Letter from Italy: hiking Cinque Terre away from the crowds

by David Downie on

A seagull and hawk dueled in the clear, blue sky directly in front of our noses. Waves crashed but we could not hear them, because they were far too far below.

Was this the land of dreamy dreams? No. Try the Cinque Terre.

The grapegrowers and woodsmen of the old, impoverished Cinque Terre used to be the exclusive owners of the view from on high, from what’s now known as ridge trail #1. That view features not only seagulls and hawks but also stunted pine trees, scalloped scrabble cliffs, and tiered terraces planted with low grapevines and gnarled olive trees. All seem to be tumbling into the Mediterranean.

Nowadays the famous fivesome of Riviera villages are part of the Parco Nazionale delle Cinque Terre, an Italian National Park. Their inhabitants are anything but impoverished. There are no woodsmen. The grapegrowers and winemakers drive late-model cars that I could not afford. They ride high-tech monorails up and down the terraces to harvest their grapes, which are turned into an easy-to-quaff, over-priced wine. The seaside villagers are even more prosperous than their mountain brethern, made rich by tourism.

The price locals pay for prosperity is heavy: the area has been thoroughly denatured, luckily without destroying its physical beauty. The Cinque Terre are simply stupendously gorgeous. But this brave new eat-and-run world comes complete with body-to-body outsiders on beaches, and iffy trattorias with menus in English, German and Chinese. Tourism has revolutionized what was the Riviera’s most sublimely isolated stretch.

A toll is charged by affable park officials, whose writ is to collect enough money to repair the trails the tourists wreck. The Cinque Terre are being loved to death, like Yosemite.

The classic example is the village-to-village trail #2, now a hiker’s highway year round. A toll is charged by affable park officials, whose writ is to collect enough money to repair the trails the tourists wreck. Backpack-to-backpack with garrulous enthusiasts, many on package tours, hikers account for the bulk of the 2 million-plus visitors to this UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Cinque Terre are being loved to death, like Yosemite.

The good news is, the long, lonely path atop the crest behind the feeding frenzy-a place of seagulls, hawks and mavericks-gives you a taste of the Cinque Terre of yesteryear, meaning 30 or 40 years ago. Even better, convenient improvements unheard of 40 years ago have been added in the last decade. Trattorias, cafés, hotels and public transportation are lavished on those intrepid enough to head for the hills. The park’s plan is to lure hikers off the seaside route to save it from ruin, and also provide an economic stimulus to those operating hospitality centers above.A gentle warning is in order: the hike up is not exactly a breeze for the moderately fit. But people of middle age like me and my wife Alison seem able to do it without undo trouble. And if you can’t scramble up the 2,400-foot grade to the highest point on the ridge, you can take a bus or a taxi and start at Colle del Telegrafo, site of a dangerously pleasant trattoria operated by the park.

For those who have done the village-to-village trail and have left craving something else, this is that something else.

Alison and I have walked the ridge trail three times now in recent years. If it were possible I would walk it daily. I would build a tree house and live somewhere near the pass and the trattoria at Colle del Telegrafo. The pesto is organic and among the most flavorful in the area, the fish is local and fresh, and most of the produce is grown responsibly in or near the Cinque Terre.

On our latest visit we were in high season, but Alison and I were the only animate creatures at the pass, other than the friendly waiter, the chef and six other clients we saw ranged around tables on the trattoria’s shaded terrace. Only one table was occupied in the panoramic dining room. Word has not yet spread, a good thing for us, but bad for business.

Much of the time we hiked along the ridge we could see the colorful inchworm of over-equipped backpackers making their way in the heat and dust far below. Part of me felt sorry for them: they were missing an authentically wonderful experience up top, in a cooler, leafier place with see-forever views.

The other part of me was thankful that the youthful packers didn’t know about the upper trail, or, if they did, had chosen not to take it.

Many people probably prefer the sweaty free-for-all on the shore. In fact, if sunbathing, swimming and socializing is what you’re after, stay below.

If you do take the ridge trail, nothing stops you from dipping down into the villages, or taking ferries or trains among them. You can get up to the ridge at many points, and walk it for an hour or for its entire 40-mile length.

The official starting point of what is usually a 3-day, 2-night hike is Portovenere. This resort has every bit as much atmosphere and is as touristy and crowded as any of the Cinque Terre themselves. As far as I’m concerned, it outdoes them with its craggy Genoese castle and Romanesque church perched over the sea.

From the docks of Portovenere the trail rides a roller-coaster north then switchbacks down to sea level as it enters Levanto, a small town still partly wrapped in medieval walls. Between Portovenere and Levanto the five Cinque Terre nest innocuously below on rocky spurs. They look like toy villages or operetta sets, enhancing the view of sea, mountain and pine forest.

