Worm Sighing

Well, I’m back. Always after a long trip there’s that strange surreality to every familiar sight and sound. Everything ought to have changed, but is in fact stubbornly identical to how you left it. The disappointment- if it’s not just a cover for relief at stability- is not because you expected the world to turn in your absence, but rather because you would’ve hoped that travel would have changed you. You pray that the distances covered will have altered your prespective.

In the real world, of course, it doesn’t work that way. As versatile and adaptable as humans are, their reactions to travel seem to indicate that they are also curiously unyielding to external stimulus after a certain point. The external vision can become nothing more than an extention of that which we expected to find, a projection, or a filtered version of the input we actually received, eliminating those parts of the spectrum that some unconscious process decided was unworthy.

But surely there is something that I have brought home with me? I have read nothing, in my absence, in fiction, science or research, except material that emphasised the extent to which we are constructed beings, nurtured and constantly changing. So how have I- or at least my understandings- changed?

I was thinking- how can I tie this story off? All the way home, through north France, under the Channel, blasting through the suburbs of London. Do I, after these travels, have anything even approximating a conclusion to offer? Has my journey actually changed my understanding, or my self, in any way? Or has this whole thing just been an exercise in shallow tourism?

Why, in short, did I go?

Maybe I’ll get back to you on that one.

But here’s an outline of what I have learnt:

1. The easiest distinction to be made in continental Europe is not between East and West, but between the Mediterranean nations and everywhere else. East to West, particularly with the reach of the modern EU, the main distinctions can be drawn from economic differences, rather than massive variations in national temperament. If the EU does its job, and the economies of the poorer nations are raised to match those of France and Germany, then a survey of the entire Union will seem more than anything else like a trip across the United States of America. Each individual state shall have its own traditions, certainly, and its own demographic mix of religions and races, and wildly varying climates. But, as in America, these differences shall surely become ever more historical. The Euro Zone will encompass every member-state, in time. The similarities between countries will massively outweigh the differences, as is already true in any of the major cities I have visited.
2. This homogenising effect is not entirely negative- at least, not in the way that the Daily Mail would have us believe. Historically speaking, the continent of Europe has veered constantly between political super-union and massive interstate fragmentation. The fragmentation has rarely been along ‘logical’ cultural or geographic lines, and the formation of individual nation-states has barely ever been representative of a re-assertion of some historical imperative- at least, not beyond the realms of propaganda. The world to come - surely a multi-polar one - will be one that holds far more respect, economically and politically, for strong unions than for smaller independent states.
3. To fulfil this, its strongest reason for existence, the EU needs to reorganise. The prevention of war is no longer the resounding and universally convincing reason for its existance as it once was, and simple economic common sense is not sexy enough to make the Union popular. But in its role as a strengthener and a bringer of equality and opportunity, the EU could find again the support that it has lost so conclusively in recent years. To accompany this reorientation, the actual work of the Union should be focussed upon the strengthening and economic reconstruction of the Eastern states. Romania and Bulgaria are, in many ways, still desperately poor nations: I have seen this first-hand. The EU shall always be failing as long as the French farmers are put ahead of the peasantry in the former-Soviet member states.
4. Turkey’s acceptance in a newly refocussed EU is almost inevitable. The Union will at that point cease to be ‘European’, so perhaps a rebranding would be in order. Culturally, religiously and geographically, the European buck stops just east and south of Istanbul. This should not be decried, nor should it be a point of contention. Turkey’s efforts to continue to see functional Islamism working as part of a real Democracy is only the beginning of its uniqueness, a uniqueness that ought to be celebrated. But Turkey is still ‘behind’ Europe in many ways: a young nation, as I was reminded when I was there. Just today, the whole of the blog site that hosts my own little effort was blocked by Turkey altogether, over a few blogs that insulted a single individual there. Turkey must learn to respect freedom of speech, whether it is about the Kurds, a beration of Ataturk, or an accusation of genocide against the Armenian people, or something else entirely. The best way to ensure this progress is through Turkey’s EU candidacy. I am here only repeating the sentiments and theories of a friend who has said this to me many times. Only after visiting am I absolutely certain that he is correct in this.
5. Okay, enough politics: In Eastern Europe, it’s amazing how quickly get sick of eating stuff with paprika all over it.
6. History is behind glass and ropes in Germany and France, but used to eat lunch off in Italy and other countries.
7. The best cafe in the world (that I’ve been in so far) is in Prague. Other than this, Prague is a bit like Paris, only less. Less everything.
8. Budapest is the best city I’ve ever been to (apart from London, of course!)
9. Bucharest is not the Paris of the East. It is the Bangkok of the West.
10. Best glass of white wine: Local Pinot Grigio, Verona. Best glass of red wine: A Burgundy Gamay rouge.
11. As baffling as it is to believe that the people of Italy can have had such a decisive and regular effect on the course of history, it simply must have to do with their women. Italian women are magnificent, determined, stubborn, hard-working, tough and ambitious. Behind every great Roman or Renaissance hero there must have been a very, very Italian woman.
12. Men on the continent are a lot more… modern than those in Britain. They are coiffed, well-presented, slim, fit, smart and so on. Vanity, all is vanity. I never felt more than scruffy in their presence, though Germany felt a little closer to home.
13. In fact, more than any other nation in the world, Britain is similar to Germany.
14. And finally the environmental bit. I am delighted to report that I return from my voyage considerably happier about the state of the European eco-systems and natural environs. The sheer magnitude of the wild spaces and wildernesses in Turkey and Eastern Europe is hard to get across adequately. My trip north through France was practically unobstructed by human development. Forests prevail across Bavaria. The mountains in Austria remain, for the most part, bare and raw. This continent is vast, and despite thousands of years of human activity, use and abuse, it remains primarily as beautiful as ever it did. If one specific country flashed an environmental warning in my head, it would be Italy. But let’s not linger on that.

