Sunday June 14

            The last half of the hospital of the previous entry was completed today, so some of the details of which corridors we wandered at what time to see which doctor might be confused.  But that adds to the whole Twilight Zone aspect of the experience.

            I have been visiting Alex daily since then.  The swelling in her feet took more than 24 hours to begin to decline, but they are getting better.  (And Alex says that they are better than she has seen them for some time.)  The latest is that she will be on IV antibiotics until the last minute, Tuesday, when she can go home and back for her trip back to the states with the group on Wednesday.  Meanwhile, she has to keep her feet elevated as much as possible (for the rest of her life!), wear support hose, etc.  She gets to fly back first class, so we are all very jealous!!  (I confess that I have volunteered to help her in first class, if she needs an aid up there…but I doubt if the insurance will pay for that….)

            I am very glad that I had the last class, 2-4, on Thursday, especially since after our Twilight Zone night before, I slept until 11:00 and still had to organize notes, etc.  And the enxt day we had an interesting class.  Alex had asked me if we could have an early class on Friday so that students could head off to Venice for the day, so we had an 8:00 class in my apartment (since the classrooms did not open that early).  And Friday afternoon I took a long nap and began to feel a bit more like myself.

            That Friday evening, Frederica had the NH Institute and FSC professors for dinner.  Originally it had been scheduled for Thursday, but after our Wednesday hospital adventure, it was not a good day after all.  So Terri, who headed off for Venice Friday morning, missed the dinner.  It was a wonderful, fun time with delicious food: crepes, stuffed calamari and Frederica’s special tiramisu with grated chocolate on top.  It was great to see her friend Robert again and to talk more with the NH professors about everything.  Finally at the end of the evening we discussed plans for our joint Lake Garda trip on Monday: olive oil tasting, then a market bazaar, then the ruined villa town of Sirmione.   I walked back home with the NH professors, not realizing that it was not a very long walk at all.  (I had struggled to find the right stop to take the bus to Frederica’s, arriving late!  If I’d walked, it would have been better…)

            Yesterday, Saturday, I was determined to take a car and see the Palazzo Te in Mantua.  I had not known until I called that morning that there would indeed be a car to rent.  (I also almost had heart failure Friday night when my computer said that the F drive was empty….my whole hard drive, empty of all my pictures!?!?  I turned off the computer and hard drive and prayed all night, and it was fine, thank goodness…..)

            Just before I set off to get my car, about 10:30, Alex called and needed some things from her apartment.  So I picked up my tiny Fiat Panda, got to her hotel and then to the hospital.  I stayed for about an hour, enjoying her pictures from Pisa and chatting.

            I left about 1:00 for Mantua, missing the signs for the smaller road to get there, heading off for Rovigo before I turned around and took the autostrade.  I arrived at the Palazzo Te about 2:30, starving for something to eat.  The café/restaurant there had another chocolate croissant and iced tea, which did me fine.  I also bought one of those round shortbread specialties of Mantua, but I did not begin it until later in the car.

            Hettie, from the NH Institute, had chatted on Friday during our walk that she was disappointed in the Palazzo Te and the surface that remained after restoration.  I guess that I am not that much of an expert, but I just loved it.  I used to teach it as a shocking example of Mannerism, but as I walked around, I was not shocked so much as intrigued and fascinated by Guilio Romano’s unending creativity.  Finally, as I was studying the inner courtyard and the dropping triglyphs, with a rusticated stone below as if to catch that triglyph, and the mask of a screaming man in the keystone of the arch heading out to the courtyard….I began to smile, amused.  Romano was having the time of his life at the Palazzo Te.  Each room is truly different, with a wondrous array of ceiling paintings, stuccoes, myths, bacchanals and all, culminating, of course, in the terrifying Room of the Giants, with everything falling inward upon our heads.

            And it was so much more amusing than the endless (and repetitive) rooms of the Vatican and even the Gallery Borghese.  Palazzo Te is also not a huge place, and each room is almost humanistic in size.  Architecture has developed a long way from the delightfully proportioned rooms at the Ducal Palace in Urbino to the overdone Vatican to the cleverness of the Palazzo Te.   Sitting along the inner courtyard at Palazzo Te, in the “seats” that are possible because of the indented plinths, I utterly enjoyed this palace.   And later, when visiting the museum upstairs, I understood the organization of the floor levels and that there are indeed three floors.  The uppermost windows that one can see in the courtyard are actually placed very low in those third floor walls.

            I then drove into Mantua, parked near a park and made it to Sant’Andrea by 5;30 or so, well before its closing at 7:00.  I think there was a service when I had last visited there, in 2007 with Rala, so my photos and understanding of the building then was limited.  But this time I was able to complete the circuit of the building.  It was another example of misunderstanding and mis-liking (or mis-disliking) a building because I had not thoroughly visited it.  There is indeed a majesty to this building.  It is not simple, as with Brunelleschi, and it is much more heavily decorated (although much of it is trompe l’oeil decoration, especially the coffers of the main vault, presumably to save cost…).   But after seeing the extravagance and extremely ornate decoration of St. Peter’s, I appreciated Sant’Andrea more.  It is a more humanistic, if not down-to-earth, majesty.   One is not so dwarfed within its vaults as uplifted, and the vaulted chapels off the transepts enriched the space more than I realized before.  And I discovered that there were other little chapels within the piers separating the three main chapels along the nave.  I just love visiting these places in person, whether I have to incur the expense of renting a car or not!

            I also enjoy walking through Mantua.  I saw the restaurant where Rala and I enjoyed a delicious pumpkin ravioli in 2007.   I also enjoy the little shops and stalls and got a few more presents for the kids and another deeper blue necklace for myself.

            I found the back road to Verona from Mantua.  We drove a goodly portion alongside fields of corn and other goods (some in very wet fields…rice?).  There were also some neon strips and huge mall-like stores, so Italy has got its share of American-style consumerism that is less apparent in the historical center of their towns.

            When I got back, while parking the little Fiat, I saw Joel, who related his story of getting pick-pocketed in Venice, probably as he left the mask store, although he did not discover this until later.  Frederica had already been contacted and ensured that he had some money left for the last few days.  This has certainly been an adventurous trip.

            Once home, I cooked up some squash pasta of my own with some ratatouille (minus zucchini).   It’s a question now of eating up the leftovers just in time before our departure Wednesday.