Padua, Venice, and Verona

I’ve had a very busy week! Last weekend my program took the lot of us to Padua, Venice, and Verona. Monday was a holiday – the Festival of the Republic – to celebrate when Italy voted down the monarchy in 1946. Then classes started on Tuesday, and I haven’t slowed down until today, when I got to relax on the beautiful, picturesque white beach of Rosignano – but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Padua

First, I want to write about my weekend, which started bright and early last Friday with a bus ride to an organic Tuscan farm. After a very sleepy, very long journey on our bus, with our adorable program manager Irene, and our very much stereotypical Italian bus driver named Alfredo, we pulled up to a picture-perfect Tuscan farmhouse. Here we were unloaded, and seated outside under umbrellas. It smelled like summer – like dry dirt and grass and flowers. Eventually these smells were joined by delicious wafts from the kitchen – the aromas of freshly made pasta, tomatoes, cheese, grilled zucchini, and berry tarts. We enjoyed an unbelievable meal, as the sun beat down on us, and on and the farm’s crisp clean laundry that was waving in the breeze. After lunch we had time to stretch our legs and visit the rest of the farm, which consisted of a vineyard, a horse barn, and pens for pigs, chickens, cows, and even a white peacock.

Then it was back on the bus, and off to Padua. I had never heard of this college town before, and had no idea what to expect. It had the characteristic Italian cobbled streets and open-air markets – one for fruit and one for vegetables, and hosts one of the world’s oldest universities. This gave it a very youthful, very fun energy, as the University remains in full operation, and is one of the best in Italy. After we were settled into our hotel, we were offered a guided tour of the city. Since I had no idea what Padua was about, I decided to take them up on their invitation. At first, I admit, I was a little bored by the tour. We saw the main square, which looked like many piazza’s I had seen in Florence, and we saw the market, which looked just as familiar. But then we took a little bit of a walk to the Basilica of Saint Anthony. My tour guide, a short, salt-and-pepper haired lady who had lived her entire life in Padua, led us through winding streets and alley-ways, and we all of a sudden turned a corner and the massive Basilica came into view. The outside was gorgeous, made up of several different domes and towers, and I was quite impressed.

The Basilica of Saint Anthony

“The inside is a little… busy,” Our tour guide warned us before we entered, explaining that the art and decoration inside has been added to over the centuries, each piece dedicated to Saint Anthony, other religious figures, or important Italians throughout history. So our group of Americans were paraded inside, and I realized at once that “busy” was an understatement. The interior of the Basilica was packed from marble floor to vaulted ceiling with frescoes, statues, and carvings. Intricate stonework laced the walls and pillars – figures in bronze, marble, and even old dry wood populated the floor and alcoves in the wall. They were all different shapes, sizes, and styles, honoring all different types of men (and even a few women), from saints to merchants to ancient noblemen.

Our tour guide drew our attention in particular to a simple sculpture of a woman that was set into the wall above a plaque. Her name was Elena Cornaro Piscopia, and she graduated from the University of Padua, one of the oldest in the world, in the year 1678. She was the first woman to ever receive a degree, and no other woman would do so for several centuries. She was allowed to graduate under two conditions – she was to be the only exception, the only woman to be allowed to graduate, due to her family’s status, and two – she was to graduate in philosophy, as theology was deemed too threatening. I was startled that I had never before heard of this woman, and so impressed by her very modest dedication in the church. For while she had accomplished astounding things in her time, she was still, in fact, a woman, and therefore had received a very plain and very small monument.

            I was still in awe from the delicate stone face of Elena when we were led into the tomb of Saint Anthony himself. I knew when we approached the Basilica that the name of Saint Anthony sounded familiar, and inside the church I saw images of him standing with baby Jesus cradled in his arms. This sparked a memory of my great aunt who passed away just this year, “auntie Nun” as we called her. I remembered suddenly that Saint Anthony was one of her, and my grandmother’s, favorite saints. When we went into the tomb we were told to be silent out of respect, and we circled behind a gorgeous green marble altar. The walls had marble carvings of the different miracles of Saint Anthony, a man renowned for preaching simply and easily the word of God, the quickest man to be made a Saint after his tragic early death. I am not a particularly religious person, although I find religion itself absolutely fascinating. I’m not sure what I believe in, but being in this Basilica you could feel the power of belief, the intensity of Italian Catholicism. It poured out of the ornate statues, the intricacy, the detail, the ornamentation, and it made the air heavy, and made me hold my breath.
     Behind the altar there was a space where you could touch the actual tomb itself. I was drawn to go and touch the smooth green marble, amazed by the fact that there was an actual body encased in that stone, inches away from my fingertips. But as I drew near I watched an old man walk up to the marble wall with intense gravity and purpose, and place his outspread hands firmly on the stone, and bow his head in prayer. His face was all at once so intensely sad, and so serenely comforted, as if he was pouring himself into the stone and drawing strength back in return. I can’t say I am touched by that deep meaning that this man and others in the church clearly felt, as I don’t know much about Catholicism, and only remembered who Saint Anthony was by vague whisperings of memory. Something about the intensity of the moment made me draw back, and instead pass by respectfully, in awe of how much Saint Anthony, and everything he stands for, means for some people. I could have stood there for hours, admiring the detailed stonework, the frescoes overhead, and the bronze statues of angels peopling the altar of the tomb, but we were ushered out and on to the next room, which held the marvelous relics.