 And, after all that, we come to the end. I have travelled 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles). I have walked through forests and beaches, arid almost-deserts and cities. I have seen the ruins of Greeks and the monoliths of Ottomans, slept in soviet-era sleeper trains, compared some of the greatest capitals in the world.

There’s no place like home, though. Good to be back.

Thanks for reading.

It’s incredibly apt that Paris is my final stop before home.

Paris, after all, is an apotheosis of the West, and of ‘Westerliness’, if you don’t mind me throwing ugly compound words around. As this trip has been a geographic and cultural progression from East to West, it makes excellent sense that we should finish here. And if Britain is the logical extent, the historic check and balance on Europe’s Western frontier (mirroring Russia in the East), then Paris is surely the last great city before the Atlantic. Here is the great civilised boundary of the Old World, the Great Powers (as once we knew them)- if not strictly speaking geographically, then certainly psychologically.

For France is also at the very heart of this Western hegemony, the heartland (for now) of Europe’s most pertinent international avatar, the EU. It spans from the edge of the North Sea and the British Channel south, to the Gulf of Lions and the mediterranean. It is a hub, a crossroads, a geographically vast and politically powerful state, linking Iberia with Italy and Germany with Britain.

And, for the most part, it’s just not terribly friendly.

I’ve mentioned this already, but I feel it bears repeating: Paris, for me, has shown the very best side of the French character. I have made more friends here in the last few days than in the rest of my trip combined. And I’m aware that I appear to be an exception; indeed, many outsiders feel that Parisians are snooty, haughty, perhaps less legitimately ‘French’ than those who live outside the Ile de France. I cannot help but disagree.

Upon my arrival on Tuesday, after an amazingly rapid ride on the TGV, I dashed about in the Metro system for half an hour (in itself not very hard work- It’s hard to get lost in this city) and finally surfaced in Louise Michel, the North-Western corner of the city where my little hotel is located. This is roughly equivalent to visiting London for the very first time, rummaging about on the Tube for a while and then finally pushing your head above ground for the very first time at Tottenham Hale. At night.

Actually, daylight demonstrated that I was sleeping in a rather nice little area. It wasn’t even describable as a true suburb- but a gentrified area with tall townhouses and trees with a vibrant edge. It felt as though it had originally been a very nice, village-like location, had briefly become ugly and perhaps dangerous, and had since been returned to something approximating its former state. The dog-crap remained, however: Paris’ famous dog droppings are more or less absent from the beautiful centre these days, but clearly linger on the fringes.

This is probably on account of all the dogs. Parisians love their dogs with a fervour greater than even the Germans. This is interesting because the dogs themselves are correspondingly smaller, as if there is an inverted correlation between a dog’s size and how much it is treated like Royalty. Actually, scratch that: we’ve seen how the French treat royals.

Speaking of which, I found Versailles to be difficult to stomach. Such is the magnitude of the place, the opulence of its interiors and extent of its grounds, that I could never once erase from my mind the image of the local peasantry, labouring every day in such a delightfully porticoed shadow. The chambers themselves actually had something of the air of a series of ever-more-florid bank lobbies. I tried to derive a bit of pleasure from imagining Marie Antoinette’s inbred, milk-bathed features transform into fury having to watch the hordes of today’s uncouth middle-class tourists wander about her lawns and bedchambers.

Other landmarks were more than satisfactory. The Eiffel Tower, though voted today by the Guardian’s readership as one of the world’s most disappointing wonders, actually struck me dumb. Used to seeing it on a television screen or postcard, the sheer size of the thing made me gape. Also, I came at night, and the romance of that must have made a huge difference.

Paris is wonderful, very like a more carefully presented (though perhaps more unreal) counterpart of London. I shall be sorry to leave it, but that’s just the way a trip like this ought to end, don’t you think?

Tomorrow, faithful readers, the conclusion.

Paris is a wonderful city.

There, I said it. There may be those among you, dear readership, who will cock a condescending eyebrow at the opinion stated above. For, it has to be said, in my more… British… moments, I have been known to indulge in a little mild Francophobia (not that I’m frightened of the bastards). As an Englishman is wont to do.

And let’s look at why, shall we? Get it out of the way? Clear the air, absolve the cliche? Why don’t the British and the French get along?
Historically, we are dire nemeses, far worse adversaries than the Germans and the Brits. We have fought strings of wars over centuries, invaded each other, manipulated each others’ politics by subterfuge, raced each other for colonies, engaged and skirmished on land and sea.

