Driving Crazy in Sardinia (Guidando Pazzo in Sardegna)

It was mid-afternoon at the airport in Olbia, Sardegna. Rushing around trying to get a car rental because although the island looks small compared to the whole European mainland, it is huge and mountainous.


The desk clerk lady said 'blah blah blah... but we only have manual transmission left'. Do you know the film scenes where the back ground seems to rush away because of camera focus tricks? Well that was what happened. And when they said the car was a Fiat it happened again because, J-Lo's advertisements in the US aside, I had heard bad things about these vehicles.





After finding the silver Fiat Punto among the other vehicles along the row, I did the usual 'walk around' to make sure there was no damage. Just a few scratches and someone had removed the letter 'N' badge on the back, leaving 'PU TO'. Damn good thing I wasn't going to be driving anywhere that people knew Spanish...


The last time I had tried to drive a manual transmission car was before college when some friends were alcohol-comatose. I remembered it as an unpleasant lurching experience with too many pedals on the floor. So, resolved to my fate, I stowed luggage and started reading the manual there in the parking lot for tips and tricks on the finer points of driving manual.

Armed with sufficient knowledge like Neo in 'The Matrix', I started the car up and managed to get it switched to reverse gear. The clutch / brake confusion made backing up a weird mix of terror about hitting parked cars behind me and impatience because I was doing everything in slow motion.

I spent 40 minutes that afternoon driving around the rent car parking lot, turning, shifting from first to second, parking, reverse, avoiding people walking around, backing out again. People were really beginning to stare, so with utmost confidence in my newly aquired abilities, I decided to leave the warm nest of the rental car parking lot like a baby bird and make my way in the cruel world.

Not one minute after leaving the parking lot towards the highway I needed, I noticed that I had a police escort (they had probably seen me practicing in the parking lot and were making sure I wasn't drunk, or Scottish). Through the first roundabout (thank god I didn't have to yield), they must have decided that I wasn't going to kill anyone and went off on their way.

Driving on the open highways towards Baja Sardegna where I was staying was great, I really enjoyed the manual transmission feel of the road. My Garmin maps were a bit miscalibrated though, so when I arrived close to my hotel it indicated that I should go down a dirt road. The road kept getting smaller and smaller with brush closing in on the sides of the car.

I got out and hiked over the large stony hill for a while and found someone who pointed me in the right direction. So, I backed up the several hundred meters, really starting to understand the car so I thought.

At the beach hotel on the mountainous hill, I parked on a large slope. Not fully understanding the inner workings of manual transmission vehicles when starting from a parallel park situation on a slope I was in for some real fun the next day. Let's just say, any accidents that may have occurred left no marks (on my car or anyone else's), again probably because everything was occurring so slowly.

The next day a nice day trip to La Madelena (Trinity Beach) was on the itinerary, and a few times I had stalled out while yielding on the roundabouts with impatient people behind me. A few angry looks and honks at me were the worst things I had to deal with luckily. For the most part, in this difficult mountainous terrain I had conquered something which I was always nervous to try. I can drive manual.











One thing about the Fiat rent car though, it was equiped with a bizarre feature. Coming back from the beach to a parking lot in Palau, I started up and noticed that the steering was super difficult and was worried that I had a car problem.

The municipal police came out of nowhere (must have been watching an obvious stranger) and offered to call the car rental place for me, but then one of the officers thought about it and pushed a button on the dashboard that turned back on the steering. HUH??!!? There was a button that TURNS OFF YOUR POWER STEERING on this car? Why stop there, why not have a button that maybe jettisons all of your fuel, or makes the wheels fall off? I thanked the officers in what I was sure at the time was perfect Italian, and made my way back to Baja Sardegna in the dark.

A Good Head for Mosaics (Testa Robusta per Mosaico)

Hmmm, I can really think of no finer way to welcome you guys back after an excessively long blogging hiatus than to bore you all with a tale of woe and accompanying vacation photos. I've been super busy with my real job, artworks, and my oldmosaics.com (I'm trying my hand writing phone apps believe it or not). Don't laugh if you look at my website yet, it's very much a work in progress. Now here's your popcorn, and the story begins...


In September while boarding the train from FCO airport in Rome to the center of the city after a long flight from Dallas, I noticed that the overhead luggage rack for my suitcase was missing several crossbar supports, creating a large hole. Because there were not many places left in the car, I carefully wedged my suitcase up on the edge rails and the few bars that were actually there. Sitting down directly underneath the hole area (so no one else might accidently get struck with a falling suitcase), I resolved to keep an eye on it and be ready with quick hands to grab if it were to fall.

