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

by Douglas S. Mack

  So score one for the Internet. Knowledge has its benefits, I reminded myself. And then I looked at my watch and got a fresh reminder of the perils of too much information. I didn’t have time to linger and savor—I had too many other things to see and do.

  “There’s the real story,” our tour guide said, “and it’s a pretty good one. But it’s not as good as the mythological version—that’s the fist-pumping story.” He flexed one biceps and contorted his face into an exaggerated glower. We laughed and his posture relaxed, his face entirely deadpan.

  When I had posted my request for suggestions, I’d sort of assumed that the only people who would respond would be friends and family. I was elated when a total stranger, who just happened to read my blog on the right day, recommended this tour. So here I was, sweating in the blazing midday sun at the Circus Maximus—which the guide described, after a lengthy, erudite description of its cultural significance, as “basically a NASCAR oval for chariots.”

  The guide was Jason, a thirtyish Canadian with a brain like an encyclopedia and the mouth of a sailor; he was leading us on what was officially billed as the “Rome(ing) Walking Tour,” but which might as well have been called “The Rise and Fall of the F-ing Roman Empire.” His manner was understated and stoic—as we had all stood around chatting before the tour started, I hadn’t realized this random dude in cutoff khakis and flip-flops was the guide—which made his gratuitous swearing and bombastic storytelling all the more amusing.

  “So first I’ll give you the good version of the city’s origins, the mythology… and then how that shit actually went down,” he continued, and with that he began a forty-minute narrative composed of mythology, history, and jokes. Power struggles, weirdness, profanity.

  Rome is built on that mix of the profane and the majestic, high culture and low. So, too, is the Tourist Culture. As I’d learned from reading Europe on Five Dollars a Day, none of this is really new. But I hadn’t realized how truly old this heady mix was until Jason sat us down on a low wall along the Via dei Fori Imperiali and told us about the Colosseum.

  “Basically, nothing’s changed in the world of entertainment,” Jason said. “Ancient Romans wanted the same thing we want today: big, loud, crazy shit. Epic spectacles. They’d flood the place and have naval battles. And in the first one hundred days of the Colosseum, they killed five thousand animals and ten thousand people—all for entertainment.”

  We stared, jaws agape. I mean, presumably we’d all seen Gladiator, but still…

  “That’s messed up,” the guy sitting next to me muttered.

  “They’d bring a giraffe into the ring with a gladiator,” Jason continued. “A giraffe has no chance against a gladiator, of course—what’s it gonna do? But imagine you’ve never seen a giraffe, right? You’re like, ‘What the fuck is this alien-looking thing?!’ Now, the gladiator knows that there are two big arteries for this long-ass neck and that if you slice those, the whole thing’s gonna go back and forth like an unmanned hose. The crowds are going, ‘Hell yes, this is sweet.’ No People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals back then, I tell you that.”

  The results of the crowd-sourced day were mixed. Yes, there was that gelato. And, yes, there was that walking tour.

  But I definitely didn’t save money—the tour alone set me back twenty euros, and I still felt obligated to follow as many of my leads as possible. There was a second gelateria recommendation, which turned out to be much more crowded and much less sublime. There was also a decent pizzeria, an acceptable trattoria, a Bavarian-style beer hall with a nice, malty lager and the soundtrack of the iPod playlist from hell (one word: “Macarena”). On balance, it was a mix of hits and misses not so different from a normal day guided by Frommer and the Goddess Serendipity. Yet it all felt a bit too easy. Less excitement, less intrigue. Less fun.

  I couldn’t wait for my reunion with Arthur.

  Rome’s riches are such that even Frommer, who is generally averse to sightseeing, feels compelled to offer a top-ten list of things to see. Number one: the Vatican.