Things the British don’t like about the French: The fact that they’re un petit peux hoighty toighty (for god’s sake, I don’t even know if that’s spelt right), their industrial laziness and subsequent economic protectionism, their use of supernational organisations to dominate other nations economically or politically, their sale of arms to Argentina, their continued tests of nuclear weaponry, their cruelty to some farmed livestock, their propensity for eating just about anything that moves, their diabolically intensive farming in the north, the way they insult British food. There’s probably quite a lot more to add to that list.

Things that the French probably don’t like about the British (I’m making a few assumptions here, as I’m not French): British military arrogance, (relatively) awful culinary tradition, Americaphilia, the gradual replacement of French with English as the lingua franca, the (again relative) lack of refinement among Brits.

Add to this a completely different set of social models. For where the British are multiculturalists, the French are assimilationists; when the British employ liberal values, the French make use of socialist ones; Britain is actively interventionist, France is strongly pacifist.

But, what, ultimately, as in the laws of magnetism, is the prevailing rift between these two peoples?

I’ll tell you right now. They’re practically identical. And being too similar, they repel each other. Being close and sharing so much, if viewed or articulated from a subtly different aspect, is too painful. Just as every classroom can only have one it-girl and one clown.

Now here’s what’s surprising me. My efforts to immerse myself ahead and during this visit to Paris have involved reading translations of some great French novels, namely Madame Bovary and Old Goriot.  And, though I’m sure this will be news to none of you, the thing about the French literary giants is that they rather enjoy attacking their own country. Both of those works make no effort to conceal their attacks on the Beourgeois character of that Era of France, prior to the so-called Belle Epoch. But we must note that it is the stub aristocracy and crushingly trivial merchant class that is so ardently assaulted by Honore de Balzac and the hopeless emergent-middle-class romantic aspirationism depicted by Flaubert that is principly the foundation of the capital that I walk through today.

For it was during this era and after it that what we recognise today as Paris actually emerged, specifically under the guidance of Napoleon III. Combined with the relics of the most (and yet least) successful popular/bourgeois revolution in history, the architectural triumphalism of the original Bonaparte, and the remaining lower-class residences that still lurk to either side of Monmartre, and the newer, uglier, increasingly ghettoised suburbs, we have the constituent elements of Paris. It is a portrait of a historical and social progression in the media of marble, stone and concrete.

So despite being set up for a fall, for a Paris that I could not love after the derision of some of its greatest inhabitants, it is something of a surprise that I love it as much as I do.

A lot of this is down to the Parisians themselves. Never mind the common external assumption that they are rude or dismissive. The Parisians I have had the pleasure of talking to have been funny, polite, accommodating and wry. They embrace automatically the kind of mild appreciation for the absurd that we recognise internationally as the best of French humour. They are well-educated, pessimistic in a light-hearted way, expressive and relaxed. I have actually had more conversation here than at any other stopping-point during my trip, though this may also be down to the fact that I am marginally better at French than I am at German or Italian.

So, strangely enough, I like Paris better than provincial France, where the farmers hold sway and the xenophobia takes hold (in the South, the Gallic temperament also seems conducive to a level of seediness that I cannot really enjoy). Moreover, I like Paris better than almost every other city that I have ever visited. And I’ve actually visited quite a few, now.

At around 9 this morning (local time) I left Italy at last, and entered France (zipping through Monaco along the way).

Italy: non basta una vita. I shall have to return. My final farewell took place in Padova, a large city on the main Northern-Italian train and road routes. I was initially unimpressed; there was evidence of urban decay and severe ghettoisation on the outskirts, where the train station sat. My arrival also coincided with the arrival of a significant storm cloud, which admittedly blew over quickly enough. I had eight hours to kill before my next train, so I stowed my backpack and wandered into town.

The sky cleared, leaving a hot, intensely sunny day in the city- and very muggy. It’s the humidity that gets you, in the end. I also wonder if there’s such a thing as an ugly Italian city centre. There’s always this laid back, comfortable warren of ancient alleyways, a smattering of historical sites; always a grand avenue or two, a dramatically modelled fountain.

As I mentioned before, it strikes me that Italians are comfortable with their past- they are tactile with it, they live in and around it, use it and maintain it. It seems that the idea that I grew up with- of segregation from history, of reverence and conservation, of maintaining things as they were, is Anglo-Germanic in origin. I shall be interested to find out where France sits on this divide.

Meanwhile the mediterranean countries that I have visited seem less interested in conservation and more in comfort. I have no intention of casting a value judgement of my own over any of this. As a student of history, I find it interesting that these outlooks should be so innate and so different. Maintenance- even recreation- of the past dominates where I come from. In Italy, beyond the tourism board profit margins, people are more than happy to run their hands over 600 year old sculptures, built shops and public toilets into Roman and Renaissance monuments. Even their religion has no qualms over massively renovating and ‘updating’ a truly ancient cathedral.

