There is no bore quite so boring as a ‘look where I’ve just been on holiday’ bore. But indulge me, this once. You see, my folks want to see some holiday pictures and it’s easier to put them here. And if you make it to the end, there’s a bit of a treat for the hortics amongst you. 

I keep the whole of November clear in my diary two years in advance, lest I accidentally accept a booking to give a talk in a small church hall somewhere on the Welsh borders and find that my opportunity to grab Dave by the collar and march him onto a plane somewhere warmer has slipped through my fingers. Such failures of timing in earlier years have led to our precious November break becoming a bracing four days in a near-hurricane on the Llyn Peninsula and a short and chilly stay in Christchurch. Dorset that is, of course, not New Zealand. 

This year, lured by the happy accident of a short conference in northern Italy, we slotted in two days in Venice and a week in Sicily.  On the plane I re-read (again) my dog-eared, 25 year old paperback copy of Jeanette Winterson’s ‘The Passion’, by way of arriving before we got there.

‘There is a city surrounded by water with watery alleys that do for streets and silted up back ways that only the rats can cross…. This is the city of mazes. You may set off from the same place to the same place every day and never go by the same route.  In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. For lovers, a bridge is a possibility… Trust me, I’m telling you stories…’.

Lovers’ padlocks on the Ponte dell’Accadamia. 

There, I’ve nothing much to add. Venice is like nowhere else on earth. How have I made it into my sixth decade before exploring its shimmering waterways ? I didn’t know there are no roads at all on the island. I didn’t know that if we got off the Vaporetto at the wrong stop we’d be bumping our suitcases for a mile over a dozen exquisite little bridges in the half dark. I didn’t know it would be all but silent at night, but for the occasional Doppler-esque ebb and flow of footsteps on the pavement outside.


I was pretty sure it would be heart-breakingingly beautiful and I thought I would be immune to its over-hyped charms. 

But everywhere you look, warm hues of ochre, paprika and terracotta rise impossibly out of its slender, silently green canals.

Down every back alley every vista captures a moment so layered, so textured, so rich in stories that each one could spawn a poem, a novel, an epic.

As you can probably tell. I liked it a lot. I loved it. Ever such a lot. I can’t wait to go back. 







Sourced from:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Tizian_041.jpg



All the guidebooks point you to the churches and museums for the soaring artworks of course, and it would have been rude not to visit a few. Yes, I know, you’ve seen them all before, those overblown paintings by some or other grand master, surrounded by chubby cherubs. All much of a muchness, no? 

But when your guide book describes it thus, ‘Is it hot in here or is it just Titian’s 1518 Madonna of the Assumption? This smouldering masterpiece… (captures) the moment the Madonna escapes this mortal coil and reaches heavenward, her signature Titian red robe in glorious disarray… that pale wrist revealed by a slipping sleeve has been known to get priests too hot and bothered to pray.’ (Lonely Planet,  Venice Encounter) the painting takes on a whole new life. And if you look closely you can clearly see that she is indeed showing about half an inch of her left wrist and both of her finely turned ankles are quite shockingly exposed.






Image reproduced from
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/giovanni-bellini/frari-triptych-1488

Impressive though she is, all ablaze in her crimson finery, it was Bellini’s restrained Madonna with Saints in the next alcove that caught my breath. Apparently the Italian Renaissance painters had recently discovered perspective and Bellini was playing with it. No matter how hard you try to ignore the optical illusion, this beautiful painting, completed in 1488 still looks like a relief sculpture, rather than a flat board. 


I stood in front of another of Bellini’s Madonnas in the Acadamia Gallery; the same deep blue robe, the same translucent veil around the Madonna’s porcelain face. Six inches and a thin pane of glass between my eyes and the 500 year old brushstrokes of an absolute masterpiece. No ropes, no pushing, no conveyor belt to whiz you past faster than you can take it in. It will be a hard experience to beat. I know nothing at all about art. But when I can feel my heart beat pounding slowly against the inside of my ribcage I know I’m looking at something very special indeed.

And so to Ortygia in Sicily, the fortress island next to the ancient city of Syracuse. Just up the street from our flat, the vast Duomo is slotted into the still standing, mighty columns of a 2500 year old  Greek temple. We placed our hands on their eternal, soaring bulk, pressed our soft 21st century fingers into the tool marks made by the stonemasons who carved it. It seems everyone has layered their worlds on this little dot of land at the southern tip of Sicily from the Greeks in 500BC to Britain in 1815. 

This delicate carving, plainly of a woman’s legs draped in a fine fabric, lies amid ruins of a neglected Roman temple, next to the railway, squashed between a car mechanic workshop and a kitchen installer. A group of workmen were packing up their strimmers, otherwise it would surely have been buried in the long grass. 

The distant past is concertinaed in front of your eyes here. Faced with the physical evidence of so much time, so many stories played out in the rise and fall of great civilisations in this one small square mile of land, you quickly recognise that you barely exist at all. 

That’s the point of work, of course. It puts paid to all this holiday induced philosophical nonsense. 




Mostly, we went there for the food.

The daily street market, two minutes from our door was piled intoxicatingly high with the plumpest white fennel, the greenest spinach, the reddest tomatoes. Everything, except the baccata (salt cod from Norway – it’s a historic thing) is Sicilian. Everything is field-fresh, unwashed, not packaged, not chilled and in season. 
It dawned on us towards the end of our week that we hadn’t seen a single obviously overweight Italian. Maybe there’s a connection. Maybe not. 

We struggled to find that most famous of Sicilian produce – lemons. They are only just coming into season here and why would they sell an Israeli lemon when they can wait a week or three for their own?


The fish stalls were astonishing – we failed to identify most of them and they were so fresh it was hard to believe they were dead. Their bright eyes gazed up at us, clearly pleading to be thrown back into the sea.

So, that will do for travel, culture and food. In the grounds of yet another church I spotted this. My horticulturalist’s instincts couldn’t help but take a closer look. 

An interesting looking tree from a distance, but up close – is that the bark of a tree or the spiny skin of a dinosaur? 


Turns out it’s Ceiba speciosa, with thanks to David Shaw aka @rudebotanical for the ident. 










Finally – till next time when we may get to climb Mount Etna. Dave took this picture out of the car window on our way to Catania airport – it’s as close as we got. She’s smoking gently, innocently, but dangerously enough for our plane to give her a very wide berth indeed. 


Two days after we got back she erupted, spilling lava down her flanks and blowing smoke rings, sultry, scary, charismatic creature that she is. History has it that in 488BC Empedocles jumped into the centre of the crater to prove that her gases would hold him up. I won’t be trying that one. 

November 20, 2013