I’ll stop there for fear of sounding too awestruck, though I was (so this is what Stendahl was getting at!). The statue was the perfect metaphor for Florence as a whole: overwhelmed with visitors, superficially like something I had seen a thousand times before, and yet still profoundly wonderful. It transcended the tourists.
I can’t say much about the rest of the museum because it all seemed so laughably small and inconsequential after David. The other rooms were jarringly empty of visitors, and I felt a twinge of sympathy for any obscure Renaissance artist whose only extant work was in some back corner of the Accademia, ignored by all but the most intrepid, dedicated art aficionado—I had one distant room to myself for two or three minutes and luxuriated in the sudden quietude before going back to gape at David again.
That evening, I had some bold and important investigations to undertake. Namely, I needed to have some pizza. Purely for journalistic purposes, understand. Solely to examine the authentic version in comparison to its American counterpart.
Here, after all, is arguably one of the greatest benefits of welcoming immigrants into one’s country: it makes society more complex, richer, and tastier. Italians, of all peoples, should understand this, given that their own traditional foods have pleased countless palates across the globe.
We don’t think much about the flow of culture into the United States, the effects of Fellini films, the Three Tenors, and venti lattes—we dwell, and not without reason, on the omnipresence of American culture and enterprise abroad. Corporations! They’re taking over the world, homogenizing culture, destroying sense of place! Have you noticed?
But, really, consider the pizza. In 1944, a New York Times article about a just-opened pizzeria led with this description of the exotic foodstuff: “One of the most popular dishes in southern Italy, especially in the vicinity of Naples, is pizza—a pie made from a yeast dough and filled with any number of different centers, each one containing tomatoes. Cheese, mushrooms, anchovies, capers, onions and so on may be used.” Gosh, sounds appetizing, doesn’t it?
Twenty years after that rather detached, straightforward description appeared, pizza was so commonplace that in the menu phrasebook section of Europe on Five Dollars a Day, Frommer offers not a translation but a wiseacre wink: “You know this one.”
Now, nearly another fifty years on, I settled myself into a corner table at one of Frommer’s recommended restaurants—he claimed “no surprises; no cover,” but surprise, Arthur, there was a two-euro cover—and ordered my own yeast-dough pie to see how it measured up. It was good enough, with the crust slightly charred from the wood-fired oven and the slight saltiness of the prosciutto perfectly balancing with the creamy mozzarella and the earthy depth of the funghi.
Here’s what struck me, though: it wasn’t as good as the pizza I can get at either of two different restaurants in my neighborhood back home in Minneapolis. With their imported San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella di bufala, and sea salt–dusted crusts, these are marketed as paragons of authentic Italian cuisine. One restaurant is a member of Verace Pizza Napoletana, the official and famously strict arbiter of true Neapolitan pizza. Even the decor and menu design of those pizzerias back home are superficially more authentic, more Old World Italian than the restaurants I visited in Florence.
Today, some of Frommer’s and my mother’s comments about Italian foods sound nearly as naive and wide-eyed as that 1944 Times article. Frommer lists fettuccine and risotto in the vegetable section, for example; most Americans today would probably not just recategorize them but smirk at the accurate but not entirely complete translations of these as “noodles” and “rice.” My mother explained the concept of a trattoria to my father in one of her letters and waxed rhapsodic about a terribly exotic dish that I recognized, having seen it on restaurant menus back home, as saltimbocca.
The fact is, in any major city in the United States today, you can easily find food that is at least as authentically Italian as that found in most cafés in tourist areas of Italy. That wasn’t at all true in midcentury America, where “Italian” basically meant cheap wine and gummy spaghetti—or Chef Boyardee, whose 1950s Life magazine ads promised “ravioli as truly Italian as the Tower of Pisa.” Most travelers of that era likely had not experienced even the watered-down version of Italian cuisine presented today by the likes of Romano’s Macaroni Grill, Buca di Beppo, and the Olive Garden. (Even Fancy Feast cat food now has Florentine and Tuscany lines, “inspired by classic Italian tastes,” for the citizen-of-the-world felines.)
