Questions of Travel: On Packing and Unpacking

Selfies at the Uffizi, Harper Lee in Naples; Tom Wolfe and Robert Towers at Columbia; Mass Tourism Everywhere; The Tolls at Aosta; "You can’t take it with you.”

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

--Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel

1.

Eight days after a tourist posing for a photograph in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, accidentally stepped backward into a painting, “damaging it while trying to pose like its subject," according to The New York Times, I was standing in line outside the Uffizi with my two children in 98 degree heat, preparing to enter the same zone of tourism and damage.

“A Photo Gone Wrong in the Uffizi Fuels Selfie Worries in Europe’s Museums," was the headline. "The damage to a centuries-old painting in the Italian museum was just one of many tourist incidents raising ire on the continent."

The selfie damaged painting, of Grand Prince Fernando De Medici¹, had been removed from the wall to be repaired. Where the painting had been, there was now a blank space on the wall. Amidst the excitement I felt about seeing works by Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci and Botticelli, among many other spectacular and familiar names² I was curious about this blank space³.

2.

When you travel you have to pack and you have to unpack. Regarding packing: I think of myself as an extremely light packer up until the last minute, when I throw in all sorts of things. It is a form of sartorial separation anxiety. Therefor I am now traveling through a heat wave with two white button down shirts. One with a french cuff and cufflinks which I never wear. The other is more casual, though with a Brooks Brothers logo stitched in pale blue on the chest, which I feel is tacky. But it’s comfortable. It’s the shirt I wore to the Uffizi.

But packing is easy compared to the real challenge, which is unpacking. I don’t mean what one does with luggage and clothes upon arriving, or even the errands and deadlines that must be attended to before departure so as to tie up loose ends and be free of them. I mean a kind of throwing off of ballast required for liftoff. Lightening the load of matters professional, emotional, and spiritual-- which in my case are all euphemisms for writing.

The most pressing errands for me are always the literary ones; the weight I need to unload are the works in progress. In this case, there was one specific piece I wanted to finish before I left for Europe⁴. The piece was a literary investigation of a tiny crime from long ago to which I was witness. Its mechanisms were revealed in a book I had already properly, if briefly, reviewed. I had maintained a cheerful professionalism in my review, but now I was working through my real feelings about it all. I wanted to be done with the whole project before I left. Finish it and publish it to Substack! I told myself. But publishing on Substack feels, to me, like playing with a loaded gun. It’s only a matter of time before I shoot myself in the foot. I couldn’t pull the trigger. And anyway, I wasn’t done with the piece. In the end, I had to take it with me.

3.

The most extreme example of a failure to unpack⁵, for me, took place in 2016 when I traveled to Naples, Italy, to do research in the municipal archives for traces of my family, members of which had passed through Naples in the fraught winter of 1938-1939.

A few months earlier, Esquire Magazine had sent me⁶ to Monroeville, Alabama to look into the curious case of Harper Lee’s literary estate. The author of To Kill a Mockingbird had just died, but her literary affairs had been in upheaval for a couple of years. The most obvious curiosity was that after Lee spent decades claiming that she was not working on another book, and that she had no interest in writing a sequel for To Kill A Mockingbird, she published another book. And it was, in a purely chronological sense, a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird.

There were irregularities to the timing of this change of heart: her older sister, Alice Lee, who had been a working lawyer running their father’s law firm until the age of 100, had always been in charge of Harper’s legal affairs. When she died, that job was passed to a woman named Tonja Carter. She now controlled the Harper Lee Estate and the millions from the new book, and the old book, and the Broadway play that had never been licensed when the Lee sisters had a say in the matter. Tonja Carter had been Alice’s protege, working as a receptionist in the law firm. Then Alice sent her to law school, after which she joined the firm as an associate. Eventually, she was brought into the firm as a partner. When Alice stopped practicing and soon after moved to a local nursing home, the former receptionist took over the firm.

Shortly after Alice Lee died, a manuscript was found in the law firm’s vault downstairs from the firm’s office. Or Tonja Carter claimed to have found it shortly after Alice died. There was an appraiser from Sotheby’s who claimed to have seen it - in Tonja’s presence - five years earlier. If it had remained in the vault, unpublished, while Alice was alive - and Harper still had her wits about her - then perhaps that is where Alice and Harper wanted it to stay? Finding the manuscript was the rough equivalent of finding an old master painting in the attic. Found money. That it concerned all the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, but was set ten or so years later in their lives, meant it was a lot of found money.

