Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide

by Douglas S. Mack

  “Grazie,” I said.

  Joseph smiled weakly.

  I consulted my predecessors for guidance in ordering—roast chicken, per Frommer’s advice, and lasagne, which my mother had at an unknown restaurant in Florence, breathlessly reporting, in a postcard to her brother, that “they use orange cheese, not yellow.” Both dishes were deliciously robust and sublimely tender, especially the chicken. Good call, Frommer. Forty-five years later, you’ve still got your touch.

  Before waddling out the door, I again tried to strike up conversation with Joseph.

  “Scusi?” I said. “Restaurant is in my old guide.” I opened to the listing and showed him.

  “Da Buzzino!” He chuckled as he saw the bold-faced type.

  “Yes, and it’s an old book,” I emphasized, drawing my hand across the cover. “Nineteen sixty-three! Europe on Five Dollars a Day! I found Da Buzzino in here!”

  “In the book?”

  “Yes. An old book!”

  “Thank you,” he offered and walked away.

  “There’s little decent night life in Florence,” Frommer warns. “Best thing to do is simply relax with a drink at an outdoor cafe in the Piazza della Repubblica, and listen to the open-air bands.”

  As promised, a jazz quartet played in the middle of the piazza, against the backdrop of a carousel, the imposing Pensione Pendini, and, in the distance, the final fiery brushstrokes of sunset. Outdoor cafés sprawled across large expanses of two sides of the square, with happy diners raising wineglasses and laughing boisterously. Couples walked by holding hands; some paused to dance to the music. These were not the spastic nightclub moves that most Americans mistakenly believe is the epitome of graceful locomotion, but polished, Fred-and-Ginger dancing, the kind that makes the observer mesmerized with delight and, if he is by himself, miles from anyone he knows, soul-crushingly lonely. My parents’ letters rushed back into my mind, their happiness making me distinctly unhappy.

  I wandered over to the loggia along the Pensione Pendini, hoping to clear my head. Big mistake—just my luck that at the precise moment I wanted to find something dreary or at least mundane, a counterpoint to an oppressively sublime evening, I happened across an unspeakably beautiful busker singing an aria. Her voice was delicate yet confident, utterly captivating, and my heart broke just a bit more with each note of her song, which was titled, I believe, “Dear Lonely Backpacker, Just Kill Yourself Now.”

  A small crowd surrounded her, including a very drunk Italian man who swayed with the music and gently implored every nearby woman to dance with him. They all politely rebuffed his advances, though if he’d turned to me, I just might have taken his hand. It struck me that I could very easily end up like this guy, drunkenly wandering the streets of Florence, eyes at half-mast, a melancholy smile affixed to my face, besotted by the city and forever in search of love.

  I glanced back across the piazza and noticed a commotion. Something less-than-beautiful was going down. Finally. I took it as my cue to leave, pausing momentarily to toss a few coins in the singer’s bucket and silently profess my undying love to her.

  A group of men had appeared from the shadows, each with a bulging sack slung over his shoulder. With furtive glances, they checked their surroundings, then dropped the sacks, which turned out to be bedsheets holding an array of chic handbags bearing the names of Italian fashion houses. As they set about arranging their wares, I noticed that they were standing just a few feet from a massive sign bearing a message in English, Italian, and French: “Buying counterfeit goods is a crime.”

  Synchronized touristing at the Duomo.

  Each man was no more than twenty-five years old and lean, with a weary posture that seemed at odds with the determined look in his eyes. They were all West African; based on Italian immigration trends and the fact that they spoke French with each other, I’d guess they were from Senegal.

  Few tourists were interested in purchasing a handbag, but now and then an American—always, alas, one of the stereotypically loud and boorish ones—would stop to haggle. It was an amusing sight, both for the juxtaposition of red-faced, argumentative tourists and poised, smirking vendors, and for the circumstances of the transaction: in this oh-so-authentic place, here was a scene involving a knockoff product (probably not even made in Italy), an American tourist, and an African immigrant. A tableau of modern Italy, definitely not something that appeared in my mother’s letters.