Though Frommer and my mother undoubtedly had their own preconceptions of Europe, based on photographs, books, and previous tourists’ stories, the information available to them before their trips was paltry compared to what today’s information-overloaded travelers have at their disposal. My mother and Frommer and their peers couldn’t presume to believe they knew exactly what to expect. They knew they didn’t know anything, and that was probably for the better. They didn’t expect their pizza to taste a certain way; they weren’t measuring the tourist café against the better Italian food back home. Put another way, back then they were ignorant; today we’re delusional.
The popularity of Italian food in the United States has also, arguably, helped fuel tourism to Italy: if the food becomes less foreign, then so, too, incrementally, do the people it represents. By importing their native foods and traditions to the countries in which they settle, immigrants provide to their new neighbors an inescapable introduction to their culture, fueling curiosity and, ultimately, familiarity (if not comprehensive appreciation). They are de facto ambassadors.
It follows that tourists arrive with distinct expectations of what “Italian” means, what images and tastes and experiences the term conjures—gelato stands, yes; kebab stands… probably not. Visitors’ expectations help affirm the nation’s already deeply ingrained traditional sense of itself and reinforce the reflexive tendency to want to essentially preserve the past under glass, which fuels nationalist tendencies and the country’s aversion to immigrants and the inevitable changes they bring.
Me, I actually like the notion that I can get some pretty good falafel in Florence, pad Thai in Brussels, enchiladas in Paris, or cultural mash-ups like currywurst in Berlin.
Saturday morning I packed up my bag and headed to the bus station, resolving to come back soon but definitely not alone. In hopes of achieving that goal, I had one last task: I had to go talk to a pig.
The previous day, I’d gone to the Straw Market (Frommer’s most highly recommended place for bargain shopping in all of Europe), in search of a marble chess set to buy for my father—my mother had seen one for sale and “felt sick,” she wrote, that she couldn’t spare the thirty dollars to purchase it. I had found one, but at 320 euros, it was out of my price range as well. As I was leaving empty-handed, I had noticed a line of tourists waiting to rub the snout of a brass boar, Il Porcellino (a historic and well-known landmark, I would later learn, and very much on the typical tourist itinerary, though there’s no mention of it in E5D).
“Is for luck,” I heard a guide explain as he pointed to the shiny nose, its patina worn away by countless hands. “You put a coin in the mouth, rub him, and make a wish. It will come true.”
I hadn’t wanted to wait in line then, but this morning it seemed important to consult the porcine talisman. The unsettled feeling in my stomach—my general trepidation about this whole trip—showed no signs of abating, and my brain buzzed with a thousand thoughts and fears, not always certain that people weren’t laughing at me in various languages I didn’t speak. More than that, though, I was still feeling lonely. Maybe the boar could help.
I started to give him my smallest coin, ten (euro) cents, but then figured he would somehow know—if he could make my wishes come true, he could probably tell if I were being a stingy bastard, and wouldn’t appreciate it.
So I dug out a larger coin, placed it in his mouth, and asked him to ease my eternally worried mind, also to maybe throw in some enlightenment and, i
f it wasn’t too much trouble, love. I rubbed his snout vigorously, hopefully, and gave him an affectionate pat on the head.
I adjusted the straps on my backpack and set my sights toward the bus station, then turned briefly to offer Il Porcellino—and Florence—one final, wistful gaze.
Paris
Life in a Movie Set
In general, go to the Left Bank for inexpensive
meals and accommodations. Go there also for a real
taste of Paris; it’s the Champs Elysées which has
become commercial and hard; the Latin Quarter,
on the Left Bank, retains its honesty.
