"Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable"

 
     James Joyce hated Rome. For reasons that had much to do with him and little with the Eternal City. He was 24 years old, drifting with his new family, forced to work in an Italian bank, copying letters—up to 200 a day. “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse.” he wrote to his brother.
     Harsh. Yet a damnation that echoed in my ears, not only while revisiting the wonders of the Vatican Museum, its arching gilt hallways stretching to the horizon, but to other cities as well: to Florence, for instance, at the Uffizi, with its harem of Botticellis, and the Galleria dell'Accademia, Michelangelo's David a marvel undiminished by 500 years.  

   Wondrous. But also half a millennium old, nearly. Doesn't anybody in Italy do anything magnificent anymore? Besides Ferraris, I mean. Everything of value seemed either 500 years old or baked that morning.
     As if to answer my question, as soon as we set foot in Venice, my 21-year-old, with the radar for the Happening Thing of the Moment the young innately possess, announced there was someplace he wanted to go. My wife and I tagged after him like a pair of pull toy ducks as he hurried through narrow alleys and across little bridges to the Palazzo Grassi to see the Damien Hirst show, "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable."
     Hirst is a British artist. Going in, I knew exactly two things about his work: one, he created those huge glass boxes with sharks and cows suspended in formaldehyde; and two, a decade ago he crafted a diamond encrusted platinum skull that embodies the insanely inflated values of the contemporary art world....

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The most beautiful library in Paris

    I could put on airs and pretend I knew it was there. 
    But the truth is, I didn't.
    The way I found myself in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France—the National Library of France—is this: I was visiting Paris for the third time last week, had been to the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Arc de Tri0mphe, the Opera and the Eiffel Tower. What, I wondered, did I want to do new? 
     I really like libraries. Not for the books, per se, but for some intangible grandeur they preserve. Maybe the idea of books having value, once, and perhaps still. They're just beautiful. I'm not sure I can explain it. 
    So I plugged in "Most beautiful library into Paris" into Google and came up with this. I think it was the distinctive beige ceiling, with its round skylights, that made me have to see it for myself. 
     The Richelieu Reading Room, as the above space is called, because its address is 58 rue de Richelieu is open only to researchers. Which I learned when the guard tried to turn me away. It was ironic. In many cultural institutions through Italy and Paris, journalists are admitted free—either out of respect or pity. But here, where there was no charge, I couldn't get in. I appealed to the guard, who said he didn't speak English, and summoned an administrator who did. I explained to her that I am a journalist from Chicago who wanted to step into the reading room.
    "People are doing research," she said. "They do not want to be disturbed." I realized she perhaps thought I was there to quiz people, perhaps about the upcoming presidential election. I assured here I wouldn't talk to anybody. I just wanted to see the place. She waved me in, another victory for French flexibility. I thought of the guard at the Library of Congress — who readers of my Chicago memoir might recall — who flatly refused to let my 7-year-old son see the reading room because he wasn't a registered researcher like his dad.

"Please return the books to their place."

    The room was worth the struggle. 
    If it looks extra fresh for a 143-year-old library, that's because it just reopened last May after five years of renovation work. 
     Tracing its roots to 1368, and the royal library founded by Charles V, the library has 14 million volumes, and is the repository for books published in France. Of course it has other buildings than this stupendous space, constructed in 1868, designed by Henry Labrouste.
     At the time it was the Imperial National Library, and the room was the Salle de Travail — the workroom — for the Department of Prints. Finished in 1873, it holds 80,000 books over three stories of shelves, seats nearly 330 readers, is divided into nine domes by 16 cast iron columns supporting spherical cupolas, "the successful disposition of which marks a distinct advance in the art of architecture," according to the Oct. 24, 1891 issue of The American Architect and Building News,  which noted its  "grand imperial effect."
    Indeed. Though the place was criticized when new. A British visitor in 1870 noted "the lighting of the new room is by no means satisfactory, there being too much light in summer and too little in winter. indeed, on more than one occasion last winter the reading room had to be closed before four o'clock, owing to the want of light."
     The library was not gas-lit for obvious reasons — the technology was still crude, and gas lights tended to cause fires, a particularly problem in a library holding not only the literary patrimony of France, but ancient Greek manuscripts.
    Although that was part of a general takedown, criticizing it for being noisy, poorly ventilated, lacking blotting paper, and decorated by medallions of writers exaggerating French contributions to literary, containing "three errors for which a child at school would be whipped." 
     Getting in was a challenge from the start, I was pleased to note. Though the librarians, "and indeed all those in any way connected to the establishment" were "polite and affable," those seeking admission had to submit "application at the bureau de l'administration" and show "that they have some definite object in view."
     "Foreigners are generally requested to make an application through their ambassadors, but for the benefit of English readers we may mention that the production of the British Museum reading ticket will immediately admit for the bearer a card of admission." 
     In view of that, I got off light. I spent maybe 15 minutes, tops, in the reading room, photographing it from various angles, and sitting quietly at space No. 186.  There I noted that, whatever advantages the internet certainly possesses, quite a number of young French people had taken it upon themselves to use the library on a sunny Thursday morning.