Carter was a vibrant presence in a white blouse, blue skirt, with raphaelite curly blond hair spilling out of the hair tie when I met her on the lawn in front of the courthouse in Monroeville in the spring of 2016. Standing under the white tent⁷, she handed me my ticket and we had a brief greeting.

The press, at that point, were in hot pursuit of the story, and she was refusing all requests for interviews, of which mine was one of many. She had been stalked by Daily Mail paparazzi. There was an aura of demure defiance in her standing under the white tent on that balmy evening, handing out tickets to be the season’s last performance of To Kill a Mockingbird. The courthouse was the stage setting for a play, which was based on the novel, which in turn was partly based on real events that took place in that very courthouse. A further nesting doll aspect was that the play was performed annually, and the actors drawn from the local community, a kind of passion play that had been going on so long that one of the older actors who had once played Scout was, in that evening’s performance, the parent of the current actor playing Scout.

However interesting this was, it was not something I could properly synthesize into a piece by the time I left on my trip. It had nothing to do with Naples, Italy, or with the plight of a Jewish family fleeing Vienna after the Anschluss of 1938. And yet I had to bring it with me.

4.

Our visit to the Uffizi in Florence had begun in Paris. There was no real reason for this except plane tickets to Paris were much cheaper than plane tickets to the other cities to be visited. I make this mistake over and over: I fly into the cheap airport and think it will be a breeze to get to wherever I am going. But getting to wherever I am going is always much more expensive than I realize. But the point of travel is to travel, I tell myself. Another mistake, since the feeling one often has when traveling, to go along with a desire for adventure, is the wish to stay in one place.

Outside Paris we visit the author Tom Sancton and his wife, the artist Sylvaine Sancton. Their house is full of her distinct abstract paintings and sculptures. The sculptures, made of wood, are totemic, tall rectangles whose surfaces undulate. Curvacious, amorphous, their long rectangular shapes are like giant Lego blocks stood up, but their surfaces are a sensuous topography that remind me of the Apsara at Angkor Watt. Situated in her studio and throughout her house, I told her I had been tempted to touch them but had refrained. She chastised me for this, said touching was essential. She said whenever a sculptor visits, the first thing they do is run their hands over the surfaces, and then points out that one is not to do this in museums.

Tom was a Paris Bureau chief of Time Magazine for a couple of decades, is a clarinet player of real accomplishment (see his book about hanging out at Preservation Hall as a teenager), as well as author of several excellent books⁸. He spoke of his early days at Time Magazine, when a group of young writers centered on Sancton, Jim Kelly, Graydon Carter, and Walter Isaacson⁹ would go out to lunch every day, each taking turns paying for it and expensing the meal. Later, he said, Richard Stengel and Kurt Anderson joined. My thoughts went to the lunch scenes in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, where the office alcoholic is always lobbying the gang to go to “the nice place,” whose important distinction from the “not nice place” was the quality of their martini.¹⁰ It wasn’t the booze that brought my thoughts to Yates but the notion of a world where languorous lunches were part of the natural rhythm of office life, at least in certain urban precincts—a notion that now seems as abstract and antiquated as a print magazine that generated enormous profits and shaped the national discourse .

The Sanctons were incredibly warm and generous, which was nice, as I was traveling with my kids. My wife was to join us later while she attended to obligations related to the release of her book in paperback. In her absence, the Sanctons and their gorgeous, art filled home provided a sense of stability and coherence. They saw us off with fruit and sandwiches and then we headed South in a rented car.

The savings of flying to Paris were slowly chipped away by tolls on the highway to Florence¹¹. And that was before we crossed the Alps. There was no one to inspect our passports as we went into Italy, instead we had toll booths. The sums were epic, even more epic and disorienting than the tunnels.

We got off at dusk at the Aosta exit on the Italian side, the second exit in Italy, a destination chosen at random. At the toll booth there was a shock. Just a few miles earlier, on the Italian side of the Alps, we coughed up 50 Euros. Now we were hit with an 80 Euro toll at Aosta. It must have worked out to ten bucks a mile. A recorded voice said something to me in Italian, my son screamed, “Spaghetti” and I screamed at the machine, “80 Euros! Are you kidding me!?” while my kids laughed at my dismay.