—Europe on Five Dollars a Day
Arthur Frommer was born in 1929 in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was a child of the Depression, and if you’re looking for an early catalyst for his frugal ways, surely this is it. “I was probably the poorest boy in my entire public school [in Jefferson City, Missouri],” he told author Michael Shapiro in a profile for the 2004 book A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration.
Frommer’s father worked in the garment industry, moving from city to city, factory to factory, following the jobs. In 1944, the family headed to New York City. It proved to be auspicious: fourteen-year-old Arthur soon got a job at Newsweek as an office assistant. He had found his calling—he wanted to be a journalist. After graduating from New York University, then Yale Law School, he was drafted into the army in 1953, in the waning days of the Korean War. Placed in the intelligence division and sent to Germany, he arrived on the Continent awestruck and delighted: “I had never dreamed that I would have the resources or the money to travel in Europe,” he told Shapiro.
He traveled as much as he could. Stockholm, Venice, Barcelona, Majorca. In Paris, while sitting at a sidewalk café, he had an epiphany: “I looked up and saw a motor coach of forty or so American tourists passing by with everyone’s noses pressed to the glass looking out at the life of Paris from the inside of the bus,” he said in an interview published in 2007 on Frommers.com, marking the fiftieth anniversary of his original book. “At that moment, I realized that the difference between them and me was that they had money and I had no money—and because I had no money, I was having the time of my life.” He decided that this knowledge—this experience—was too good to keep to himself.
Each night, he sat down in the barracks and scoured his memory—he had no notes, no specific addresses, only rough “mental pictures”—to write what would become The G.I.’s Guide to Traveling in Europe. In 1955 he borrowed money and had “10,000 or 12,000” copies printed in Oberammergau, Germany, then sent them to Stars and Stripes newsstands on army bases around Europe. It sold for fifty cents. And it sold out almost immediately.
Two years later, Frommer was working long days as a lawyer in Manhattan, but still thinking about travel and the success of his first guidebook; he was convinced that the time was right for a civilian version. He went back to Europe for a month, getting the details he’d missed in the first book, “just crisscrossing the streets until midnight, then taking a train at night to the next city,” he told Michael Shapiro.
The title of this new book was Europe on Five Dollars a Day, with chapters on twelve cities. Frommer self-printed again, with an initial run of fifteen thousand copies.* Again, it sold out almost immediately.
Paris was perhaps the most enthralling city for Private First Class Frommer, who had minored in French at NYU and dreamed of the Left Bank café life of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Even today, when interviewers ask the obligatory question, “What’s your favorite city?” Frommer’s response never wavers: Paris. It rejuvenates him, he says.
As for me, I was not feeling rejuvenated. Pretty much the opposite. I had taken refuge in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where I sat on a bench and gave careful consideration to just staying there for the next few days, avoiding the streets, the subways, the city, the people.
Outside the fence surrounding the park was a world of gray stone and glowering gargoyles and haughty citizens with their noses permanently stuck in the air, sneers primed in the backs of their throats, waiting to be deployed the instant I walked by. Being treated horribly is a highly anticipated part of the French travel experience—eat some escargot, be perplexed by a bidet, and get a stereotype-confirming story to share on Facebook: OMG, you won’t believe how mean that cheese-eating surrender monkey was to me!—and I was expecting the worst. My French was only slightly better than my Italian—numbers plus the names of a few pastries—and I’d heard that if I so much as mispronounced half a syllable, I’d have a pack of feral poodles sicced on me.
Now, as it happens, the rude-Parisian stereotype is not one that either Frommer or my mother—neither of whom was typically shy about offering an opinion—mentioned at all. Both had only nice things to say. Indeed, in Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France, historian Christopher Endy notes that just 5 percent of foreign visitors had “negative assessments” of the French, according to a 1958 government study. And in my half day here so far, everyone had been kind and patient with me. Disconcertingly so, actually. Maybe it was a trap.