Unfortunately for me, a nice lady and her mid-twenties attractive daughter sat down next to me and we all struck up a conversation. Gravity took its course, and that coupled with my lack of baggage-related attention resulted in a surprise crushing blow to the forehead. At the time, I was thinking 'That's odd, my whole head moved back because of this crushing blow.' I still smile when I think of hearing all the normally reserved Italians in the train car simultaneously gasp at the horrific site. I laughed it off but I was worried about the possibilities of concussion because people in the street on the way to my hotel were saying things like 'cattivo bruschi' and such.

So, I resolved to just stay awake after putting my bag away at my hotel and took the train from Pyramide to Ostia Antica (which in all honesty, I was planning to do anyway). I had been to Pompeii and other archaeological sites around Europe, but had never made the time for this super close one even though I'd been to Rome several times.











I only had a day to cover so much ground, so I ran. I ran like Forrest Gump that day until there were enormous blisters on my little toes in spite of my comfortable hiking boots.











Ostia Antica was a treasure hunt maze of in-situ mosaics! The archaeological area covers a few square miles with so many uncovered and partially buried insulae, or city block areas with houses and shops.

Mosaics were not just reserved for the numerous public areas like baths and forums (the ancient equivalents of water parks and shopping malls, I guess), but many obscure ones were to be found in various houses scattered across the large archaeological area.











Below is an obscure mosaic from a small shop in the western part of the city. I think these look like leather working tools from the time, or maybe just meat tenderizing? It’s fun for me to try to understand what the artists were thinking back then when they placed the tesserae. That’s one of the reasons I like the ancient works so much because you can see the brush strokes in an ancient fresco or the choices about andamento from thousands of years ago and it’s like you are standing there right behind the artist from a different time, understanding how life was or how it was imagined.











I'm happy to report many of the mosaics were geometric in nature. I've been on a geometric mosaic kick lately with my triclinium background and it was great to see through the eyes of long gone artisans. Some of these forms were not covered in the usual mosaic history books.
Here’s what I’ve been calling a ‘sparse flower geometric’ from a house in the far north part of the site.












Check out the ‘meander-lozenge combo bordered by other meander and guilloche’ that can be seen near the entrance…












And below is a captivating but simple geometric from a home in the southwestern part of Ostia.











Occasionally, the driven visitor is rewarded with a random sectile work. The pavement below was especially interesting to me because of the ‘reused’ pieces of border carved marble in some of the triangle pieces (easy to see above the numidian yellow square at lower left).












The owner of this villa within the city must have been keen on the army because of all the shields?












Most of the mosaics left within ancient Ostia are monochrome, but even without colored tesserae, there is a world of information locked into these stone relics.
Here is the map of the area. The far reaches of Regione III and Regione I have some ‘off the normal path’ semi buried mosaics in hard to reach houses because of the overgrown brush, etc.












Speaking of semi-buried, sometimes the archaeological superintendents will place big mats covered with sand over some of the endangered and more important mosaics to help preserve them. Maybe I could have bribed some of these hard working archaeologists restoring a pavement near the Capitolinum monument to lift off one of the covers? Well, I did put some money in their tip jar.












In my opinion, Ostia is an underrated site for mosaics and is a wonderful mirror to the past and being an armchair archaeologist, I’m very glad to have visited.
Probably the best source of information if you are interested in visiting Ostia Antica is Ostia-antica.org.

Meeting A Blogger! (Incontrato i Blogger Fantastico)

It was very hot, not 'Dallas hot', but incredibly humid. It was the kind of humid which causes sweat to drip from your nose and wonder which it is that you are breathing, air or water. I had just arrived on the train and was making my way across the Italian town with my 60kg of luggage, sun beating down, trying to keep one eye on my outdated GPS in order to keep my wrong turns to a minimum.

Under normal circumstances, this would cause me to run to the nearest air conditioned room and order a cold drink. But, I was very excited that I was on my way to meet a blogger that I've admired for a long time. She has a fantastic eye for design, a respect and deep knowledge of western history, and is a true original in my opinion. You have probably guessed by now that it was Maggie from 'Mosaicology' who I was going to visit.

It probably sounds strange, but I had never met an actual blogger until then, so I was a bit nervous.