  All I really wanted to see was the Sistine Chapel. But, as at many museums and landmarks, you don’t open the door and go straight to the main attraction; first there are other things to amuse and distract. In this case, there was an endless series of rooms and halls and galleries, each more elaborate than the next, with vaulted ceilings and marble columns and mosaic floors and gold leaf and trompe l’oeil and more Marys than even the Uffizi Gallery, to say nothing of the parades of chubby-cheeked cherubs. And so many people: nuns in habits, church groups in matching shirts, and others like me who were here for no other reason than, well, when in Rome… Some of the tourist types wore loose scarves I’d seen for sale by the entrance, bare shoulders being forbidden in this holy place. They all mixed as one, clutching guidebooks and bags from the Hard Rock Cafe and doing the Tourist Dance. Even the nuns.

  Soon enough, I was getting restless, ready for the main event, the Sistine Chapel. As the rooms got bigger and the decor got crazier, I kept thinking, “Is this it? There’s a big, painted ceiling. This might be it. Right?”

  I should note, perhaps, that I was raised Mennonite. Urban hippie Mennonite, not buggies-and-barn-raisings Mennonite. Still, the core values remain the same: humility, pacifism, simple living—the last especially important, my parents seemed to believe, for purposes of saving up for the next big trip. The Mennonite version of grandeur in church design is to paint the walls a color other than white, meaning I’m always a bit out of my element in more opulent sacred spaces, what with their vaulted ceilings and gold leaf galore and those cherubs leering from above.

  So take that and factor in that I’m on the record as being easily bored by Renaissance paintings, especially by the third hour of them… and perhaps you’ll forgive me when I say that when I got to the Sistine Chapel it was more relief than revelation. Yup, a lot of good brushwork, Michelangelo.

  I was much more interested in the living, breathing, three-dimensional humans around me. Like the professional shushers. People whose job it was to keep us quiet. Every few seconds, this one guy would call out in a stern, stage-whisper yell, “Silenzio! No photos!” And then someone’s phone would ring or a flash would go off and we’d all look around with looks of bemused denial—It wasn’t me—and then the professional shusher would shush us again. I sort of wanted that job, actually, not just so I could put “professional shusher” on my business card but because the people-watching was even better than at most tourist landmarks.

  The pilgrims and tourists didn’t always fall into their assigned roles. One of the nuns looked bored out of her mind, clearly fidgeting beneath her navy blue dress. A few of the church group tried to herd their friends to the door, their expressions ones of fatigue, hunger, and full bladders. And a pair of women cloaked in gift-store scarves stared at the ceiling stock-still, necks craned, eyes wide, breathing shallowly.

  I left them with their wonder and went off to find the gift shop—I owed my parents a postcard. As I browsed, I noticed one of the church-group men trying to get the attention of the shop clerk.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you sell action figures of the Pope? Ones that move?”

  The clerk was aghast. “No! Not here!”

  “Do you know where I could get one?”

  Long pause. Double blink. Sigh. “Try a shop by Saint Peter’s Square.”

  I went back to the Pensione Texas to see if Dario was in a talkative mood.

  He was.

  “It was very different,” he said when I asked him to tell me more about the hotel back in its heyday. “Things change very much. This city has changed very much since 1963. People here are not so kind and friendly as before. Now, George Clooney has a house on a lake in the north. I think he goes there for the quiet. It is the country—if you go there and ask someone where is the church, they will take you there, walk with you. Here in Roma, it was like that, but not anymore.”

  “Now that there are lots of tourists?” I asked
.

  “No, there were always lots of tourists. That is not new. But the people—the people have changed. Each time is different.” Dario opened the old brochure and pointed to one of the pictures. There was a bar on the fifth floor, directly above us, he told me. The photo showed a chic lounge. He paused to gaze with a small, bittersweet smile. “It’s closed now. For the restoration.”

  I got the sense that the restoration was ongoing—very ongoing.

  “It is difficult to make changes to the building,” he said. “Lots of money, lots of time. In Roma, they are very protective of the history. This is how it should be, but…” His voice trailed off, as though he had said too much. “The process of improving things is sometimes difficult. Especially if the building is important or had a famous person who was here. This building was designed by a famous architect who also designed the Victor Emmanuel monument on the Piazza Venezia.

