Seeing in the Rain

(This blog appeared as a travel piece in a Florentine English language magazine called, aptly enough, The Florentine on February 8, 2007. I thought I might reproduce it here as a change of pace.)


The best thing about Bagni di Lucca, northeast of Lucca, is not what it is but what it recalls. Stare into the vapors rising from the 120-degree hot springs and you will see images of another epoch: Byron and Shelley taking the waters and then writing home to urge Tennyson to do likewise, German poet Heinrich Heine and Irish novelist Charles Lever feeding their muses and perhaps their metabolisms. This spa town above the rushing river Serchio is worth a walk around. Once you cross its Ponte a Serraglio, you’ll be on the road up to another slower, mistier, mossier world of sulphur fumes and sleepy hollows. It was November when my friends and I were there. One of the springs was closed for the season. Hardly anyone was around. We had the road to Bagni Caldi and the adjacent Stabilimento Jean Varraud all to ourselves–ourselves and a black cat that stalked us long enough to be bored by our company and seek excitement elsewhere in a bit of string.

Near the top of the hill is the early-20th-century Stabilimento Jean Varraud, a labyrinth of steam baths, massage rooms, exfoliation chambers and swimming pools. We crept in unannounced and fully clothed and somehow managed to explore the establishment thoroughly, ignored by chunky men in terrycloth robes and flip-flops who passed by like wraiths before they disappeared behind unmarked doors, leaving in their wake a puff of sulfur. We felt like Dante exploring Purgatory.

More evocative even than the Stabilimento’s springs or its long history of ‘taking the waters’ is its casino, now a preserved room filled with gaming tables, where clients came to relieve the tedium of sitting in the grotta a vapore and afterwards lying face-down in a white sheet and an uncomfortable blanket, breathing in. One table, covered with images of cards, is monogrammed with the name Caribbean Spud–which sounds more like a potato than a card game. The walls of the casino have been scraped to reveal layers of yesterdays. It is a ghostly room, well suited to the bath-robed spirits that flit from bath to bed without saying so much as a buongiorno.

Fifteen kilometers away is the town the guidebooks say is the prettiest town in the Garfagnana. They’ll get no argument from me. Barga is a movie set of steep, dark streets lined with houses whose earth-colored walls in quiet pinks, gentle browns and compliant grays, suggest they haven't been constructed so much as grown from the hillside. I say all this having seen Barga in a pouring rain.

If ever a town had its head in the clouds, it’s Barga. The day was gray when we arrived, grayer when we stopped for lunch in a fine little restaurant just inside the city walls, and after linguine al tartufo and a defensible local wine, pouring rain. The 12th-century Duomo, perched at the very top of the town, is the jewel in Barga's crown. We marched Duomo-ward, never minding that the rain came harder with each step, and wave after wave of water washed down the tilted streets under our feet. The piazza in front of the Duomo could have afforded a stunning view of the Garafagnana landscape. But as we looked into a gray mist in tutti direzione, it was as if the Duomo were floating in a cloudy sea.

Inside, a few euros in a coin box illuminated a 15-foot-high marble pulpit sitting on columns supported by a pair of patient lions. Above the altar was an imposing 12th-century, multi-colored wood carving of St. Christopher, with the Christ child portrayed as a miniature king, crown and all, sitting up properly on his shoulder. In the chapel to the right is a pair of Della Robbias worth the walk in the rain. In the chapel to the left are two ordinary paintings, one to the Glory of the Madonna by the school of Simone Pignoni and one a grisly beheading scene of St. John the Baptist by Baccio Ciarpi, and the walk-away best in the show, a crucifixion by an unknown maestro of Barga hung inconspicuously on the chapel wall. (I’ve always been a pushover for unknown masters.) The walk back down the paved hillside was slick. We stepped carefully to avoid losing our footing. Every now and then we would stop and stare upward at a corner of the town where the roofs cut into the sky to make a collage of tile and gutter spouts. When a town begins to paint its own pictures, you know you're in a special place. See Barga whatever the weather, but make a special effort to see it in the rain.