  In fact, such scenes would become commonplace—they are the new authenticity of our globalized age. I was quickly discovering that, just as in the United States, the tourist industry in Italy—and much of western Europe—seemed to depend on immigrants, at least to outward appearances. Statistics back this up: more than half of Italy’s immigrant population works in the service industry, including restaurants, hotels, museums, gift shops, and other tourist-oriented businesses.

  Shortly after I had arrived in Florence, I had stopped in a café for some gelato, and it was served to me by a woman who, before I could open my mouth, greeted me in English inflected with a thick Russian accent. My last conversation in Florence would be with a chipper Indian man named Sathivel, who sold me my bus ticket back to the airport. In between those interactions, I saw Southeast Asian women selling brightly colored silk scarves on the Piazza Santa Croce, Rom men hawking remote-controlled cars and other toys along the Arno, a dapper West African maître d’ at a fancy outdoor café, a veritable United Nations of vendors—but seemingly no native-born Italians—at the various street markets.

  Many Italians seem not to have gotten the memo about changing times, changing notions of authenticity. Just a month before my trip, Silvio Berlusconi had been elected prime minister, for the third time, based in part on a campaign promise to crack down on immigration. He had also aligned himself with the explicitly anti-immigrant Northern League political party, whose campaign tactics had included a poster of an American Indian in full feather headdress with the ominous caption, “They were not able to regulate immigration—now they live on reservations—think about them.” By 2010, some 4.2 million resident foreigners lived in Italy, comprising roughly 7 percent of the nation’s total population, about one percentage point above the European Union average. (Interestingly, the Italian government’s official “resident foreigner” figures include children born in Italy to foreign parents.) By comparison, the 2010 U.S. Census documented 36.7 million foreign-born residents, or 12 percent of the total population.

  One of the ironies of Italy’s burgeoning anti-immigrant sentiment is that until recently, the flow went the other way: outward. The nation’s departures outnumbered arrivals until 1972, with nearly 26 million Italians emigrating to other countries between 1876 and 1976.

  What’s even more jarring, though, is Italy’s response to the twin influxes of immigrants and tourists. The basic message appears to be: “You foreigners, the ones who don’t stay, the ones who only want to examine our culture and not become a part of our social fabric, the ones who condescend to us and overrun our most cherished historic sites: we want you. You other foreigners, the ones who actually desire to live here, the ones who, in fact, fill the menial hospitality industry jobs that keep tourism afloat and ensure that the culture-dabbling Good Foreigners keep coming in droves: go away.”

  As I watched the vendors in the piazza, I wanted to know their stories: Where, exactly, were they from? Were they here legally? Had they faced the discrimination I’d been hearing so much about? But implicit in the question “Where are you from?” is the accusation “You don’t belong here.” You’d never ask it of someone who looks Italian, after all. More than wanting to know their stories, to scratch the alluring patina of this place and understand what was beyond the surface, I loathed the idea of being an obnoxious, prying American.

  In any case, as I worked up the nerve to approach them, they suddenly started tossing their handbags into hasty piles in the centers of their sheets, pulled the four corners together, hefted their bundles to their shoulders, and briskl
y walked back into the shadows. A few moments later, a car marked “Polizia Finanza” glided by.

  Thursday was my day for art. Arthur Frommer advocates a leisurely, contemplative pace for taking in Florence’s museums and galleries, but I opted for a different strategy: art overload, cramming all of my museum-going into one day.

  The weather was a spastic mix of drizzle and full-fledged downpour, so the line to get into the Uffizi Gallery was wedged into the narrow loggia outside the museum, tight as a rush-hour subway. Vendors worked the crowd, hawking umbrellas, but apparently someone else had beaten them to the punch, because many of the tourists wore flimsy ponchos that could only have been purchased in a moment of utter desperation and which bore a striking resemblance to enormous condoms.

  Once inside the museum, my first view was not of some strategically placed masterpiece, as one might expect, but of that defining ritual of modern tourism, the Incompetent Security Check, at which the sullen guards continually scolded tourists to drop empty water bottles into a trash bin but paid no attention to the constantly beeping metal detector or the screen on the X-ray machine.