  “Because the building had a famous architect, any changes must be approved by the city, which takes a long time—often years,” Dario said. “Both outside and inside of the building. Most of the other hotels now have air-conditioning, but we cannot, because it would cause too many alterations and there would be pipes and mechanical work on the exterior. They have become more strict in the past ten to twenty years. And the city has a very small staff to monitor and approve all of these things.”

  “So you just have to wait and hope?” I asked.

  “Exactly. It is a long process.” Dario paused. “But I do think it’s better this way; it is necessary. It is important to keep the history—it is better.”

  After a long, awkward pause, he asked, “Do you know of Alfredo’s? It is probably in your book. It was very famous, popular with Americans.”

  The restaurant’s eponymous owner, Dario said, had invented the dish fettuccine Alfredo, and the flourish with which he served it was part of the attraction. (I later learned that the restaurant was such an iconic Roman place in the minds of Americans that it was part of the original Italy Pavilion when Epcot opened in 1982. That outlet of the restaurant closed in 2007, though one remains in New York City.)

  “That sounds expensive,” I said. “It probably wasn’t in my book.”

  “Now, yes, it is expensive. I ate there once, many years ago. It was fine. My family—my mother—cooks in a more traditional way. I prefer that. Americans, maybe, are not so familiar with the traditional foods, but they like this. However, as you say, a place becomes famous, and then it becomes expensive.”

  Right, I thought. Except when it doesn’t. Except when its history becomes a trap and the changing times pass it by and it becomes a symbol of fleeting fame and deteriorated grandeur. Like the Pensione Texas. Dario didn’t sound jealous of Alfredo’s continued good fortune—not in the least. Things change, he said once more. It made me hope, if only for him, that times will change again, and the Pensione Texas will reclaim the glory that for now exists only in memory and a brochure tucked into a desk drawer in Minneapolis.

  I couldn’t help but think of fettuccine Alfredo as I dug into my dessert that night. “As my final send-off to Rome, I’d go to the Restaurant Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navona,” says Arthur Frommer in E5D, “and I’d have its specialty—a ‘Tartuffo’ (ice cream covered with cherries and bitter chocolate chips).”

  Like Alfredo’s fettuccine, the Tartuffo had clearly become a star with tourists, given its prominent place on the menu. (I couldn’t help but wonder how much of this came straight back to the prominent mention in Europe on Five Dollars a Day.) And like the pasta, its fame had spawned a substantial price tag: nine euros. The serving was generous—baseball sized—but the ice cream had clearly been prescooped and then dug out of a freezer; it was also baseball hard. I was crushed. In Rome, I had finally gotten my traveling mojo back, and this felt like quite the wrong send-off.

  I recalled that Gelateria del Teatro was just a short walk away. I hurried off to reboot my palate and give Rome a more fitting final act.

  It was just as good the second time.

  Madrid

  Better Living Through Tourism

  The amazingly low prices of this nation… are not the

  product of progress, but of decline. While we are the

  lucky beneficiaries of those prices, it is nonetheless the

  fervent wish of this book that the Spanish people will

  have a better future, and that Spain, in the years to

  come, won’t be so darn easy to visit on $5 a day.

  —Europe on Five Dollars a Day

  When I told people I was headed to Europe, or had just come back, the subject of Barcelona inevitably arose—“Did you check out the food scene?” “Did you see the Gaudí buildings?” or, most often, a straight-to-the point “Isn’t Barcelona awesome?” And I’d have to say, “Actually, I didn’t go there; it wasn’t in my guidebook”—it really wasn’t on the tourist trail at all in the 1960s. Today, Barcelona is one of the most popular cities in Europe for travelers, trailing only London, Paris, and Rome, and ranking well ahead of some of the places that did make the Europe on Five Dollars a Day cut, such as Nice, Athens, and Oslo.

  And Madrid. Spain’s capital did make it into E5D, but the moment I arrived here, I realized that Frommer’s comments about the place might as well have been about Mars or fifteenth-century Mongolia, for all the similarities it had to the city before me. In perhaps no place I visited other than Berlin were the differences between then and now more profound.