We hadn’t booked a hotel. There was nowhere legal to park. Aosta felt like the South Bronx of the Alps. Then the sky darkened and a huge cloud lowered over the nearby mountain. I took a chance on parking on commercial street and we walked into the old town. Everywhere, bars spilled over with singing drunk people, most of whom were not that young. We found a restaurant, sat outside, and I ordered too much food. I should have known by the way the waitress made me confirm and then another waitress who spoke a little English came out to double check. We sat before our pizzas and pasta and salad and ate while youth in skimpy clothing walked by in the direction of who knows what. The cloud slowly consumed the mountain at the end of the street. When the skies opened, a waitress came out to extend the canopy further, encompassing our table.

During the thunderstorm, we huddled and ate. For a moment things seemed grim. But then for no reason things became kind of fun, as though the rain had made things cosy. When the rain stopped, we went in search of a hotel. We were directed to a hotel we thought was called Hotel Obama. But everything was full, even The Obama. The side streets were narrow and dark. Consulting out phones, we found our way to the HB Hotel. It emerged out of nowhere, it seemed, and there was a lovely guy behind the desk, a reserved figure, demure. He was amused by us. He spoke a little English. The HB was booked, but he sorted us out, made some calls, let us drink water out of the colored glasses on the counter and took our phones to charge behind his desk. And then he asked if we were Dutch.

“New York City!” we all called out.

“Why did you think we were Dutch?” I asked.

“Because you are very tall.”

The guy at the HB Hotel only smiled a little when he smiled. He was a cool customer. Dark hair almost in a pompadour, a thin mustache. He made you feel like a smile from him was hard won. And he smiled a fair bit while dealing with us. The clueless New Yorkers.

What was Aosta? What was that toll? I need to do research and find out. It feels as though I took cash out of a random ATM and later discovered the service fee was one hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars. Some outrageous sum. I have a feeling that at some point in the future I will finally meet the person who knows of such things and who will say to me, incredulously, ‘You got off at Aosta?” But the hotel we found, in the end, was great, and I made a little sandwich at the breakfast buffet the next morning and wrapped it and put it in my pocket, which felt like a crime. I was trying to get my money’s worth in Aosta.

We made it to Florence in the afternoon. We were staying in the center, which was full of groups of girls and a few boys, a great many of them American, moving like schools of fish. High school graduates. College graduates. It was the heart of darkness of American tourism in the center of Florence. Evangeline had friends in town, traveling on their own. Old enough to vote, fight in wars, and therefor travel. She swam off to see them, beaming.

Left to our own devices, Alexander and I attempted a festive dinner of our own, but this was mostly an occasion to eavesdrop on large groups of American women.

Things improved the next day when we started taking evening walks to the basketball court at the Piazza D’Azeglio at dusk¹², when the day’s scalding temperature began to cool. It is a great half court and I was delighted to discover it— both for the level of basketball and the mix of Italians and other nationalities. Everyone spoke the universal language of pick-up basketball, the great American export. On our walk to and from the court, we passed a Municipal building with freshly painted political slogans including one that reads, “Stop Mass Tourism.” I discuss this topic after the game with Diego from Sienna. 5’ 11’, athletic, and like all the players there, someone who would have done just fine in a New York City pick up game. who is a student in Florence, a bellhop in one of the city’s fanciest hotels, but who also says his family benefits from this same economy of airbnb’s and mass tourism. Like all the other locals, he doesn’t live in the center of town. His English is good. “The real problem,” he says, “is capitalism.”¹³

Late at night, when the crowds die down, and Evangeline is still out with her friends, I go sit on a bench and stare at the Duomo, waiting for her to return. I come to know the traffic patterns. The cars and trucks swerve right at me and then curve around a giant planter and go off down the narrow street. The air was still hot at night, but at that late hour there was a breeze and the sky was a clear black. Every now and then a group would amble into the piazza. “Strangers in a play,” as Elizabeth Bishop put it.

The Duomo itself was so vivid, unusual, brightly lit, “the strangest of theaters.” I would sit there, look at the Duomo, and then a car would come right at me, its headlights bright, and then swerve away. The sight of a car receding down a narrow street late at night is a universal urban grammar. In some way it made me feel at home.