  Then, finally, into the gallery, where I immediately understood what my mother said when she wrote, in a postcard, that she and her friend Ann were “drowning in art.”

  Goodness. As Frommer puts it on the first page of the Florence chapter, “the treasures here [at the Uffizi] are so thick that Raphael’s priceless Madonna of the Chair is casually stuck away in a little nook.” I couldn’t find that particular nook (possibly because it turns out the painting is now at the Pitti Palace), but just after entering the museum, I took a wrong turn and ended up in a dingy, fluorescent-lit elevator lobby, where there were four works by Giovanni da San Giovanni, a Baroque-era painter. In any museum back home, they likely would have been the center of attention; here they’re just, yawn, some more seventeenth-century masterpieces.

  Now, I would like the record to show that I genuinely wanted to appreciate every last one of the beyond-copious works of art in the Uffizi—I honestly hoped to improve my sadly minimal knowledge of art history. So, following Frommer’s advice, I began my tour of the museum with the best of intentions to take an unhurried, reflective stroll through the halls.

  The thing is, though, it’s hard to appreciate fine art when there are so many other people trying to do the same, especially if half of them are either (a) listening intently to their audio guide, oblivious to their surroundings and prone to walking about zombielike, crashing into benches, walls, or you; (b) students or quasi-artistic types who sprawl on the floor in front of every remotely interesting work and attempt to replicate said works on their own notepads, although passersby can’t help but notice that the vast majority of these sketches are rather exquisitely crappy; or (c) checklist tourist types who carry books with titles like The Manic Traveler’s Ten Things to See in Ten Minutes in the Uffizi, typically peacocked with Post-its, which they pluck off one by one as they blink at each “must-see” work before sprinting to the next.

  A small, cruel part of me began to hope that, just to liven things up, I would witness some of the literal swooning and panic attacks that you hear about every now and then, when the beauty of Florence’s artistic and historic riches creates a potent mix of vertigo and delirium. The condition is called Stendahl Syndrome, after the French writer who wrote of experiencing its symptoms in 1817: “I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty… I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves.’ Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.” I suppose I’d experienced a fleeting case the day before, on the bus, but that was born more of the Tuscany countryside’s refusal to play to my jaded expectations rather than of the pure power of beauty per se.

  Now, sarcastic thoughts flowing full force, I was starting to experience the Anti-Stendahl Syndrome: complete obliviousness to beauty.

  I’d read Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad just before I left Minneapolis, and his comment about the Uffizi had stuck in my mind: “weary miles of picture galleries.”

  Yeah. Pretty much. I’d already seen a fatiguing number of Renaissance masterpieces, and yet, somehow, my map informed me that there were still whole floors of the museum I had not yet entered.

  Maybe there was still a way for me to salvage this excursion, though. In my mother’s letters, there was one painting she mentioned repeatedly, in an amused tone befitting the work’s intriguingly freakish name: Madonna with the Long Neck. This I needed to see.

  Well, let me tell you, there are more than a few Madonnas in the Uffizi. Ridiculous quantities. And allow me to further note that a lot—a lot— of the Madonnas have rather excessive necks. I lost count of the number of times I thought, Hmm, she has a longish neck. Is she the Madonna with the long neck?

  There were Madonnas with happy baby Jesuses and Madonnas with mopey Jesuses. Jesus holding books, clutching birds, flexing his biceps, grasping Mary’s breast in a frankly painful-looking way. Madonna of the Harpies and Madonna of the Goldfinch stared each other down from across one cramped room. There was bloated Jesus, colicky Jesus, Elvis-looking Jesus, and even, I noticed (though I don’t know why I noticed), Jesus with just one testicle.

  When I finally found the elusive long-necked lady, it was in the gift shop, on a postcard. I bought it and sent it to my mother with my own amused, sarcastic note.

