Days 28 & 29: Pisa, Milan, Paris

Pisa's Cathedral Square (or Square of Miracles). Here you can see, from left to right, the Baptistry, the Cathedral and the Leaning Tower. Why does the tower tilt? Because it was built on ground too soft on one side to support its weight! (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The old year is coming to an end and so is this retrospective journey. Events at home were getting steadily worse, and it became clear that I would have to return to England sooner than planned. The final leg to Rome would have to wait until another day. 

I said goodbye to Margarethe, then Benji walked with me through Lucca's early-morning streets to the bus station. In less than an hour I was in Pisa. It's a magnificent city with a really ancient feel, and, like Florence, is bisected by the river Arno, the most important Italian river after the Tiber. I hadn't realised how big Pisa was — it has a population of 200,000 if you include all the suburbs. I also hadn't realised how much there was to see apart from the cathedral with its famous crooked campanile. I could have spent a lot longer visiting Pisa's numerous historic churches and medieval palaces, but I had a train to catch.

Milan's Piazza del Duomo (Cathedral Square) in front of one of the grand arched entrances to the 19th-century Vittorio Emmanuele shopping mall. The cathedral, out of sight on the right, is the fifth largest cathedral in the world. Milan, with a population of three million, is a huge industrial, commercial and financial centre, with the third largest economy of all the EU cities, and is the second biggest Italian metropolis after Rome. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.) 

In a few hours I had arrived in Milan. I had some time to kill before catching my next train, so I walked from the Art Deco and Fascist-inspired railway station into the heart of the city. It was dark, but no longer pouring with rain as it had been in Pisa. I passed La Scala opera house, then entered Cathedral Square through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a four-storey double arcade which was constructed between 1865 and 1877 and is one of the world's oldest shopping centres. I'd seen something similar before in Naples — the Galleria Umberto I, which opened in 1890. As you might imagine, the retailers here are the famous names of jewellery and haute couture. I found it all rather alienating and intimidating, especially in the dark. I felt dwarfed by the austere and monumental architecture, and unsettled by the fabulously expensive luxury items displayed in the shops — the icy, inhuman touch of wealth and commerce. The Camino seemed far away. Milan is, of course, a world capital of style and fashion, and I definitely did not fit in, what with my weatherbeaten pack and my mud-stained boots and the distant look in my eye.

The rooftops of Paris from the Butte Montmartre.

I took the overnight sleeper to Paris. At the French border we were woken (that is those of us who were asleep — it was a cramped, uncomfortable compartment) by customs officers and border police, who examined our passports and identity cards. A few people were turfed off the train. Border controls were obviously getting more stringent because of the increasing European refugee crisis and extremist threat.

I did manage a surprising amount of sleep, and before long it was early morning in Paris and I was walking across the Place de la Bastille and the Place de la République — soon to be shown on millions of TV sets as the national focus of mourning after the Paris terror attacks of 13 November (also my birthday, as it happens). I checked in to a cheap hotel just off the Rue Saint-Denis. 

For the rest of the day I simply walked — through the Marais and the Place des Vosges, along the Rue de Rivoli, by the Louvre and in the Tuileries Garden, up to Montmartre and the magical snow-white Basilica of Sacré-Coeur. I admired the view of Paris from the Butte Montmartre, astonished as always at the lack of skyscrapers. I watched the artists, buskers and street performers in the Place du Tertre. And I spent a long time wandering round Montmartre Cemetery, discovering the graves of Berlioz, Dumas, Heine, Stendhal, Truffaut and Zola. 

The Musée d'Orsay on the river Seine. The bridge you can see is the Pont Royal.

Before taking the Eurostar train back to London the next day, I spent a few wonderful but exhausting hours looking at the paintings and sculptures in the Musée d'Orsay — which is housed in the Gare d'Orsay, a former railway station on the left bank of the Seine. Here you can find the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world (these were originally held in the Jeu de Paume gallery on the other side of the river, where I'd first seen them in the early 1970s).

The Main Hall of the Musée d'Orsay. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

I can't even begin to describe the treasures contained in this museum, so here's just a brief visual taste . . .

Dr Paul Gachet by Vincent van Gogh. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Alone by Toulouse-Lautrec. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Apples and Oranges by Paul Cézanne. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Renoir's Bal du Moulin de la Galette. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Monet's The Magpie. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Arearea by Paul Gauguin. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

1500th Post: Nothing But Shadow And Mist

A quarter way up Ben Nevis in August 2009.

After 1500 posts, if it's possible (it isn't) to distil the essence of this self and this blog, this is it . . .

What ends happily is never the end / the secret is / there's another secret always. DANNIE ABSE

All the way to Heaven is Heaven. ST CATHERINE OF SIENA

Click the links . . .

O'Cebreiro

Navarre

Eunate

Tierra de Campos

Hontanas

Oloron

Undués

Saint-Trophime

Agrigento

Nájera

Dents du Midi

Fribourg

Irache

Vauvert

Enna

Horreos

Ultreïa

Naples

Devon

Rochegude

Etna

Don Blas

Troyes

Hadrian's Wall

Paris

Orford

Somerset

Tricastela

Love locks on the Pont des Arts, Paris.