I would sit on the bench until all hours taking it all in, staring at the Duomo. No one knows how he did it without calculators, how he built it, got the roof to stay up. I was happy sitting into the small hours, looking at my phone, looking at the Duomo’s wildly narrow rectangles and triangles, the pink and green and white pattern glowing in the artificial light. Looking at the black sky, looking at the American tourists. My only obligation was to sit there and exist. Sometimes I think my main skill is sitting on park benches.

I thought, one day I will come back to Florence and go to the Uffizi and sit on this very bench and look at the Duomo. Will I be with my kids?

5.

I used to stare at the building on 82nd Street, just off York Avenue, where Harper Lee lived for decades in a ground floor apartment. There was an Ottomanelli’s on the corner where she used to get sandwiches. Months after she died, her name was still on the buzzer. I used to hang out in front of the building or across the street, beneath a giant white brick building, lingering and asking questions of people going in and out.

A couple of years later, the piece long since killed, unpublished, buried, I dropped by and saw that Harper Lee’s name was still on the buzzer. I thought of the fiasco of that piece, all that time and energy. Tonja Carter was related to Truman Capote by marriage. Her husband was a Carter and so was Capote. Just after the money poured in, her husband died in a freak plane accident. Why was Harper Lee’s name still on the buzzer? The super had told me, in his white T-shirt, standing outside the building, that Tonja sometimes used Harper Lee’s apartment. Fiacos, if you play your cards right, sometimes turn into hobbies, projects, little secrets that armor you against the world.

6.

If you can’t unpack before a trip, you may find yourself sitting in a hotel room in Naples, Italy, frantically typing away on a piece that tries to untangle the labyrinth of Monroeville, Alabama. At some point I went out to sit in a cafe and talk on the phone to an Esquire editor about the latest draft, and only now that I focus on this fact do I realize that the editor was not actually there on that narrow Neapolitan Street sitting across from me with his own espresso. Such was the intense, vivid sense of moment, my immersion in the world of Harper Lee.

The streets of Monroeville had absolutely nothing to do with the streets of Naples; there was no way one could think one place might enrich the other, although now that I think back there is one aspect they both share-- a sense of terrible, buried secrets, and the sense of menace that attends such burials and suppressions. To Kill and Mockingbird and whatever quest I was on shared one thing: a preoccupation with fathers.

The hotel I was staying at in Naples was The Hotel Miramare. It had once housed the American consulate, before World War II. Some of the rooms had a view of Vesuvius, the volcano across the blue bay of Naples. But I wanted a room in the back, where a set of well worn stairs accessed through a small courtyard led up to the entrance of what had been the consulate. In January 1939, my father had walked up those stairs, gone to the second floor, and in some proximity to where I sat sweating out my Harper Lee piece, had received his visa to America. He was fifteen and had left Vienna the previous spring, not long after the Nazis marched into Vienna. Now he was sixteen. The visas to the United States acquired by the five members of his family, of which he was the youngest, tell a confusing story that I have been piecing together, on and off, for a decade.

This is what happens when you lose someone you love--you start to reassemble them, in some way, in your head. That he was my father, and had a hectic and I presume terrible immigration experience, running from the Nazi’s, watching his neighbors and his city turn against him and his family and all the Jews who lived there, gave this piecing together a respectable context, a legible task. But the reality was more primitive: a grasping, irrational need to reconstruct the loved one. This is what fuels the broad interest in ancestry and genealogy as much as the fun of the detective work and the of aura of respectability that attends to the work of the historian digging in the archive.

My father and his family all left from different ports and different times. My aunt from Genoa; my grandmother from Naples. My father and his brother from Le Havre. The Naples saga had particularly intense timing: My aunt got her Visa on January 3rd. A day later, on January 4th, my grandmother, who had gotten her visa in Naples in December, got on a boat in Naples headed to New York. My father got his visa on January 5th…

My grandmother - my father’s mother - is someone I met as a small child. I have only dim memories of her. The few stories about her I have heard often seem to reflect a person who has gone a little crazy. She had become paranoid, worried about the sounds from the radiator being an indication that Nazis were present, or soon to be. Many survivors possessed these irrational fears.