There are ups and downs, of course. But if we assume that it is impossible to attain a historical truth, then the Mediterranean way almost seems sensible. There is no delineation between past and present, not in the same way as in Britain, which is now undergoing a bit of an identity crisis for this very reason. The history of Italy is a continuum, a flow of events which run to and encompass the present day, built not on ruins, but into the remains of, each previous era. A great deal must be lost, but something else gained: A sense of identity.

These implicit differences between Mediterranean Europe (in which, like the Economist, I feel inclined to include Turkey- or at least Istanbul) and Gallic or Germanic or ‘Northern’ Europe - perhaps the best phrase here is a nice vague Ottoman one: Frankish Europe- fascinate me. Monsieur Sarkozy, here in France, is renewing interest in a kind of ‘Mediterranean Union’; a trading bloc with diplomatic ties as well. Think of the earliest roots of the EU and you might see something close. This union would incororate parts of North Africa (perhaps even a well-behaved Libya), southern Europe, France (which is geographically perhaps the oddest candidate) and even some Middle Eastern states.

I suspect I’ll have more to write later about what I feel about the EU now that I’ve spent so much time within its continental borders. But the MU? that’s an idea I can get behind.

I write this from Nice. The train journey through Northern Italy was pleasant enough. I shared a compartment with a nice young couple of Parisian history teachers enjoying their holiday. I am even starting to remember some of my old GCSE French.

The railway ran right on top of the coast, which was a wonderful site to wake up to. At a certain time in the morning, before the night clouds have been scorched away by the sun, the whole world looks like silver here.

Now my thoughts turn north. Paris awaits. And astonishingly, one of the longest single journeys of this trip will be accomplished in just a few hours. The French TGV is an astonishing achievement. I’ve never been on a bullet train before. I may never be able to sit down in a First Capital Connect Wagn again.

I returned to my little room in Ferrara. Ferrara, Italy. I knew from the moment that I opened the door that something wasn’t right. It was quiet.

It’s quiet, I thought, adding: Too quiet.

Because it was. It was too quiet.

I stepped into the room, depositing my bag on my bed with a sneer.

A flicker of movement in the shadows beside the wardrobe! I dropped instinctively into defensive stance Gamma, otherwise known as ‘the wrathful llama’.

Thus did my war against the Bugs begin. They came in the night, squadrons of them. They came to secretly deprive me of my precious bodily fluids. This could not be allowed to continue.

Imagine them, if you can: like the alien menace out of Starship Troopers. Or, indeed, the alien menace out of Alien, Aliens, or Alien Resurrection (which, by the way, was penned by Joss Whedon. Bet you didn’t know that). Not Alien 3. I hated that one. Like one of those insectile creatures, only tiny: practically a nano-beast, only a little bit bigger. Normal people probably couldn’t see them at all. Luckily, I have 21-21 eyesight.

I woke after that first night in something like a cold sweat (it was hot). And then the pain registered: the thousand tiny bites, the swelling, on my arms, my legs, my back, my neck, my arse. Bastards, I thought. Nobody touches my arse.

I sprang from my bed. There they were, on the wall, bloated with my blood, complacent. Nobody before had resisted them. Nobody before had drawn the line against their evil. But I would not go quietly into that night. I would live on. Today was the day that mankind fought back. Today was my Independence from Mosquitos Day.

The nearest creature didn’t have time to react as I instantly splattered him with a roundhouse-kick. His companion was more wily: smaller, lighter. He banked like a spitfire as he came away from the wall, dodging my karate chop and specialised ‘clap of death’. The creature dived out of view. And then I heard a sound.

That horrifying high-pitched whine… it shall haunt my dreams forever. Normally, the creatures are utterly silent. In Malaysia, they know the mosquito as ‘the nonexistant irritation’. Don’t be confused: there are loads of mosquitos in Malaysia. I know, I’ve been there. They say that they’re nonexistant because they’re so silent. The bugs, not the Malaysians. They’re loud.

So when you hear the bugs before you see them, it can only mean one of two things. Either it’s a centimetre away from your ear, or there are a lot of them.

I turned, slowly. There were a lot of them, only a centimetre away from my ear.

I parried the first wave, back-flipped onto the bed, but they were already on top of me again. One dived for my wrist, and I brought my other arm around like a viper, undercutting the creature and letting the laws of aerodynamics do my work for me. Caught in the slipstream of my lightning-limb, the tiny creature, clearly baffled, plummetted toward the ground. Before it could recover, I smashed it with my heel, pirhouetting to ward off the rest of the swarm.

I needed a weapon, that much was clear. I grabbed up yesterday’s T-shirt. “You’re just lucky I wear deodorant,” I quipped, ravelling my makeshift whip and holding it ready.

My first target was a bloody smear, the second evaded me and soared low over my head, forcing me into a slow-motion evasion. The others closed in, all around. There were too many. Every time I whiplashed one into oblivion, ten more took its place. One alighted on my ankle, and I felt the miniscule puncture of its proboscis.

That’s when I got really pissed off.

I kicked up, unseating the minibeast, and then palm-smashed it into the mirror, where it stuck, writhing away the last few seconds of its meaningless life.