For the moment, though, I tried to block all of that out of my mind, focusing instead on my own personal happy pill: a sackful of pastries. Chocolate croissants happen to be my addiction, and in Paris, I had found an entire city of enablers. Before I departed for Europe, I intentionally avoided any articles or advice about things to do, places to see, anything that would taint my experiment in willful ignorance—except when it came to chocolate croissants. I was going to Paris. They know their pain au chocolat there. I tracked down a Paris-based writer I’d met years earlier, Eddy Harris, and respectfully demanded patisserie tips. High on his list was Gerard Mulot, which just so happened to be near my hotel, and that was where I had stopped on my way to the jardin.
I opened the pastry bag and let the scent linger in the air as I watched a little boy launch a sailboat in the fountain in front of me and a pack of joggers race past, their brightly colored spandex confetti-ing the manicured parkland as they disappeared into a row of trees. An altogether charming scene. Seriously: maybe I should just stay in this spot until it was time to go to the airport.
The exterior resisted slightly as I bit into the croissant, then shattered, sending gossamer-light crumbs drifting into my open book—sorry there, Arthur—and falling to the ground. The interior was as layered and complex as a canyon wall, dense with buttery strata. I had experienced the rapture: flaky, chocolatey bliss.
Pigeons pecked the dirt around me, grateful for my messiness. The croissant was so good that I was briefly tempted to chase the birds away and scavenge the crumbs myself. One pigeon was the fattest, most hopeless one I’d ever seen. I named him Goodyear, though he (and it must have been male) was probably incapable of flying and was forever losing out to the other birds in the race to the crumbs. He was plucky but dopey. I felt a kinship.
I tossed a piece of croissant directly in front of him and watched him gobble it happily.
“Open your bag. Tickets downstairs. Open your bag. Tickets downstairs,” the security guard repeated as a monotone mantra. I unzipped my satchel, but she waved me in without so much as a cursory glance inside.
I was back in the big, bad world, inside the Louvre’s glass entrance pyramid—a bit of architectural flash, requisite in modern museums, added in 1989.
Europe on Five Dollars a Day says that the Louvre is free on Sundays. You will be shocked to learn that this is no longer true. I expected as much, of course, although I was really not yet ready to spend any more money on art—the museum overdose in Florence still had me reeling.
I had a plan B, though, which I hoped would get me either into the museum or into trouble. As I’d watched the pigeons and runners in the Jardin du Luxembourg, I’d pondered the state of my quest and realized, with a bit of disappointment, that E5D had not yet pushed me out of my comfort zone, aside from a few moments of sphincter-loosening panic in the Piazza dell
a Sketchiness. It had merely created the sort of middling awkwardness that I am able to find anywhere, anytime, on my own. By the time I had finished my second croissant, I felt emboldened.
My idea was that at the Louvre, I would saunter over to one of the guards and bust out the guidebook, pointing to Frommer’s claim that admission was free right now and insist that he let me in. This, ideally, would lead to one of two things. Scenario one: he’d be won over by my naïveté and bumbling charm and escort me inside, possibly for a behind-the-scenes tour and a parting gift of one of the lesser works from a back gallery. Or scenario two: hilariously haughty verbal abuse in a language I didn’t speak, followed by the guard dragging me by my ear up the stairs to the plaza and tossing me into the reflecting pool outside the entrance. Awful, but potentially character building. Either result would be fine.
I flipped through my book and found the appropriate page, then picked out a guard at random, a rangy guy with a crew cut. I strode toward him with as much faux swagger as I could muster.
“Free?” I asked, poking my open book.
He looked confused; clearly he’d been expecting directions to the bathroom or the gift shop.
“In my book…,” I began, then paused. “It says… Sundays? No charge? Yes?”
More confusion. He pointed behind me. “Tickets over there.” No scorn or impatience. No smile at my scampish irreverence, either, though I could detect a slight snicker in his otherwise stoic command. Keep pushing! I told myself. Charm and/or infuriate!
“No, I go in… without ticket?” I said. “Because of the book?”
Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide Page 5