When I consider that she got on a boat to New York the day after her daughter secured a visa, but the day before her youngest child, my father, did… That is a form of stress that is hard to picture or imagine.

I was in Naples to find out more about why they were there in the first place. My story was here, literally here in the hotel room where I was staying in Naples. But I hadn’t unpacked before I left.

Maybe this is a problem everyone has as they get older, and writers just have it more acutely-- All the things that live inside you unfinished or unexpressed that have to scoot over for all the new things you are seeing and feeling. You have to try and make space.

7.

The line outside the Uffizi wa so long that even though we had booked tickets in advance, I was worried we would not get in. When we did, I vowed to stay as long as I possibly could. I used to have this feeling when, in 11th grade, I got into Studio 54. A similar sense of having made it past the velvet rope. You didn’t really know where you were or what happened there. You just wanted in.

Once we got into the Uffizi, we marched in a slow procession through security. “It’s like TSA,” my son Alexander remarked.

Evangeline was the art lover of our group. She was watchful, focused, prepared. On some level, our entire presence in Florence was being driven by the bright spark of interest Evangeline had developed during her art history class and its field trips to the Met. I was merely the driver, Alexander a passenger. He had asked to stay back in the room. It was cool there, and he had a laptop. I told him attendance was required but he could leave after an hour, if he wanted.

(The Cestello Annunciation By Sandro Botticelli, Photo: Evangeline Beller)

Upon arriving in Florence, I had observed many teenagers and their swarming habits with a sense of tenderness - because the appetite and curiosity about the life that awaits is so intense in my daughter, and so poignant to me. Also, protectiveness, because I knew that for whatever their individual virtues, they - we - are part of some larger locust like phenomenon that is a hallmark of our age. If you live in a city that has tourists, you will be familiar with the effects of this swarming: the sudden and seemingly inexplicable lines outside of this or that bagel/brunch/sandwich/pizza shop, fueled by a viral video. The sandwich is not the point or at least not the whole point. Being in the line is the point. You could say it’s not the destination, it’s the journey, but does this apply to standing in a line for brunch?

The presence of a line has a gravitational force. If there are people in line, there must be something waiting in line for. Joseph Heller caught this in his novel, Something Happened, or at least in the lengthy epigraph, which is not a quote by someone else, but a riff of his own in which one teenager summons another to join a crowd on the sidewalk. When asked why, the first teenager says, “Something happened!”

Alexander was having none of it. He wanted to go back to our rooms. He goaded me, peppered me with remarks that were wilful provocations: “What’s so special about this museum?” “This is like going through the TSA.”

And then, as we climbed a long flight of stone stairs, he turned to me and asked, “What happens if you're disabled?”

The earlier remarks were blunt instruments but this remark signaled the start of a new phase of the campaign. It’s amazing what subterfuge, how much psychology, the kids are capable of when they focus.

“I don’t know,” I said, climbing.

"It's unfair," he said.

"This whole place is a monument to unfairness," I said.

We had already passed a series of galleries as we were herded down a hallway, and within the roped off galleries were portraits of cute people with pink, rosy cheeks. I thought of a passage from Edmund White’s essay, “My Father,” from his book, My Lives, where he reflects on the business success of his father, and the broader legacy of the merely rich. About his father he wrote:

His achievement is probably impossible to ascertain now. The historian is only interested in spectacular wealth and innovation in business. On the thirtieth anniversary of Truman Capote's famous Black-and-White Ball, once considered the world's most sought-after invitation, Vanity Fair sent me a photo of all the guests and asked me to help identify the third of them whom no one could name. They were just rich people, couples who owned something big in Akron, and the world forgets these people as soon as the coffin lid closes over them.”¹⁴

From there, we ascend the stairs and see a series of sarcophagus.

Evangeline goes off on her own.

Me and Alexander move from room to room, which are filled enormous, nearly flowering medieval icons and friezes. Very small versions of such images dot his grandmother’s home. "I've seen one of these in every classroom,” he said, regarding the Madonna and Child. “What makes this one special? Did the person make it with more love?"

"This is an eyesore,” he declares in front of another artwork.

The barrage continues:

“This is a fucking social experiment,” he says.

“Museums are such a scam," he says.

Finally, "That's a poorly painted hat."

“Let’s stand in this line,” I say, and move towards an epic line within the museum. “Just to take a break.”