“Guess that’s seven years bug luck,” I said.

And then I saw a new weapon. My shoe deodorant spray, and next to it, me left sandal. I dived forward, rolled and grabbed up the weapons of my fathers.

Let me tell you about that shoe deodorant spray. It’s nasty. It comes from the depths of Royston, Hertordshire. Believe me when I tell you that the people there need industrial-strength shoe deodorants. And this one? This one was at the bottom of the ‘discontinued line’ box. It was both anti-bacterial and anti-fungal. I can’t even stay in the same room after spraying that thing, as it would send me into fits of coughs. It propels its spray of nastiness at high pressure, screaming like a steam train.

With my sandal in my left hand and this in my right, I was indestructible. The creatures must have known this; they had disappeared, gone to ground. I decided to address the silence of my room. I knew that had to still be there.

“Listen,” I said, “It doesn’t have to be this way. We can learn to live in harmony, humans and bugs together. You could limit yourself to drinking the blood of rabbits, we could try to inhale a bit less vigorously. There are ways around this.” Nothing. It was clear that I wasn’t getting through.

“You don’t know me, bugs,” I said, “I’ve seen things. I’ve fought scorpions in the jungles of the far east. I’ve obliterated cockroaches, with this very sandal. You know what the spiders call me? They have a name for me. It means ‘the gathering storm’. If you choose to make a fight of this, so be it. But know now: I will end you.”

At that moment, they came at me en-masse. I had rotated slowly in the centre of the small room as I gave my address, and was facing the mirror. I saw the swarm rising behind me like a black cloud. I turned, swept away the vaguard with my sandal, and opened fire.

They dived and rolled. At least a dozen were caught in the blast, too desperate for my blood to think of avoiding my chemical attack. They swerved feebly, blinded or driven instantly insane by the toxins… or both. They were easy.

Two more waves came in, trying to out-flank me. I threw myself backwards, spraying and swinging. A pair of them got too close. I scissor-span away, and came around spraying again. A particularly huge bug, it must have been the Queen, couldn’t get out of the way in time. I followed her erratic flight with pinpoint accuracy, forcing her down with the spray. At the last moment, she seemed to turn. “Curse you, human,” she was clearly saying.

My karate chop finished her. After that, it was just a mopping-up action. One last-ditch assault nearly pushed me off my guard: they penetrated my defensive perimeter, coming within inches of my face, flying with the desperation of a last stand. And in those final moments, as I destroyed them, I realised that, deep down, we were not so different. In the war, I had learnt to respect my enemy, and worse: I had become just like them.

That night, I wept. I wept for the tiny, meaningless souls of the Bugs. And for my own. For I had stared to long into the abyss, and the abyss had stared also into me.

* * *

 So, yes, I’ve finally managed to find a working computer in Italy, as you can tell.

Bologna was beautiful, tall, and austere, in a way. It’s a very red city, and I write that in both a literal and figurative sense. Indeed, it may just be the only city in the world where the political leanings of its inhabitants have been directly affected by its architecture, and not the other way around. An (in?)famous bastion of socialism and communism, Bologna also has that little touch of the south to it, mainly in the easy-going cameraderie of its citizens.

The food, of course, was spectacular. Though the best glass of wine in my life was had in Verona, Bologna’s personal vintage ran a pretty close second. I had a traditional lasagna al ragu, which was perfectly cooked and well salted, by god. You don’t realise just how bland British cooking can be until you go abroad. Embrace the herbs! Embrace the seasoning!

Ferrara has something of Bologna’s atmosphere, but is far smaller and far quieter. Indeed, it can feel a little bit of a ghost town before lunch-time, though this is true to a certain extent of every Italian city. The atmosphere here, however, is truly special. The old medieval quarter is perfectly preserved; you could almost imagine you’ve slipped 500 years back in time, just by turning the right corner. The city also comes complete with its own fairytale castle, loads of frescoes, modest, dark and somehow tasteful churches, and a modern, vibrant feel. There is a complete comfort with the past, here: history is not put behind glass cases or ropes, it is preserved, lived in, maintained.

Some of the real pleasure to be had here is in following the fortunes of the d’Este family through the ages. Each part of the little city represents another effort at urban planning, trying to structure a new kind of capital with each passing generation. Their family tree is a twisted, evil-looking thing, their history replete with all the machiavellian drama you could desire. Every house seems to have its own half-myth in relation to that ancient family.

Future plans have changed, a little: tomorrow evening I get on a sleeper train to France. The following day I will be partaking of the astonishingly fast French TGV, which can take me from Marseille to Paris in just under two and a half hours. I’ll stay put in Paris for the rest of the week, making day-trips from there; so hopefully Versailles and Poitiers will be on the cards. If I’m going to visit Paris for the first time, I might as well do it properly.

More soon. Hopefully.

…it gets very, very slippery. This I now know from first hand experience.

The pavements in Verona, you see, are made from marble. Some parts are stippled, others cracked; some are arranged in a tiled pattern, others as venetian cobbles in a pinky-white sort of way. It’s all very pretty, and a big part of the city’s wonderful colour scheme, if that’s the right word, which is derived from the design and materials of complete (though facade-less) Roman Arena here, which is the second best outside of the Colloseum in Rome. And naturally enough, Verona was made initially successful by its rank as north Italy’s biggest Marble exporter. So why not throw it around the whole town? It’s a wonderful material!