Luckily, I arrived early in front of the church agreed upon. Even more luckily, the bar in front of the church had outdoor seating and would sell cold water and wine to me. They never give enough wine in the church. :)

The bells struck the time and there was only one lady with family members meeting the description out there. She was looking around as if waiting for someone, but no, it was not her.

A while after the last echo of the bells were gone, I was relieved to see them appear. I waved them over to the outdoor bar. In a short moment we were all sitting there as old friends, discussing art and design, history, politics, and everything and nothing. They are such precious people to me, and we had only just met in person!

Time flew by as we talked and then sadly it was time for me to catch my next train to the Venice area. But, we have plans to draw up jewelry pieces using rare stones, and I can't wait.

I just returned home a few hours ago after so long on the airplanes, so now I will sleep for a few days...

p.s. - A., grazie per l'auto alla stazione!

My Bologna (Comune di Bologna)

In Italy, there are two towns named after foodstuffs (or was it the other way around?) that I visited on my last trip. Quick, take a guess what they are! Ok, time's up, put your pencils down and read more. In some ways they were very similar, but in my quick first impressions, they couldn't be more different.

The first town was Bologna. As a food, I generally detest bologna, putting it somewhere between 'Spam' and 'Egg Salad'. But names aside, I met a great family from Bologna on the train from Rome. They were an upper middle class husband and wife travelling with a college age daughter and younger son. They commented on my GPS and I struck up a conversation with them, for a while in Italian, but then we switched to English. Being the cosmopolitan people they were, fluency in multiple languages was easy for them.

The Italian lady made her own sculptures which she showed me on her cell phone and I showed her some of mine which she graciously complimented. The husband was busy at first talking with his daughter who was just recently engaged to be married, yet you could still see he considered her his little girl because their family was super close.

Over the trip, we all talked Italian and US politics, art, business and what it was like to live around Bologna. And, that was before I even arrived in the city. By the time we were all there, I had made genuine friends with like minded people and was actually a bit sad to say goodbye. The city was clean, historic, and home to professionals and the affluent. As a generalization, it seems like people in the North are more career oriented and strive for a really high standard of living.

Bologna has been known for its superior universities and as knowledge center since the middle ages. Maybe long enough for all the smartest people's genes to have amassed more concentratedly in one location. Needless to say, I really enjoyed my time around the city of Bologna.

The other food named town, (Did you guess Pisa? It's not the same as Pizza...) was Parma, as in 'parmesan cheese' and 'parma ham'. At this point, I have to mention that I consider parma ham extremely gross as it is uncooked.

I'd been driving for quite a while on the highway after killing a large apple juice and bottled water in Milan. I arrived around Parma by car on Sunday afternoon on my way to Firenza, and had to go to the WC so bad my berries were about to fall off. So instead of going to an 'Automat', I pulled off the A1 and headed to the city center of Parma over by the museum (of course). I parked in the awesome parking garage and didn't find a public restroom there. So I headed in the direction of the museum. Walked up the stairs, but they were closed, on a Sunday afternoon. At 2:00pm...

Ok, so I thought it can't be that hard to find an open restaurant to order whatever so I could use the toilet. Well, it *was* that hard. I walked across the courtyard of the museum and down *several* long city blocks before I could find anything at all open. Along the way, there were sandwich counters and a few other things which had absolutely no restrooms. I must have painfully walked 2 miles in ever-widening circles like a Coast Guard pilot looking for a capsize accident survivor before I finally found a restaurant with the qualifications for which I was looking.

For this reason, I will forever have an unfair bias against the city of Parma and their evil 'shut everything down at 2:00 pm' ways. Where food named towns are concerned, I'll always go to the city historically more friendly, that is, to my Bologna.

Stone Cold Carrara (Pietre di Carrara)

When in Italy back in October I took a train from Firenza (Florence to you English-city name-in-foreign-country insistent types) to Carrara (also called Carrara in English). This little coastal town is basically one of the best sources of marble and stone processing in the entire world. Michealangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti, no one ever knows his full name) walked these very mountains and quarries looking for likely pieces to carve famous sculptures in. Isn't it weird how the name Buonarroti kind of means 'good breaking' in Italian, and he was a sculptor? Whoa...

Here is one of the largest processors in town, Marmi di Carrara. Check out the comically large cranes for hoisting the blocks. They have gigantic saws too. I wonder if they ever sawed a car apart? You could make a stretch limo pretty easily there I think.