And so we are standing at the back of a long line in the giant hall without knowing where it leads.

"Is this like the Lil Uzi Vert flash mob of the Uffizi?” I say.

I do the Lil Uzi “I Just Wanna Rock” dance that a couple of years earlier had sent my kids into peals of hysterical laughter at their goofy dad. When they composed themselves they both made me solemnly swear that I would never, ever do that dance in public.

And here I was doing Lil Uzi at the Uffizi, the weird robot hands and hips dance.

Alexander stares at me blankly for a few moments and then says, “The last twenty seconds is tied for the worst twenty seconds of my entire life.”

“What's the other twenty seconds?” I ask.

"I don't know."

Exit teenage boy. I give him a key and a twenty euro note along with my encouragement to buy something to eat on the way home.¹⁵

When I get to the front of the line, I stand at a velvet rope and peer into a large room to regard the treasures. A man behind me loudly says, "Excuse me, could you all tell me what's in here?"

I turn to find an older, ruddy cheeked gentleman in a red polo shirt and cargo pants standing beside his wife, a kind of blonde that knows no parallel in nature. His honesty is somewhat disarming.

“I think it's Aphrodite,” I said. “I am not entirely sure.”¹⁶

“We just got in line because I figured it was something worth seeing,” he said.

I would have disdained them with more force but the fact was I had done the exact same thing--blindly gotten in line because I needed a break from thinking, without knowing where it would lead. Only that when I got there, I could take a picture. It was a line not so much of art lovers as trophy hunters. And I was on it, too.

The woman who I was pretty sure was his wife was a bit younger than him. There was something kittenish about her and I wondered how long they had been married. I turned as they took their selfie and saw that I was in the picture, behind them, in the prime photo bomb position. I declined the selfie-interuptus and played it straight.

“That was tempting,” I said when they were done.

“Well, you are going to be on Facebook and a whole lot of people in Houston are going to see you,” said the man.

Feeling challenged by this in some way, as though my own status as an American was being questioned, I responded, “Congratulations on Kevin Durant.”

A vague moment of recognition played place across his face, which was an otherwise unplayful place. I could see a thought flicker: Here was one of these Northeast basketball people. There is a word for that. He gave me a nod. His wife, or date, but I think wife, but I am not totally sure, was looking intently at the pictures she just took¹⁷. I turned to the room behind the velvet rope, stared for a moment, and moved on.

I stayed for hours. Evangeline and I bumped into one another and had a long chat in front of a couple of Titians, one of which she had written about. The one Manet had referenced for Olympia. Eventually, she went home. I stayed. I took pictures. I wandered and stared. I was not going to leave. I was going to be a stowaway. It was going to be From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but in the Uffizi. I took pictures of people taking pictures.

8.

In 1990 Tom Wolfe came to speak at the Columbia University MFA program at the invitation of Robert Towers, chair of the writing program. Towers was a gracious, soft spoken, and highly influential figure for me and many others in the program. When I published my first story I gave an interview to the Columbia Spectator crediting some notes I had gotten from Towers for the change in tone that the story represented. I said he encouraged me to be less interested in being amusing and to try instead and be “more viscous.” The next day he approached me in the hallway with uncharacteristic haste and complained that he had never encouraged my writing to be more viscous, which, he said, means oily. But he was smiling.

Tom Wolfe wore his white suit and stood before us - I was a student in the fiction program - and gave a kind of casual stump speech that was a variation of his instantly famous essay in Harper's, Stalking The Billion Footed Beast.

I didn't know this at the time, but Towers and Wolfe we're both from Virginia, or had connections to Virginia: Towers was born in Richmond, Wolfe went to college at Washington and Lee in Lexington, VA. After Wolfe spoke, he took questions. I had one.

"Isn't the social realism you are advocating undermined by the ideas of Walter Benjamin's essay, 'Art in the age of mechanical reproduction?'"

I was very excited by this essay. I wish I could say for sure who introduced me to Benjamin and his book, "Illuminations." I found the whole thing exciting, but Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, above all.

Wolfe, I recall, absorbed the question for a moment and then uttered, “No. First of all, Walter Benjamin was wrong...”

9.