Unfortunately, I’m down to one pair of sandals (I disposed of my trainers, which had been relatively expensive by my standards, in a fit of pique somewhere back in Germany when they started developing significant holes in the souls. Back to the five quid specials for me) and these have absolutely no grip. They had very little to start with, and they have even less now, after a month of clambering all over Europe.

And then the thunderstorms came. I was lucky enough to miss the worst- in Italy, it never rains, but it pours- and congratulated myself on staying cosy with a new book (Orhan Pamuk’s My name is Red). And then I got hungry, and so set off to find a slice of something.

It was a warm evening, of course, so the sidewalks were already starting to dry out. But all the same, the film of water over all that marble massively reduced its friction against my sandals. The end result? I might as well have been ice-skating. For fear of falling into traffic (or just falling) I was hobbling along like an 80-year-old with a spinal injury.

Which was also alright, really, as Italians aren’t the sort to take much notice of other people and are too laid back to comment or make fun anyway. And it was a nice night, so why not take my time? Well, mostly because another storm was on the way.

I tried to escape, I really did. But the marble got even more wet, so that there really was no part of it badly damaged enough for me to take a reasonable, adult step. The rain thundered down and I crawled back to my hostel on the other side of the river while everyone else rushed. Deja vu all the way, of course, after the Prague incident. Nature 2, Simon 0.

I’m writing this from Bologna, which I’m giving myself the day to explore before hopping onto another train for Ferrara. Bologna, the birthplace of mortadella. The birthplace of tortellini (otherwise known as ravioli for people who actually like food). The birthplace of- my God- Lasagne. And, of course, the original home of the Bolognese sauce.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my graceland. My Mecca. Possibly my Everest, depending on how much food I can afford.

It’s calling me already. Write soon.

How does an entire nation continue to operate smoothly without ever, once, ever, EVER putting up road signs?

Of course, I’m exaggerating. The centres of towns, the historic areas, the motorways: these are all signposted. But the path between the bridge and the train station? The two identical-looking pathways that lead, eventually, to completely different and utterly inextricable locales? Well, do you think such roads deserve to have names? If they have names at all, do any but the locals deserve to know what they are? If you don’t already know your way around, do you think you’re worthy to try to begin to?

Gentle readers, I give you Italy.

But let me stress, I absolutely adore this country (or at least those bits of it that I know- in the distant north; and I hope to get to know parts of it much better over the next week).

First of all, we have all the cliches. Here, as nowhere else, are the traditional assumptions of outsiders taken as truths, reworked to reinforce actual truths. The complicated-seeming hillsides, the descent to scrub on the plains, the barely angled red roofs, the parading lines of poplars receding into the distance, and, bent and twisted, lower growths: gnarled olive and massed vine, and sun-flecked saplings, their leaves all tipped with silver, rustling in an adriatic Breeze under goldbrushed subalpine skies.

Look, it’s Italy, I’m allowed to get a bit poetic, alright? And anyway, I think I love the people more than I love the countryside. How can it have been a single people, responsible for events and civilisations so great and so disparate? Moreover, how can it have been these people, these self-conscious, deliberately bored, slow-strolling, preening men, and these women, with their dyed hair and painted nails and massive, delicate handbags?

And yet they did. They changed the course of humanity a dozen times, and they did it all in sandals.

I’ve finally got round to reading the latest Umberto Eco (inspired having relived the brilliant Name of the Rose), and I feel that I can recommend it almost as highly as that other tome. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana deals with recent Italian history as a man tries to (literally) rediscover his past from the (mainly literary) products of each era he has lived through. It’s a really exhilerating piece, and, I feel, far more autobiographical than any of Eco’s earlier works. And, for me, it’s a perfect book to read as I attempt to immerse myself in this corner of North-East Italy.

After all, the Italians had their own, earlier Fascist era, and unlike the Germanic peoples, I find it difficult to put this down to a social precondition of conformation, if you like, to conformity. Here, it is the passion of a people with hot blood that led to atrocity, to the enthronement of Il Duce; more of the sense of desperation to recapture an ancient and lost glory. Of course, in pursuing their Roman dream, Mussolini’s Italians forsook the (some might say greater) dream of their Renaissance and Enlightenment.

My base of operations for the next few days is Verona. Tomorrow I aim to visit Mantua for the day, before heading out to Ferrara the day after that. Ferrara is an excellent location from which I can visit Bologna and Ravenna… and then, it’s farewell to the city-states, and on to France, and the final leg in my journey.

I do not fool myself that any of these Italian cities are going to be without tourists. But each of them (even Verona) falls short of the high-summer insanity that will be reigning right now in Venice, Milan, Florence and Rome. I shall not be off the beaten path, but perhaps off the hammered one.

More when I get to Ferrara, if not sooner.