     For more than you'd ever want to know about the history of the French national library, including Jacobin leader Francois Hanriot's proposal, during the French revolution, that it be burned "partly, it would seem, because he was anxious to destroy the Fleur-de-lis and other armorial  bearings stamped on the books" plus minute observations of its condition in 1870, including a general disparagement of the new reading room, and many catty remarks on French vanity versus the unquestioned superiority of all things British, see this unsigned article in the April, 1870 Westminster Review, beginning on page 207.

Bebe Vio raises her foil against anti-vax hysteria

     You don't need to speak the language to have your attention snagged by the April issue of the Italian edition of Rolling Stone magazine.
     The cover is a fashion shot of Paralympic fencing champion Bebe Vio, dressed in Dior, her dark brown hair short, her deep blue eyes staring straight at the camera. The scars on her face are concealed by makeup, but those on the stump of her right arm are on display as her left prosthetic hand points directly at the viewer.
     "Vaccinatevi!" the headline reads.
     In English, "Vaccinate!"    

     It's tempting to think of resistance to vaccination as being a particularly American form of selfish ignorance, like belief in healing crystals or denial of climate change. But the phenomenon is, sadly, global. While some 380,000 people die each year of meningitis, mostly in Africa and other underdeveloped regions, a significant number of parents in supposedly developed countries still resist vaccinating their children. Italian Rolling Stone calls it a "real civil battle" and Vio, 20, is their poster child in the fight.
     Born in Venice, Vio was 11 when she contracted meningitis — the Centers for Disease Control suggests children of 11 or 12 get inoculated against the disease, with a booster shot at 16....

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Several columns for the price of one

Piazza Colonna, Rome.

     Computers are such an integral part of our lives now, I don't know why I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that among the joys of coming home Saturday-- seeing the house still standing, scooping up the ecstatic dog at a neighbor's—was sitting in front of my smoking hot, souped-up iMac, touch-typing and no longer having to navigate the world on the molasses-dripping-from-a-stick-in-winter modem speeds found at 19th century apartments in Rome and Venice and small hotels in Florence and Paris.
     Old school, I suppose, an echo of the scorn we used to feel for computer nerds and their Tandy motherboard projects sent away for from an ad in the back of Popular Mechanics. 
     I immediately went back and posted pictures over the past week's worth of posts, which had seemed blank, inadequate, without illustrations. It was frustrating, not being able to share photos. I had got a week's worth of posts to run, and then planned to just toss up an interesting picture and a few words: how cool it is, for instance, that the sewer covers in Rome feature the initials "S.P.Q.R"—"Senātus Populusque Rōmānus," "The Roman Senate and People," the same acronym carried into battle by centurions 2,000 years ago and found on ancient Roman coins. Well, cool to me anyway.

Marcus Aurelius's column

      Our hotel in Rome was a few blocks from Piazza Colonna, the square dominated by Marcus Aurelius's column, which we passed every night hurrying to our favorite gelato spot, Giolitti's. The square around it was blocked off and patrolled by soldiers—the valid fear, I suppose, being that somebody will ram a truck into the 1,800-year-old pillar, with its winding face telling of the victories of the emperor, famed for this "Meditations." 
      The column is one of the many based on Trajan's column in the Roman Forum. I figured, I would toss up the photo with some glib line, "Here's your column for today." Given the Romans had the technological ability to build the thing with chisels and ropes, it seemed perverse, in our modern age, not to be able to upload a picture of it.  
      Articles on such columns invariably note that it can be difficult to ascertain how much of the stories depicted on the columns are fact, how much propaganda, and that had a familiar ring to it. Donald Trump didn't invent lying about your accomplishments.
     Jump forward about ten days, and we were meeting our son in Place Vendome, in Paris, to go to lunch. There, I should have known but didn't, is found what at first struck me as yet another copy of Trajan's column, except in bronze. Luckily we had a few minutes to kill, and I went in for a closer look. Not a copy at all, except in concept. Rather, it is a completely different spiral narrative, this one celebrating Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz.  
     A reminder that, when doing a column, it's all too easy just to imitate somebody else's column.  

