Italy is a silly place.
For readers with whom I have kept in close contact during these five weeks of travel — and the preceding five months of study in Paris — the description of a place as “silly” is not new. I use “silly” to mean a variety of things, be it dysfunctional, surprising, aggravating, foreign.
But I’ll say it again: Italy is a silly place, for all the above reasons and then some.
I explained it to a friend the other day during a Skype call: it almost feels like Italy only recently decided that it wanted to be a developed nation. Granted, Italy IS a developed nation, with a very high and lovely standard of living. Their food, culture and absolutely delicious and inexpensive coffee products treated me very well during my recent week here.
And yet, somehow it still has this very casual, off-kilter approach to daily life in this Western world — any one reading any foreign coverage of the Italian political system and my main man Silvio Berlusconi knows as much.
I think my visit to Italy, the only part of my trip where I am truly traveling and lodging completely alone, came at the wrong end of my trip. I’ve been on the road for more than a month now, battling missed trains and crazy connections and changing food prices and sometimes bad operas and the like, and I’m mostly just ready to go home.
Instead of that, I got a week alone. In a country where I don’t speak the language and have really nothing to do. Which was kind of a bother.
But I still had a mostly lovely week in Milano, the second-biggest and wealthiest city in Italy, home to culture, fashion and money markets. And, of course, the world-famous Teatro alla Scala, arguably the best known opera house in the world.
After my crazy train trip here from Bavaria — see the earlier blog post for the unfortunate but still true details — I was not really into the idea of city exploration. What I wanted to and actually did do was sleep.
Upon waking, I discovered that Milano is an elegant and leafy city, with tree lined streets and (mostly) beautiful people. It should be said that, even though Milan is a major fashion capital, this isn’t always evident when walking amongst its people. For every expertly coifed young lady in a gorgeous floral print or a suave older businessman in a perfectly picked and colorful suit, there are seven less-than classy others walking by.
The architecture and layout and parks are all delicately northern Italian — an Italian friend in Paris adamantly informed me that ‘Milan is NOT Italy’ — and the coffee, as mentioned above, is TO DIE FOR. Cheap and plentiful and elevated to an art form of the quotidian and the ordinary, coffee in Italy is probably of my new most favorite things and would have made this portion of my trip worth it even if the opera wasn’t wonderful ( which it was.)
No matter where you order it — and you order and pay for it first, and then wait at the bar for your beverage — coffee of any kind is rich and exact and basically perfect; I’ve been told its because the Italians know how to roast their beans just so. And it so good. More than once, I ordered multiple cups at a single café, mostly because it was so cheap, but also because I got the impression that Italian cafés aren’t as casual about the whole “sit here until forever” thing as their Parisian counterparts. It also made me remember how BAD the coffee is in most places in Paris.
I arrived in Milan on a Tuesday for a Thursday opera, meaning I had a few days to kill. I spent most of my time in cafés and the small but perfectly adequate central park (Parco Sempione), sitting, sunning, reading and just being generally lazy. I managed to finish Camus’ “Le Mythe de Sisysphe” in French and worked my way through some fascinating French journalism in a recent issue of my favorite French daily, Le Libération.
I also wandered around the city, seeing the beautiful Central Train station, an elegant iron-glass-and-stone shopping galleria that is considered one of the world’s first shopping malls, the famous shopping streets and many quirky and absolutely delightful miscellaneous buildings and avenues. It was cool to see the street cars, too, a copy of which I just happened to ride last summer in San Francisco along Market Street.
I spent a few hours in the shop at La Scala, where I bought a cheap and mostly acceptable version of “Macbeth” at the New York Met from 1959, went on a run one hot and ill-advised afternoon, and got ready for my last big opera night of the summer.
First off, La Scala is probably the most beautiful theatre I have ever been inside of in my entire life. For all the ugliness and functionality of the Bastille Opera in Paris, La Scala is subtle, elegant and absolutely gorgeous. Lush, red curtains, intricately detailed wall-decor and a gigantic chandelier share a perfectly preserved opera hall as a home. It never gets old seeing the composers memorialized in European opera houses — it’s a mix of the famous and obvious with the nationalist heroes that today are not known at all.
Furthermore, La Scala recognizes its status as a tourist destination but doesn’t let that cheapen the experience for anyone. It is still one of the most serious opera houses in the world, and it seems to keep that vision at the forefront of its mission.
(Side note: La Scala has seen a series of strikes and union protests in recent months, as the Berlusconi government explores ways of trimming back the house’s admittedly generous cultural subsidy. As such, many performances this summer have been cancelled or delayed, and the director of “The Barber of Seville” unexpectedly walked out of the production in early July during the first week of the staging, calling for a sudden substitution.)
I had first level box seats to the left of the stage, and I had what was probably the best view a stage as I’ve had this whole summer. I shared my box with a Milanese couple and a couple visiting from Singapore, and I think this is the kind of audience that comes to La Scala, making it a perfect house for my project. With an audience built on popular legacy, the theatre both encourages and excites this audience by expertly staging classic works.
And the staging I saw of “The Barber of Seville” was really something. It was almost casually perfect, as if the brilliant main cast just happened to find themselves onstage together that night and decided that, since they really weren’t doing anything else, they might like to sing the hell out of an early 19th century Italian opera about barbers and young lovers and the like, especially considering the skill level of the there-assembled full size orchestra.
The entire cast was fantastic. The soprano lead was breathtaking, the bel canto tenor was excellent, the famed Barber was charming and roguish and every single cast member sang well and seemed to be having a great time. In true opera buffa fashion, the opera is short on plot — a disguised Spanish count woos a young girl held captive by her only slightly creepy guardian, and with the help of the cunning and lovable local barber, everything works to everyone’s best interests — but big on musical familiarity. This means that a lesser cast could have just let the work rest and sang the roles with a boring exactness.
Instead, they were positively delightful, making the whole evening fun, funny and musically superb. It wasn’t a controversial new staging like some of the other operas I’ve seen this summer, but it was pretty perfect in its classical, traditional way. It was a great ending to a madcap summer of opera, music, trains and adventure.
I’ll probably post at least one more time before my flight home from London on Tuesday morning, but know this, dear readers: it has been a pleasure to share my summer — and earlier Parisian spring — adventures with you, and I hope that you have enjoyed reading this half as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
Tomorrow, it’s Paris, with London on Monday and Detroit on Tuesday. Detroit might seem like the lesser of three cities in that travel narrative, but to me its the biggest and best of all: it’s home.
I can’t wait.