It’s worth saying, from the outset, that my adventures in Austria thus far haven’t helped me much in the attempt to distinguish it conclusively from Germany, not even in addition to my brief experience in Vienna a few Christmasses ago. Perhaps this is because no true distinguishment is possible. But I cannot help but feel that this is about my own failure to see something, something which must be very clear to others.

After all, there are those who speak similarly of German Switzerland and their ‘Hoch’ (high) German-speaking cousins. Am I only aware of the differences - and the legitimacy of the differences- between Germany and Switzerland due to my own background? Would I not, half-Swiss as I am, be outraged to hear that a little under 70% of my countrymen are lumped in with the largest German-speaking country (primarily by foreigners) simply as a matter of intellectual laziness, as a matter of assuming ‘historical accident’?

We do no such to Britain, a country seperated from Germany by very little linguistically, and perhaps less geographically. And imagine the uproar if someone to dismissed Portugal as an accidental sub-plot of Spain’s great Iberian history.

So, here are the cliches: it is meant to be more right-wing than most of Germany (as, it should be noted, is neighbouring Bavaria); it is meant to have more of an imperialist outlook (a reference to the Hapsburg days. And that, I’m afraid, is more or less it.

Shall we take refuge in facts? One fifth of the country’s population lives in one city, Vienna. The remaining 6.5 million people are primarily rural or suburban; Austria’s other main cities are only about the size of large German towns. So Austrians are simultaneously more urbanite and more provincial than their German counterparts. In comparison to Switzerland, meanwhile, we find in Austria a comparable number of national residents, spread over an area much larger, and similarly riddled with mountains.

What does this tell us? Well, it suggests that Austria is a country of two very distinct parts; the great and sedate Imperial capital of Vienna, and the huge expanses that characterise the rest, populated with rural individuals and residuals of that same Imperial past; after all, Hungarian and Slovene tongues are all officially recognised languages in outlying regions. We tend to characterise Austria as right wing, partly because politically the far-right (centred around Salzburg) tends to do rather well, partly because there was barely any opposition to the establishment of Germanic unification under the Nazis prior to the Second World War. Modern, maintream political stances help to underscore our assumptions in this; Austria is easily the most outspoken opponent of Turkey’s EU candidacy (mind you, if London had been twice beseiged by the Ottomans, I might not feel all that differently!).

But this is a big country, and empty, and filled with people who are culturally and racially products of very different ages and areas, the legacy of empire and Austro-Hungarian alliance. Let us call the Austrians, rather than Rightists, conservatives; conservatives in that they adore their national heritage, and music, and conservationists of their forests, empty valleys and beautiful mountain-ranges (and they are beautiful, as they march past: beautiful and almost impossibly vast). And let’s not forget, it was the Austrian state that imprisoned British historian David Irving for his loud, revisionist Nazi sympathies.

Innsbruck, for whatever reason, I am finding to be far more to my tastes than Salzburg. It is quiet, though more believably city-like at its fringes, with blockish urban arrangements and grotty streetside casinos and questionable club venues. The interior, however, is sleepy and medieval, punctuated by the two inverted brackets of the rivers Inn and Sill, which gush with that specific, fresh alpine blue-green cloudiness. And, best of all, there is no point of the horizon that is not characterised by vast, looming mountains, all absurdly clear, all flouting the laws of perspective so that they seem like a wall: so that Innsbruck feels as though it is situated at the bottom of a stone goblet with a serrated-needle sharp and snow packed rim.

Tomorrow, I leave the German-speaking peoples behind for good, and delve at last into Northern Italy.

As I crossed the border from Germany into Austria, a thick fog descended upon me. And, within minutes, peaks loomed out of the mist, gathering on the horizon on either side of the train. They were varying shades of grey, a surrealist impression of a mountain-range, an illustration on the wall of a one-night cheap hotel.

I was pretty foggy, as well, and the strange mist helped me realise it: foggy about how, exactly, Austria is distinct from Germany. Just how much do they share, culturally, other than a language, and an oft-unified history? I have heard it described as a ‘historical accident’ that these two countries are politically seperate at all. But that sounds a little familiar; Ein Reich, anyone?

Immediate first impressions may count for nothing, but here they are anyway: with the geographical differences comes a psychological difference. People here seem a touch closer to the German Swiss here, in terms of temperament at least. Also like the swiss, they clearly favour the lifestyle of apartment-living; the outskirts of every town we passed through, and Salzburg, the one I stopped in, was filled with blocky, carefully clean apartment buildings.

As a final goodbye to Bavarian Germany, here is a poem that has generously been shared and translated for me. It is by a man called Alfred Mombert, is untitled, and fairly characterises a style that my correspondent describes as ‘Schwaermerei’, or extreme, inspired enthusiasm. My best advice would be for you to read it aloud, even if your German pronounciation isn’t the best. These words, especially before translation, carry an incredible amount of aesthetic appeal: the weight of them, the shape of them. At least I think so; see what you reckon.

Einsames Land! Einsamer Baum darinnen!

Suess ist das Stehn und Sinnen

unter deinen Zweigen.

Aus deinen Wipfeln sinkt es nieder,

das Selig-Daemmernde und Schweigende.

