Home again, Home again, Jiggity-jig

[kitewithfish]

I have returned from Milan, and actually got home at a much more reasonable hour than I thought I would. Though my flight got in before 18:30, I assumed I would have to wait for the last Postbus from Austria to get to the Bratislava airport at 20:30 before I could begin the two hour drive back to Vienna.

There's a lot of stuff I left out of my visit to Smadar for the sake of brevity. For instance, a description of her living situation. It's actually a rather nice little apartment, small by the standards of anyone living there, but big to people like me, who've been living year to year in single rooms. It's essentially two rooms, a large back room serving as a bedroom to Smadar and her roomie, which also contains a piano (?!). The other room is a combination of kitchen, dining room, and living room. It's got a full stove and fridge, but also a fold-out couch where they put me for the duration of my stay. They've got a washer, but no dryer, because that's the way Italians roll. And, of course, a crowded little bathroom with an accordion door.

On the last day, I took full advantage of the kitchen to cook Smadar a proper meal. I'd not understood how much I'd missed cooking. It was all very simple things to cook- baked chicken thighs, sautéed zucchini and eggplant with a little cheese, some left-over rice-shaped pasta mixed with linguini. All things that I can simply cook off the top my head given a little oil and enough burners on the stove, but that I have not really touched here at all. ( I dearly miss chicken in my life- everything here seems to be pork, pork, pork.)

Milan was lovely, but I think my opinion was tainted by the section of Vienna I'm living in. Milan seemed like the streets and sidewalks were all incredibly broad and there were simply people everywhere, all the time. It was lovely, and reminded me of my very short trip to Honduras. Things did tend to look like they'd seen better days- faded paint and chipped plaster are the order of the day, but everything works. I found the atmosphere a bit more relaxed and friendlier than Vienna. All the buildings in Vienna seem to be the same uniform shade of white plaster, and while it's got architectural beauty galore, Vienna seems to be a bit more severe in it's style. (On another not, "style" looks very odd to me now, because I'm used to seeing it spelled "Stil" and thinking that same thoughts about it.)

Milan was WARM. This was a thing I've missed in Vienna, where they are having a very cold and rainy fall by their standards.

I saw a number of things in Milan that were quite simply gorgeous. The Milan Central Train station is a architectural mish-mash, but absolutely beautiful. Mosaics seemed to be everywhere- all residential buildings surrounded a gated courtyard, which could be glimpsed through the main doorway to the building (always at least ten feet tall), and the main hallways had a variety of mosaic styles. It seemed to be a very quick way of gauging the price of the apartments- the fancier and more colorful the mosaic, and the more green the inner garden, the most costly the place would be. Smadar's was fairly simple, but colorful.

The Duomo in Milan was beautiful and made me feel very at home. We visited it on the first day I was there, which was a Sunday, and there was a sparsely attended service going on. The cathedral is Gothic in style, and it felt like walking into a sequoia forest- the pillars holding up the structure inside are only carved at about forty feet up, so the bases of the pillars look like something out of Tolkien. I walked in, feeling weird and out of place and very, very foreign, and suddenly it was all gone. There was myrrh in the air and the choir started chanting, and it all seemed to fade away into the service. I don't think Smadar felt the same way, since she's Jewish and it was sort of a cultural experience for her rather than actual worship, but I felt like I'd just come home. We didn't stay too long, since the service was in Italian and Latin, and tourists weren't supposed to be there anyways. I wish I'd gone back, but I suppose I'll just have to find myself some cathedral around Vienna to satisfy my Cathedral-lust.

Wikipedia has a little snippet from Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad that sums up my feelings rather nicely

"What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems ...a delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath!... The central one of its five great doors is bordered with a bas-relief of birds and fruits and beasts and insects, which have been so ingeniously carved out of the marble that they seem like living creatures-- and the figures are so numerous and the design so complex, that one might study it a week without exhausting its interest...everywhere that a niche or a perch can be found about the enormous building, from summit to base, there is a marble statue, and every statue is a study in itself...Away above, on the lofty roof, rank on rank of carved and fretted spires spring high in the air, and through their rich tracery one sees the sky beyond. ... (Up on) the roof...springing from its broad marble flagstones, were the long files of spires, looking very tall close at hand, but diminishing in the distance...We could see, now, that the statue on the top of each was the size of a large man, though they all looked like dolls from the street... They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. Peter's at Rome. I cannot understand how it can be second to anything made by human hands."

And for all it's loveliness, the Duomo still inspires in me a mix of awe and shame. While Christian Milan struggled for centuries to finance the building of its massive Gothic cathedral, hidden under white plaster somewhere along my street is the remains of a little synagogue in the Gothic style that was pulled down in the Anschluß. We get our great Cathedrals and monuments, but we can't let a little synagogue stand?

Comments

[thelauderdale.livejournal.com]

I was a child in Vienna for a few years. My memories aren't particularly place-specific, though - I remember things like the duck stickers on the coat peg at my preschool, or the worm I picked up going home, or sandbox politics in the compound where I lived. It'd be interesting to go back and see it with different eyes.