            We filed into a room that sported three beautiful, floor to ceiling cases filled with gold relics, jewels, and religious bits of fabric and scrolls. The center case had three prominent glass orbs, with different objects in them. We learned that Saint Anthony had originally been buried elsewhere, in a simple wooden casket, which was displayed against the left-side wall. When they removed him from this casket to move him into his final resting place in the Basilica, it was found that his tongue was still flexible and functional, though he had been dead for months. This miracle was commemorated in a somewhat gruesome way, by removing his tongue from his body, along with his lower jaw and his vocal cords, and displaying them in glass orbs as holy relics. Our tour guide laughed and admitted that this was rather barbaric, but she also noted how even today the relics of Saint Anthony’s renowned voice and orations draw thousands and thousands of pilgrims to the Basilica. We were allowed a closer look at the relics, and I could have spent another several hours in front of the three cases, looking at the golden carvings of globes, saints, and chalices. Close up, Saint Anthony’s tongue looked like little more than a speckled rock, his vocal cords a dark mush, and his jaw looked like a plastic casting, gums still intact. I couldn’t believe I was looking at the actual parts of a human being, regardless of the miracles he may have inspired. All too quickly we were led out of the Basilica, and to the University of Padua, one of the oldest in the world. We were then left to our own devices in the town of Padua, just as it started to pour.

           

The University of Padua

Venice

            How does one describe the city of Venice? It is everything one imagines and more  - the canals snaking their way between the narrow terraced buildings, the ornamentation, the venetian masks displayed in store windows, the gondoliers in striped shirts pushing their way through the murky water in the place of modern cars. There are streets named after assassins, after murders, after lost love. There are beautiful opera houses, richly decorated hotels, and flowers tumbling off of ornate balconies. Of course there is the famous San Marco Square, with the beautiful palace and world-famous café’s - and of course I paid my fee for a picturesque ride on one of the gondolas with my roommates. We had an absolutely unreal moment where we threaded under bridges in the bright summer sun, and drank the Venetian cocktail called Bellini, a mix of prosecco and peach juice.

But my favorite part was when the tour guide led us off of the beaten path for just a moment. Within a few blocks of the main roadways Venice becomes as silent and as quaint as a painting. The shouts and bustling of the thousands of tourists fall away and instead there is serene and peaceful quiet, just for a few minutes. 

Off the beaten path

      Unfortunately, my trip to Venice was rather short, and I had to plunge back into the activity to go hunting for souvenirs with my roommates, find food that wasn’t ridiculously overpriced for the tourists, and get back to the meeting point, past the Bridge of Sighs, and onto our private boat back to Padua. I loved what I saw of Venice, and am excited to return with my family at the end of the month, so I will withhold my other observations until then!

The Bridge of Sighs

The Palace in San Marco Square

Gondola ride!

Verona

           

            Ah – the city of love! And, as I learned, the city with the third highest divorce rate in Italy. Despite the irony, I loved Verona. For all that Padua was fun and youthful, and for all the queer beauty of Venice, Verona was my favorite place by far. Verona mixes the rich history and art of Italy with a quaint modern elegance. It had a much slower pace than the other cities I’ve visited, and everywhere we went we smelled flowers. We saw the oldest Roman theater, which is still in operation across the river, and walked over the Ponte Pietra, or “Stone Bridge,” that is mostly in the same condition it was centuries ago. 

Ponte Pietra, Verona

     In the city itself we learned that while Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet did not in fact exist in the city of Verona, the families that they belonged to did, and similar family feuds and violent acts of loyalty, desperation, and love often took place in the city streets. We visited Juliet’s balcony, a place constructed solely for tourists, and I got to touch her right boob on the statue there, which is supposed to mean good luck! Finally we saw the coliseum there, the third largest and most well preserved coliseum in Italy. We had to leave all too soon to go visit a winery in Valpolicella, owned by the Gamba family. I left the lovely city of Verona unwillingly, but our next stop proved to be just as beautiful.

Juliet's Balcony

      Alfredo, our bus driver, managed to maneuver our huge tour bus up switchback mountain roads, in between buildings that left mere inches on either side, and off the road into the front lawn of the Gamba winery. The villa on top of the hill in Valpolicella offered one of the most amazing views I’ve seen so far, a panorama of classic Italian wine country, with towns nestled in the valleys, and terraced vineyards lining the hills.

     We were taught how to taste wine, to look at the color, the smells, the taste, and how it goes with food. Then we took a stroll into the vineyard itself, along a dirt road that was spotted with cherry trees. At our host’s example, we picked fresh cherries from the trees and chewed them as we walked. We were led down into the cellar where the wine rested in huge oak barrels, and finally were able to relax on their beautiful deck and watch the clouds drift across the sky.

            I didn’t want to leave Venice, I didn’t want to leave Verona, and I certainly didn’t want to leave the vineyard, but eventually the time came to head to back to Florence, so we waved goodbye, piled onto the bus, and Alfredo brought us back home.