Die Haende stgrecke ich aus, und sie fuellen sich

mit unsichtbaren Blaettern, und ich fuehlte das ganz

im reifgewordenen Herzen.

O Baum, an deinem Stamm, unter deinen Zweigen

ward ich ein blinder Mann, und sammle ein

die Gaben, die aus deinen Wipfeln niedersinken.

Das Herrlichste, es sinkt mir auf das Haupt,

und auf die Schultern, liegt zu meinen Fuessen.

Es verschuettet mich.

Reicht eine Harfe! Das Tief-Ewige

umschauert mich.

Es dringt ein Glanz in eine Nacht.

Das muss die Traene sein, die draussen auf der Schwelle

des Hauses lagert und den Mond anblickt.

Reicht mir die Harfe! Glaenzender war ich nie!

Schlliessd die Pforten auf! oeffnet die Fenster!

Ihr Alle, Alle kommt zum grossen Fest!

…

Lonely land! Lonely tree within it!

Sweet is it to stand and meditate

under your twigs.

From your tips it sinks down,

the Holy-Darkening and Silent.

My hands I stretch out, and they fill

with invisible leaves, and I would feel this completely

In my ripened heart.

O tree, against your stem, under your branches

I became a blind man, and gather in

The gifts that sink down from your tips.

The lordliest (most glorious), sinks onto my head

and onto my shoulders, it lies at my feet.

It engulfs/overthrows me.

Hand me a harp! The Deep-Everlasting

encloses me thrillingly.

A glory presses out into the night.

This must be the tear that rests on the threshold

of the house and contemplates the moon.

Hand me the harp! Never was I more bright/brilliant!

Throw open all the portals! open the windows!

All of you, all, come to the great celebration!

Pretty melodramatic. But such a beautiful language, and so well applied here. It’s easy to detect that very German love (almost worship) of nature, of the forest, in this work; the great cultural history of the Jaeger (hunter). And easy to imagine it springing from the Tolkienesque countryside of Bavaria as well.

A learned friend and ally of mine was quick to point out some thoughts which arose from yesterday’s remarks about the politics of embarrassment. Specifically, he pointed out that in public notice there is the politeness common in English signs, but also the constant application of what he terms the “imperative mood”; so that they imply, again in my friend’s words, both “permission and command”. This, clearly, is something which I would have otherwise missed, Germanically illiterate schweine that I am.

Also in the public comments for yesterday’s post, we have the suggestion that my observation is reinventing the wheel- even more than is usual for me- in that psychologists and sociologists have considered ‘uncomfortableness’ as a possible explanatory factor in German social history for some time. I have requested an expansion on this point.

Good lord, I think there’s something of a… dare I say it?… correspondence society in the offing here!

Here are a few more thoughts around the uncomfortableness thing. It should be stressed that tolerance is a tricky word to apply here. Let us say that, while the threshold of tolerable embarrassment may vary generationally, demographically and regionally; may even be, on the whole, higher than that in the UK; the tolerance of embarrassment-causing behaviours above that threshold is sharply lower, both in terms of prescription and warning, as my first friend points out, and in terms of ‘punishment’. Thus we demarcate between sensitivity and tolerance.

After all, nobody who has visited a German city of anything over 100,000 inhabitants can claim that the modern public mood is anything other than eclectic and vibrant. Berlin is now known as the party capital of Europe; German counter-culture is fierce and more widespread than elsewhere. There seems an acceptance here of things that are still, in Britain, tarred by the brush of noncomformity and ridiculousness; videogaming is practically a national passtime, for example; rock music and its subcultural trappings have never gone out of fashion here as they seem to have further west.

So we see an acceptance, a malleability of society to accept aspects of culture and counter-culture that cannot be surmounted, to accept into a greater in-group the subgroups that compose broader German society. This (surely unconscious) mentality of accepting the ‘other’ when it is widespread enough, or well-established enough is simply another solution to the problem of embarrassment.

And perhaps we see the evidence of this solution in the last century of German history. For what else was the success of Nazism than the quick blossoming of a new ‘in-group’? The desperation not to appear alien to the ermergent new order explains how it was the German people, the formerly moderate majority, that made the Third Reich into what it was. By moving the goalposts of normalness and uncomfortableness, Hitler and his friends were manipulating the psychology of the German people.

Apologies if the above seems either too blunt, too circuitous or too obvious; I am suffering from a lack of sleep through a combination of a worsening head cold and the incredible snoring of a 60-year-old Italian architect who slept in the same dorm as me last night. I have never encountered such snoring before. It was almost a relevatory episode; I thought, for a moment, that I detected in that regular, whinging groan of nostril-impelled air a secret code, a demon language happily forgotten by the scholars of mankind. That was at about 4.30 this morning.

Regensburg is a nice city; compact, walkable, somehow exhibiting its own slightly mediterranean atmosphere (never mind that it is nestled in the northern foothills of the alps!) It is also the nothernmost point in the entire course of the river Danube, which is absolutely glorious here: fast, sparkling, split by islets and reflecting the majesty of some of the great architecture here.

Where Bamberg was cute, Regensburg is dramatic.