  I bounded up the subway station steps at Puerta del Sol—basically the Times Square of Madrid—eager to poke my head above ground like a prairie dog and take in the scene. On one side of the square, a billboard for Nike soccer shoes towered above me; I winced and turned around to find long rows of Renaissance revival buildings—a tiny balcony at each window, terra-cotta tile topping each roof—stretching into the distance, along the streets that radiate out from the square. That was more like it. The buildings were just the right scale (four and five stories) to give a sense of officiousness and urbanity without being imposing. A bagpiper played at one corner of the square; on the other side, a duo of hammer dulcimer players of mesmerizing dexterity and virtuosity put on a show for the crowds streaming by, an even mix of gawking tourists and commuting locals. The street was all bustle and high spirits—even more so than Rome or Berlin or any of the other cities I’d just visited—a genial cacophony, more friendly than frenzied.

  It would be incorrect to say that Spain was truly thriving. The recent collapse of the worldwide economy had hit the nation especially hard—by April 2010, unemployment would reach 20 percent and the burgeoning deficits here and in other countries (including Greece and Italy) would cause widespread concerns about the long-term fate of the common euro currency. As I walked up a pedestrian mall called Calle de la Montera, headed toward my hostel, I saw several people—each with a haunted, hard-luck expression—wearing sandwich boards that read, “COMPRO ORO.” I buy gold. They were handing out cards for a pawnshop. When I ventured back into the city after a few hours’ respite in the hostel, I got propositioned three times in the span of one block. (Well, I thought, Frommer was right when he said the Spanish people are friendly and helpful.…)

  Still, Madrid’s exuberance was impossible to deny. That night I feasted on impossibly cheap and delicious tapas and hung out at a side-street bar, sipping beer and chatting with the bartenders—what a joy to be, finally, in a city where I spoke the language, albeit crappily!—and when I ambled back to my hostel after midnight, sated and giddy, the streets were still alive. There was even a bookstore open.

  Seventeen cities get the full treatment in Europe on Five Dollars a Day; Madrid is the final chapter and also the shortest. I would have more than enough time for Frommering, I knew, so I spent the next day biding my time, enjoying myself, tracking down places and sites listed in my E5D only if I happened to be in the neighborhood. My navigational instincts were in fine form, and the few times I did get lost, I discovered I was no longer th
e least bit concerned about making a fool of myself when asking for directions. “I’m getting quite brave about asking ‘stupid’ questions,” my mother wrote from Rome—being a happy tourist is in part about acknowledging and accepting your own ineptitude, but being keen to improve.

  In the morning, I took a bike tour. Our leader was a man in his early twenties named Ramón, tall but lean, and with a soft voice that belied the giddy delight he took in showing off his city. The bustle had not abated. Sometimes it felt like every other block had a festival going on or about to start—groups gathering, music blaring. When I asked Ramón about it, he shrugged. “Just regular life.”

  We stopped at Mercado San Miguel, a big Beaux Arts building with a decidedly modern interior. As a public market, it had historically been a community fixture, Ramón said, but in recent decades had fallen on hard times, becoming a forlorn, dismal place. A few months earlier, it had reopened as a showcase of regional foods. There were produce and fish stands as well as a chic little wine bar and a small tapas restaurant—modern and traditional, urban and pastoral, all rolled into one packed market. It, too, felt like a festival—but, no, just regular life, tourists mingling with locals, everyone beaming.

  We got back on our bikes, reluctantly, and moved on. At a sprawling intersection where two major roads met at a roundabout—it reminded me of the Arc de Triomphe, albeit with slightly fewer cars and a massive fountain in the middle rather than a monumental arch—Ramón called us to a stop. The fountain was covered with an immense white tent, and a stage was being set up on one side of the intersection, just in front of the Palacio de Comunicaciones, the city’s iconic structure, a Gothic-inspired edifice that was part wedding cake, part cathedral, but altogether stately.