I couldn’t believe how many astonishing artworks I encountered at the Uffizi. How many familiar names. How labyrinthine and vast the collection was. At the end they send you through a series of rooms filled with Caravaggio. The walls are all painted red, which is a clever way to reflect and enhance the satanic glamour of his paintings. I regarded the throng of people in front of Medusa, taking its picture. I took a picture of them. The image I captured has a doppelganger in the Louvre in front of the Mona Lisa. It has it’s doppelganger all over Europe, according to the Times article, which quotes an professor discussing possible solutions to the plague of cell phones in museums, which included the establishment of “selfie-zones.”

For some reason my usual enthusiasm for Caravaggio was quelled in this museum. I wanted the more naturalistic or painterly images. I doubled back, swam against the tide. I wasn't ready to leave.

At one point I regarded room after room filled with portraits. Were they selfies? No, they were portraits.

You can only see so much art and then you stop seeing. But I had moved beyond this into a kind of submerged state, a dream state. I surfaced at the cafe on the roof, refueled with water and espresso, and went under again. I just swam through it, immersed. It was just after the coffee break that I bumped into a self-portrait by Rembrandt. I hadn’t realized how much Northern European art was in the Uffizi. I hadn’t realized anything. It overwhelmed me. I greeted this painting, this self portrait of the old, rosy cheeked, slightly dyspectic man, with a burst of laughter, as though it were an old friend I had bumped into and I was now saying, “what are you doing here?”

It’s not such a bad thing to look at yourself, I thought, gazing at the Rembrandt which was, after all, a painting of a man in the act of looking at himself. It’s ok to look at yourself if you are really try to see.

1. David West, the former NBA player, once remarked on the Open Run podcast, “You can’t take it with you. The Egyptians learned that. You can’t bury and take the treasures with you.”

The context of the quote was his turning forgoing his player option of 12 million dollars and instead signing for a pittance to play for the Golden State Warriors. The 12 million would have been on top of close to a hundred million he had already earned, so it was not a fortune to him, just more of a fortune. Instead, he played for championships, and got two.

I mention this because, to begin with, is “you can’t take it with you” the lesson the Egyptians learned? It seems to me that they were very much under the impression that they could take it with them. But also, I thought West was touching on something both eternal and era specific: the desire to take it with you. Isn’t that part of what is behind all these commissioned portraits of the Medici’s, and all the other pink cheeked grandees whose faces fill our museums? And isn’t that impulse also part of what makes people so avid to stand before a piece of art - or anything - and take its picture?

I think photographing an artwork and taking a selfie in front of an artwork are, however similar, driven by slightly different desires. But in both cases, they are a kind of digital pyramid, a mausoleum of a moment. A wish to take it with you.

2. I don’t want to apologize or explain my lack of connoisseurship, but I used to love seeing movie screenings without having any idea of what they were about. (This was back when there were movie theaters and press screenings.) Sometimes I like to live in ignorance of what is to come.

3. To dispel any suspense, it turns out the damaged painting was part of a show that had closed in the eight days since the selfie of destruction. So the blank space where the Grand Prince Fernando De Medici had once been was not something I could witness first hand. In the process of sorting this out, though, I did find out that the painting next to the blank space was called, "The Massacre of the Innocents" by Giuseppe Maria Crespi. This title seemed evocative of something regarding mass tourism, but I what exactly I have not yet sorted out.

4. This is the sort of vague phrase one utters to camouflage the decision making process in which a trip to Berlin shall be preceded by a trip to Italy, which will commence with a flight to Paris. The how and why of this thought process/insanity is discussed later in this piece.

5. In spite of the personal nature of this quest, this errand in Naples was also a literary, professional matter, and therefore a flesh wound in comparison to the worst examples of a failure to unpack, which usually involve holding on to some romantic wish, or nursing a romantic, sexual obsession.

6. As was the case with the vast majority of journalism assignment over the years, this idea originated with the editors, who had reached out to me. One of the strangest facts of my professional life is that I could never get any work as a journalist until I published my first book of fiction.

7. Never before or since have I encountered an image that so entwined the vibes of blushing bride, Mayor, and Godfather.

8. Most recently, The Last Baron: The Paris Kidnapping That Brought Down an Empire.

9. An example of New Orleans always punching above its weight in the national story is how this foursome features two New Orleans natives in Sancton and Isaacson.