Place Vendome, Paris.

     

Homeward bound

     A day is 24 hours, last time I checked, and while I like to have a post up at midnight, it isn't a RULE. As your amiable host, I get to set the rules. And the truth is--truth being a value even more valued than consistency--when it was midnight in Chicago Saturday, it was 7 a.m. in Paris, and I was just stirring in our hotel room in the Latin Quarter. Dinner and packing kept us busy until midnight, there was no energy or inclination to cull some words from the herd and assemble them in any kind of cohesive order. Now it's almost time for a quick croissant and the bolt to the airport.
     Or maybe not so much of a bolt. The sign of a good vacation is it resets your carburetor a little, dials it back from a frantic roar to a steady purr. Cabbies good or bad, flights early or late, crowded or empty, we'll get back all the same, to the deep rut we've shuffled over years. And when we do, we'll even appreciate THAT. Another reason you go on vacation: to come back. To experience that sweet moment went you drop your bags, look around, smile, and say to yourself, "Hey, I live here! This is pretty nice!"
     Not a bad thought. I began this thinking I was telling you you'd have to wait until tonight. But I think this will do. Back at full 10-finger strength tomorrow.

Attack on the Champs-Elysees

     People eat late in Paris. So when news of Thursday night's terror attack on the Champs-Elysees started pinging across our cell phones, shortly after 9 p.m. local time, we were sitting around the dinner table at the apartment of friends in Boulogne Billancourt, a western suburb, discussing the upcoming presidential election—the first round of voting begins Sunday. As with America last November, theirs too is devolving into a nightmarish farce, with the likely winner suddenly seeming to be either the communist Jean-Luc Melenchon, who wants to pull out of the European Union and nationalize the banks, or the National Front xenophobe Marine Le Pen. It hardly needs to be said that the murder of a police officer and the wounding of two others, a shocking event in France, on the wide shopping boulevard synonymous with prosperity, will boost Le Pen's all-too-real chances. A reminder of the tacit collaboration between haters around the world. Groups like ISIS commit atrocities in the name of Islam trying to drive a wedge between Muslims and the moderating influence of the tolerant West, and fearful haters like Le Pen eagerly believe them.  Both are allies, and both want the exact same thing.

Metro mysteries

    I've ridden the Paris Metro nine times in the past two days, racing from museum to restaurant to library, rumbling from Odeon to Pyramides to Opera, and so couldn't help noticing ways their system is different than Chicago's.
     No announcements. They commute on utter quiet on their trains' rubber wheels.
    Some parts took figuring out. The first train I went to get on pulled into Cardinal Lemoine station. The other doors slid open, but the door directly in front of me stayed resolutely closed. I sprinted to  the next door-- Paris subway trains have three or four entrances to the two on Chicago "L" cars--and hopped on the train. On Paris trains, riders have to open the doors themselves to get on or off, either by lifting a chrome lever or, on newer trains, pushing a green button. Parisians seem to handle the responsibility well.
     The benefits are obvious. Less wear and tear on the door mechanisms, for one, since they only open when a person wants to get on or off, not every time the train pulls into the station. It also allows, I noticed, gentlemen a chance to be polite, as those standing by the doors will open them for the benefit of others, even though they themselves are not leaving the train.
     Other differences are less readily explained. I have seen more people rolling cigarettes in two days riding the Paris Metro than I have in the past 20 years riding the "L," including a man Wednesday who removed the tiny butt of a smoked cigarette from between his lips and delicately inserted it into the makings of his next smoke. Why all this impromptu manufacture? It couldn't be poverty--France does have 25 percent unemployment, so maybe that's it. Though there are a lot of poor people in Chicago too and I don't see them rolling cigarettes on the train. Maybe that's it--I'm riding the train more  here. Or maybe it's that so many more people still smoke here.or -- a guess from left field-- maybe a country with national health care taxes the bejesus out of cigarettes, to pay for the enormous medical burden they place on society, but loose tobacco for some reason is taxed less. Anybody know?
     While I'm tossed out questions that I would figure out myself were I not on vacation, what's with the scarves? French men like to wear them loosely around their necks, dark blues and purples and greens, fine wool scarves that are part warmth, part decoration. You might see such a scarf on a flamboyant young man or two in Chicago, but here they're everywhere. I know it's dome kind of Gallic badge of masculinity. But why?