trip, anyway, and more than I thought I'd manage to post, so I'm content. So much happened that only the people we traveled with could really appreciate, so much comes down to "it was hilarious at the time, but I guess you had to be there"; and it's always interesting how articulating an experience, the act of describing it and the description itself, can change the quality of the memory of it, fixing it in words that maybe can never be exactly the right words and inevitably color it with all the other associations those words conjure; there's a cool passage about that in the Calvino book, which I'll have to find and post as a quotation. Photographs can facilitate memory or overlay it, take the place of it; telling a story can change the story. So I don't grieve what I left unrecorded in pictures (well, except for some cool shots I could have taken from the gondola if my film hadn't run out) or what I leave unrecorded in words; some of it might stay safer and truer that way, and all of it will no doubt, over time, leach into fiction, which, since I'm not a very good travel writer or memoirist or blogger, is where it's best used anyway. :)
( Montefollonico )
( Toscano )
( Venezia )
( Firenze )
( Roma )
There's more I'd like to record about the trip, and so much more I'd like to say, about adventures in communication and about people we met and about trying to read Calvino's Invisible Cities in the original in Venice and about cultural subtleties and culture clash in unexpected places and all kinds of things. But this is the gist of the trip, anyway, and more than I thought I'd manage to post, so I'm content. So much happened that only the people we traveled with could really appreciate, so much comes down to "it was hilarious at the time, but I guess you had to be there"; and it's always interesting how articulating an experience, the act of describing it and the description itself, can change the quality of the memory of it, fixing it in words that maybe can never be exactly the right words and inevitably color it with all the other associations those words conjure; there's a cool passage about that in the Calvino book, which I'll have to find and post as a quotation. Photographs can facilitate memory or overlay it, take the place of it; telling a story can change the story. So I don't grieve what I left unrecorded in pictures (well, except for some cool shots I could have taken from the gondola if my film hadn't run out) or what I leave unrecorded in words; some of it might stay safer and truer that way, and all of it will no doubt, over time, leach into fiction, which, since I'm not a very good travel writer or memoirist or blogger, is where it's best used anyway. :)