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Can't See the Forest for the Cerebrum

New Zealand makes me think of the iffy relationship between the Earth and the things that live on it. Maybe that’s because New Zealand is so isolated, a smaller version of the world subject to the strains of life run amok, but seen more clearly because seen more simply. Take the extinction of the Stephens Island wren, a rare flightless bird erased from the book of life by the beginning of the twentieth century. What did it in? Rats brought to the island by the Maoris and finally, feral cats, when the bird made its futile attempt to escape by floating across the three kilometer isthmus between Stephen’s Island and the South Island mainland. Being flightless, it must have floated across on rafts of sea grass.

Habitat alteration by homo sapiens and species introduction, again by homo sapiens, are implicated in over half the cases of species extinction in recorded history. New Zealand is currently home to 7,000,000 possums. They were introduced from Australia over a century ago. They consume over 20,000 tons of forest foliage every day. It’s getting to be a case of them, the possums or the Kiwis. Noah's ark no longer applies.

I think it is useful to step back a bit and, as Joan Rivers, the comedienne says, "Take a look at ourselves." When the New Zealanders clear-cut the Cameron Rise of its orange roughy, a tasty fish now on the same road to extinction as the Stephens wren, they were merely behaving like all good mammals do. Take as much as you can get and devil take the hindmost. You don’t see a pride of lions practicing animal husbandry. The New Zealanders are doing what they can to control overfishing. Time will tell. But the fishermen and their customers are just like those feral cats. And no one likes governmental regulation.

Nature, like the army, doesn't give a damn about compassion. So why shouldn’t we pillage, rape and ravage just the way the chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans do? Well, one answer is that if we do, we’re in serious danger of terminating ourselves. We are not above the eco-system. We are part of it just like that Stephens' Island Wren and the feral cats. This is hard for most of us to swallow. Our highly developed cerebrum has allowed us to conceive of ourselves as outside the eco-system, as if we were in it but not of it. It just isn’t true. Whatever we do to the Earth we do to ourselves. It’s hard to see that simple truth. The cerebrum gets in the way.

I don’t know why. But it seems easier to see that in New Zealand.

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Tit for Tat

When it comes to sheep farming, it is hard to beat the New Zealanders. For every million New Zealanders there are nine million sheep. A few months before I came to New Zealand the pages of its newspapers were filled with stories about a wonder sheep. His name was Shrek. He was a merino clever enough to have eluded his shepherds for six years. When he was finally re-captured, he was sporting a cloak of wool that looked like the train on Grace Kelly's wedding dress. When Shrek was shorn, the wool harvest weighed over 60 pounds, enough to make suits for twenty hefty men.

The New Zealanders pay for their success. They are the butt of Australian jokes.

Q. How does a New Zealander find a sheep in the wilderness?
A. Exquisite.

The New Zealanders give tit for tat.

Q. How did it happen that only the finest citizens immigrated to Australia?
A. Each one was vetted by a judge.

The rivalry between Australia and New Zealand is a teasing and taunting rivalry, a thoroughly masculine affair. Each nation tries to out-macho the other. Why? Probably because each nationality is a bit envious of the other's origins. The New Zealanders would have welcomed a bit of larceny in their progenitors, the Australians a bit of respectability.

It is instructive to look at the history of Australia and New Zealand from the point of view of larceny vs. respectability. Australia was founded by criminals who couldn't tell a sheep if it jumped up and bit them. In the first five years of their existence they nearly starved to death. New Zealand, on the other hand, was populated by skilled labor. The lists of New Zealand settlers are dotted with trades like barber, farmer, baker, doctor. This was a country founded by people who knew what they were doing and how to go about it.

Some 150 years later look at the results. There is nothing in New Zealand, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter, to match the Sydney Opera House. On the other hand, there is nothing anywhere else in the world to match New Zealand's decency as a government toward its citizens. Health care is considered a right, not a privilege. Lawsuits for human activities susceptible to error, like driving a car, are forbidden. Firearms are illegal. All this has produced about as stress-free a society as it is possible to have in the developed world.

What is the take home? Apparently, whether you know how to slaughter a sheep or garrote a toff, it doesn’t matter if you are thrown onto a frontier 10,000 miles from home and told to live or else.

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