10. Or the quantity? Surely it wasn’t the quality. Maybe the not nice place just served wine? I don’t have the book at hand. If anyone can remind me of what distinguished the nice from the not nice place in Revolutionary Road, I want to hear it. Thank you in advance.

11. The notion that the autobahns are private and expensive, while the slower and often more scenic roads are public and free, is something I only grasped after arriving in Italy.

12. We had brought our own deflated basketball, found a place to inflate it, and I walked to a solitary narrow street with a high blank wall lit by a street lamp above some kind of shrine, and simply shot the ball against the wall over and over for about five minutes. Then a bird flew into the narrow street with  a crazy zig-zag of confusion and smashed into one of the buildings. It was a real thump. It kept going and a moment later was gone.

A drunk or deranged bird. I took this as a sign of some kind. The sign perhaps that  I should not be desecrating the ancient city by shooting a basketball against one of its  buildings. So I went home. Alexander out of intuition about angering the FLorentine gods, or maybe discretion, didn’t even want to bounce the ball on the city’s street until we arrived at the court at Piazza D’Azeglio.

13. I talked to some guys after these games, in addition to Diego.

From him and everyone else there I was afforded the slight bump of basketball respect for my Americaness - it is still our game, after all, culturally, even if the world has caught up at the highest levels - and my height. And I was, in turn, so happy to find one language, Pick-up basketball - ‘the who’s got next?’, the postgame slapped five, the pointed finger to acknowledge an assist - that I could speak.

The other people I spoke to were from Great Britain. One rather tall and slope shouldered big man, around six foot three, crew cut, T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, had an earthbound hook shot that was part Jokic , part Ivica Zubac of the Clippers. He had just a enough of a skyhook that at least on one occasion a bunch of different accents called out simultaneously, “Kareem!” It turned out he was from Ireland and never played organized ball. He just played a lot in the park. Upon hearing this I said, “I played with a member of the Irish National team in college, Karl Butler.” He stared at me. “This was in 1986. He told us stories about how the team would walk five miles to get a keg of beer and walk five miles back with the keg on his shoulder. He liked to shoot. He was good. Look him up! Karl Butler!”

And then there were the goofy, happy eyed pair who ambled over when it was dark and asked to put up some shots. One very tall in a pale blue Fred Perry shirt. One short in a T-shirt. When they said they were from Manchester a few of the other players came by and said, “United or City?” I waited a while to bring up music. No, they had not heard of Moby Grape but yes to the Happy Mondays. As for Oasis, “I’m working the bar backstage at one of their shows,” said the tall one, whose pale blue shirt was the color of Man City. I paused on the verge of going on about it all, but instead asked how old they were.

“Eighteen,” said the tall one.

“Nineteen,” said the short one.

“We just got here,” said the tall one. “We’re traveling with them.” He gestured to a bench partly obscured by the lush branch of a tree. Through the leaves I could see a pair of young women.

Maybe it was my shock at their age - a shock not shared by Alexander who when I called over and said, “Guess how old these guys are?” looked up from the bench he was sitting on and said, “17 or 18” - or maybe it was the young women on the bench, but I suddenly felt very concerned for them. Or, if not very concerned, slightly protective. Isn’t that young to be wandering around? Of course it’s not. EVangeline’s friends with whom she congragated throughout our Florence visit were all traveling unchaperoned. What was wrong with me? Didn’t I recall the many adventures I had gotten into by the age of 18?\

14. I really love this book, and this essay, and this author, such a great and unlikely friend of mine. The fact that White passed away while I was trying to unpack before my trip was of some relevance; I couldn’t finish the piece I was working on because I was distracted by mourning Ed White!

And I guess I should also mention that Capote figures largely in the Harper Lee fiasco; Tonja Carter came from his people; Capote was a Carter. As if the whole thing wasn’t gothic enough.

15. I was no more enthusiastic about museums at his age. The dynamic between us for that hour reminds me to the epigraph of Michael Cunningham’s novel, A Home at The End of The World.

16. In fact, I would later discover, "The Birth of Venus" by Sandro Botticelli.

17. There is a photojournalism word for this I learned from my friend Matt Roberts, who was a photographer for the Cambodia Daily and later the Daily News. The word - the verb to describe this act of photo review - is chimping. I love that word. The woman was “chimping fiercely,” a phrase from one of Robert’s fantastic pieces describing his adventures as a photojournalist.