  After a quick lunch, I headed to another of the city’s famous museums, the Accademia. I decided to get off the main streets and take what seemed to be a more direct route on smaller, quieter passageways. But in the labyrinth that is Florence, it’s astonishingly easy to get lost, particularly if your sole navigational assistance comes from a forty-five-year-old map that lists only the most well-trafficked piazzas and streets.

  It was like being stuck in quicksand: the more I struggled to get my bearings, the more disoriented I got. I became ever more removed from the tourist masses, until they disappeared completely and the only voices I heard were Italian.

  In one shop window, a stooped craftsman used hand tools to fashion an elaborately detailed wooden picture frame, a scene that could have been taking place anytime in the last five hundred years. In another, a woman in a tight black dress surveyed a small but well-stocked showroom of avant-garde modern furniture, all sleek lines and neutral tones. It was wonderful and captivating and inspiring, exactly what travel is supposed to be all about.

  And then I found myself surrounded by drunks.

  I had wandered into a dark square filled with vacant-eyed souls and strewn with trash. I named it Piazza della Sketchiness. It seemed to have come out of nowhere, a mirage of all-too-realistic grime and grit, the first truly disconcerting and depressing sight I’d seen in Florence. It was the anti-Brigadoon, or perhaps the Ghost of Florence Yet to Come, once tourists and globalization had finally rubbed away all of the charms and sense of place. All those news stories of the horrors of modern Italy, which had been lurking in the margins of my mind since my arrival, came to the fore.

  Allow me to pause here to ask a question: Is there a more perversely pleasurable travel daydream than considering all the exotic ways in which one could die while on the road? I think not. The options are endless: choking on tapas in Spain or being run over by a Porsche on the autobahn or suffering severe head trauma from falling stones at the Colosseum. A high school classmate of my mother’s—this is true—crashed his bike into a canal in Amsterdam and drowned.

  At this particular moment, my most likely cause of death was a wine-bottle blow to the head, courtesy of the disheveled behemoth scowling at me. I did the mental calculation: actual skinhead or just a menacing character with a shaved pate? He staggered slightly. Boozy stumble or prelude to a chase? My pulse quickened until I noticed his typically Italian footwear, all flash and no function. So at least I could outrun him. I put my head down and kept walking, stealing backward glances every few stride
s.

  In his five-hundred-plus years, Michelangelo’s David has had an arm broken off during a melee (1527), been attacked with a sledgehammer (1991), had his stature severely underestimated for hundreds of years (he’s seventeen feet tall, not thirteen, as the New York Times had it in a 1991 article, or fourteen, as stated in 2008 by London’s Daily Telegraph), and, in a replica at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, had his manhood covered by an enormous plaster fig leaf, reportedly because Queen Victoria disapproved of such brazen nudity. He has been depicted on refrigerator magnets, replete with a wardrobe of festive magnetic outfits; as a light-switch cover, with a strategically placed cutout in the crotch forming a sort of anti–fig leaf; and on countless tacky postcards, including the ones for sale in the shop across the street from the museum, postcards that showcased David’s light-switch region with a pair of sunglasses balancing on the, er, “switch” itself. Let us not even speak of the boxer shorts.

  In spite of these indignities, the multitudes still come, with some 1.3 million visitors to the Accademia each year. David’s popularity may soon get him evicted from his current home: a few months before my trip, Florence’s head of culture requested governmental approval to move the statue to a new concert hall on the outskirts of town, citing “an unsustainable level of tourists” in the city center.

  I joined the line outside of the museum, aware that I was doing my part to make that level incrementally more unsustainable, and again prepared myself for a letdown. With so many admirers and such déclassé associations, David couldn’t help but feel a bit camp, even if my mother wrote that he was “magnifico”; even if Arthur Frommer says that he “may alone be worth your entire trip to Europe”; even if the ever-caustic Mark Twain was impressed, in The Innocents Abroad.

  Well… it was wonderful, magnifico, not at all cheesy. Though tourists did indeed swarm around him like groupies to a rock star (swooning and all), I cannot offer a single snide comment about their behavior or exclamations because I was too busy staring at the Man of Marble in his perfectly lit corner.