Lyrical Paris

We may never get to Paris

And find the café of our dreams

So I’m leaving for Paris

Don’t try to find out where I am

April in Paris

Chestnuts in blossom

Holiday tables under the trees

Sous le ciel de Paris

Marchent des amoureux

Sous le ciel de Paris

Coule un fleuve joyeux

Paris c’est une blonde

Qui plaît à tout le monde

I’ve got nothing to lose

But the hole in my shoes

And small change

The pavement cafés

On the Champs-Élysées

Are deserted

And the trees are so bare

On the Boulevard de la Madeleine

I walk the boulevards

And I ask the moon and the stars to find you

But we don’t exist

We are nothing but shadow and mist

Nothing but shadow and mist

I’m throwing my arms around Paris

Because only stone and steel

Accept my love

Because nobody

Wants my love

Walking along the Via Francigena in France.

Resemblance reproduces the formal aspects of objects but neglects their spirit. CHING HAO

We are acting parts in a play that we have never read and never seen, whose plot we don't know, whose existence we can glimpse, but whose beginning and end are beyond our present imagination and conception. RD LAING

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires. NELSON MANDELA

Lyrical Paris

I conjure up an imaginative Paris, half-real, half-mythical: Jacques Prévert scribbling poems on café tablecloths; Baudelaire, in drug-induced somnolence, stumbling down alleyways through puddles of spilt absinthe; Sartre and de Beauvoir debating existentialism in Les Deux Magots; Jean Genet finding epiphanies in Art Nouveau urinals; Henry Miller wallowing in nostalgie de la boue and celebrating the lotus flower and its muddy roots; Rilke’s panther pacing up and down its cage in the Jardin des Plantes; the mentally ill and terminally insane in the Salpêtrière, endlessly gesturing; government ministers and their mistresses legislating and fornicating in the Palace Bourbon and the Palais du Luxembourg; portrait painters in Montmartre flattering their sitters by accentuating the good bits and airbrushing the dodgy bits; pretty sirens in the posh bars of the Boulevard Saint-Germain beckoning in the tourists for a flinchingly expensive glass of red; smart prostitutes patrolling the Bois de Boulogne like efficient businesswomen, while the lurid, tacky ones smoke crack in the backstreets of Pigalle; fashion-accessory shih tzus and chihuahuas trotting by their Versace and Gaultier-clad owners along the Champs-Élysées, or being carried in handbags like exquisite, tiny invalids; clochards swigging cheap wine on the quays near the Pont Saint-Michel; the open-air bookstalls lining the Seine’s Left Bank, a scene unchanged for a hundred years; the mathematical, metallic chic of the Tour Eiffel . . .

. . . but, above all, I imagine the songs of Paris, those innumerable clichéd, romantic songs, crooned by an Yves Montand or a Charles Aznavour, and those more authentic, lived-in songs from the big heart of a diminutive Edith Piaf, and I trawl through these songs, and am drawn inexplicably to a dozen of them; then I steal a line from this one and a line from that one, like a jackdaw filching rings dropped in the Tuileries Gardens, and arrange them in a different way, cut-and-paste fashion, until a poem emerges from this musical bric-a-brac, and finds itself. You might call it a cento or poetic patchwork, an assemblage or lyrical collage . . .

Lyrical Paris

We may never get to Paris
And find the café of our dreams
So I’m leaving for Paris
Don’t try to find out where I am

April in Paris
Chestnuts in blossom
Holiday tables under the trees

Sous le ciel de Paris
Marchent des amoureux
Sous le ciel de Paris
Coule un fleuve joyeux

Paris c’est une blonde
Qui plaît à tout le monde

I’ve got nothing to lose
But the hole in my shoes
And small change

The pavement cafés
On the Champs-Élysées
Are deserted
And the trees are so bare
On the Boulevard de la Madeleine

I walk the boulevards
And I ask the moon and the stars to find you
But we don’t exist
We are nothing but shadow and mist
Nothing but shadow and mist

I’m throwing my arms around Paris
Because only stone and steel
Accept my love
Because nobody
Wants my love

A Grey Day In Paris

I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day. ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Bordeaux To Paris

On the Monday I took a train from Bordeaux to Paris. This journey under grey skies brought me back to earth with a jolt. The landscape I passed through seemed tedious and ordinary, especially beyond Poitiers, and flat, featureless, arable fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Or perhaps I was just feeling a little tired and jaded after my long walk...

I arrived at Gare Montparnasse in the early evening. It was pouring with rain, and I walked for half an hour through the rain to the Hôtel de Nesle, a cheap, tiny, off-beat hotel near Place Saint-Michel. The next day I explored Paris, city of love and romance, but on this occasion I didn't find much of either. I think it was something to do with my mood, which had become dull and listless...     

The famous 13th-century stained glass windows of La Sainte-Chapelle.

La Sainte-Chapelle under grey Parisian skies.

The centre west portal of Notre-Dame. This stupendous example of Gothic art depicts the Last Judgment.

Notre-Dame de Paris. The cathedral's three rose windows — north, south and west (you can see the west one here) — are some of the great artistic masterpieces of Christianity.

Le Pont des Arts. Here couples pledge their undying love for each other by attaching a padlock to the railings and throwing the key into the river below. 

Near the Rue Mouffetard on the Left Bank.

The Pantheon.

The Pantheon is a mausoleum which contains the remains of distinguished French citizens. Here is the memorial to aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince.

Underneath the the Pantheon's central cupola.

The university of the Sorbonne.

The Sorbonne.

Place de la Sorbonne.

After two weeks' walking through remote, rural France, I soon found the grand buildings of Paris — those monumental symbols of wealth, power and privilege — rather oppressive. I began to feel unwell, and a cloud of lethargy and mild depression enveloped me...