As a digression, here is an American sculptor I admire who picked out a *huge* piece of marble himself from a quarry in Colorado, then proceeded to carve a grand piano and a lady on it!!!

Back to Italy, Carrara has some of the best state of the art marble processing facilities and is one of the largest processors of marble blocks. Blocks are the form that they get the marble down from the cliffside in. They drill holes in the mountain, blast, and run like hell to avoid hundreds of tons of falling stone.
Here are some blocks that evidently landed perfectly on the back of a transport truck.

The city itself is small, but nice and friendly. Everywhere, the patios use expensive scraps of white marble tile. I felt like Augustus Gloop when he saw the chocolate river since beautiful stone was everywhere. I walked *all* over that town and I was able to make several industry contacts there, so it was a good trip.

Here is an enormous pot carved out of a single block (I hope I don't get any bad searchers because of using the words 'enormous' and 'pot'). You know how your shadow gets larger when the sun is behind you and casting forward? Well, think about how big this pot is now...

From the rough block form, marble goes through a few steps before it gets to the tile that you might walk across in your garage or coat closet. First, they saw these blocks down into smaller block pieces that they then further saw down into slabs (used commonly for countertops, etc). They then take some of the slabs and saw those down into tiles of various thicknesses and sizes. Typically, they'll put these tiles in a polishing maching to get that 'glossy' finish.

Since I like old looking stuff, I always use the back side of the tile and sand that down to where it's smooth, but not glossy. This state of marble is called 'honed'.

Some chunks of the big blocks are left in larger pieces which they carve fireplaces and things like that from. In the industry, these pieces are called 'cut-to-size'. I need to get some of these pieces for some statuary that I want to do, but it's a bit costly since even a piece big enough to carve a lifesized head would weigh around 300 lbs.

Ancient Lake Fun Part I (Divertimento di Lago Antiche)

Driving through rush hour traffic is never fun in any city, but in Milan it can really grind to a halt. We had left Venice earlier that morning by rent car and had lost a bit of time with a fun stop at Lake Garda's ancient city of Sirmione that I'll elaborate on later.

The lady I was renting the villa from in Bellagio was expecting us at 5:00pm, but a helicopter would be the only option which could have made that happen. Luckily, I didn't have to sit in the Milan traffic for the full 360 degrees of the loop around the city, after only a few miles of a parking lot, I saw a workable exit to the north.

Trying to read the road signs in Italian on a big highway system you've never been on with many impatient drivers zipping around is not exactly the relaxing part of the vacation. The trusty GPS guided us to the correct road north for Bellagio after a few wrong turn missteps in the city of Como itself. Up the mountains we went on the narrow twisty east side 589. Suddenly, the lake came into view off to the left (and way down there). Flashbacks to driving in Santorini Greece came to mind, but this was much easier by comparison.

Lake Como (Larius to the Romans) has long been a resort. Pliny the Younger had written about stays in a villa here for hunting and fishing around 2000 years ago, but mine was going to have running wat... nope he had that, a sewer sys... nope he had that, um, electricity! Which was going to be very handy soon since it was beginning to get dark as I was driving on up around the twisty mountain roads.

I gave the owner Francesca a call when in town. She dropped everything and drove up the awesome hill where the villa is located to let us in and give information about the rooms and the area. I knew it was going to be a nice place, but I was surprised at exactly how nice it all was.
My mom loved the view and the balcony, and there was an olive orchard and an infinity edge pool which were part of the property. There was even a nice little cobblestone parking area behind an automatic iron gate.














Speaking of fancy pools, for the record, even as nice as my pool is, I'd gladly trade my house for this villa any day of the week because there are just no views like this in Texas. Francesca is a great business woman, she and her sister run a shop in town and the nice villa in the pristine location was handed down in their family. She had restored it to a very high standard. Although I don't use the term lightly, it was 'chock full' of amenities.

The town of Bellagio is small and pleasant, well except for the 1960's style band bleating out old rock and roll in Italian at one of the hotels. It is by necessity a compact center of town and everything is pretty much within a few minutes walk.

If you go, I recommend stopping at Villa Melzi and by all means, take the boats around and explore. If you want to spend obscene amounts on shopping, I'd recommend taking the boat over to Mennagio and catching a bus to Switzerland.
Or if you just want to relax, you can do like I did and have a few bottles of wine in your own villa while looking over the same awesome lake Pliny did 2000 years ago.

I think I'll be back here soon.