Getting to the ridge is a challenge, but not an insuperable one. No matter where you arrive from, to reach the southern trailhead in Portovenere you need to transit through La Spezia. This lively and authentic rail hub and military port facility is near the Tuscan border. Unsung, it’s worth half a day of your time for the food alone: some of the best Ligurian specialties are here. But it is not handsome, and most visitors understandably rush through it. Like them we tripped across the echoing stone streets of La Spezia’s old town and crossed the so-called “Gulf of Poets” in half an hour on a ferry to Portovenere.

In their early 1800s poetry, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe-Shelley described this gulf’s drop-dead beauty. Fittingly Shelley drowned while swimming across it. Since then Portovenere has morphed from a rough-shod military stronghold hedged by sea and cliffs into a gentrified vacation spot. Its pastel pink, lemon and ochre houses are about 1,000 years old.

Café tables and lazy cats fill the pocket-sized waterfront piazza. By 9:45 am we were having cappuccinos and pastries there. Portovenere’s San Pietro church turned out to be a surprising Romanesque layer-cake of black-and-white stone. It reportedly tops what was a pagan temple at the promontory’s western tip. From its wave-washed loggia we could see our path climbing north toward Riomaggiore, the southernmost of the Cinque Terre.

“Daunting” was the first word that came to mind. The second was “amazing.”

A staircase marked with a red-and-white flag tilts up from the base of the 13th-century castle, runs along its serrated walls, and delivers thrills practically at every step. That makes the climbing even more of a challenge. You’re likely to stumble, because you’ll be dazzled by the views.

Portovenere’s black Portoro construction stone used to be as famous as the marble of Carrara-at least in Italy. We scrambled through broom and tree heather and came across abandoned Portoro blocks and mining equipment. About 20 minutes above Portovenere, the cliff-edge detour marked “1/a” led us to rock climbers dangling like giant spiders on a former quarry face. Normally I don’t fear heights. This was different.

There is no paved coastal road for cars north from Portovenere, making this pine-stippled hogback as close to empty as you can get in Italy. Due west of us, peaky Palmaria Island and its smaller cousin Tino were calved by the mainland. Eastward we could see La Spezia’s port and the saw-toothed, snowy Apennines.

The faint-hearted should probably abstain from this hike. One section we rounded at “Il Pitone,” about an hour’s hike north of Portovenere, was a kind of daredevil’s balcony wrapped around cliffs. Just beyond it, a hardy resident told us he scales the 700 or so steps with no handrails every day to his house in the hamlet of Schiara sited a vertical 1,000 feet below.

Some of Italy’s longest-lived inhabitants are from the Riviera: apparently to survive you develop legs and hearts of steel.

It took us 2 hours from Portovenere to a hard-driven hamlet called Campiglia 1,300 feet above the crashing surf. Another hour of pine needle-padded paths through scented forests with infinity-views brought us to the woodsy Sant’Antonio Abate chapel. Candles burned, honoring Alpine troops who died in the World Wars. The snack bar built onto the back of the chapel seemed heaven sent. Our bottled water was gone and we greedily gulped a liter on the spot, then shot down thimbles of hot espresso. It was one of those only-in-Italy places, destined to lose money, devoted to dead soldier-heroes, and thoroughly charming.

Though it had been scorching at sea level, the weather up top was crisp, sunny and breezy. Reportedly it’s much the same all year, often 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit cooler on the ridge than below.

Thirty minutes past the Alpine chapel and in time for a late lunch we trooped into the famous trattoria at Colle del Telegrafo. Admittedly I was at first miffed to see a regular municipal mini-bus from Riomaggiore. Buses serve the crossroads. It straddles a pass at about 1,700 feet. Several well-heeled tourists, clearly not hikers, alighted and ate joyfully, though not as joyfully as we did.

Over lunch a friendly park ranger shared our table. After the pesto and seafood, he poured out lethal doses of the Cinque Terre’s lemon-based Limoncino liqueur. The area was northern Italy’s main citrus producer once upon a time. Park authorities have replanted lemon trees, and the liqueur business has started up again.

We’d noticed umpteen crumbling terraces on our walk. About 1,250 miles of dry stone walls keep the 250 tiers of Cinque Terre terraces from sliding into the Mediterranean-or used to. “That’s longer than the Great Wall of China,” the ranger remarked. “They’re built of dry stone because there’s no cement,” he explained. “It’s environmentally sound and traditional. It took centuries of backbreaking work to build them, and they’ll take decades to restore.”

The park has reconverted a dozen abandoned hillside houses and churches into restaurants and hostels. One of them, the Sanctuary of Montenero, was our next stop.

An hour’s walk downhill toward Riomaggiore on twisting trail #3 brought us to the sanctuary. We’d reserved dinner and a room but were too early to check in. Lower than Colle del Telegrafo at about 1,400 feet, this 14th-century former convent with a pink and lemon-hued belfry still seemed airborne. There is no paved road here either. A cogwheel monorail that looks like a funfair ride shuttles steeply from the sanctuary to a highway and bus stop a quarter mile below. The monorail is used primarily for luggage, since most guests are hikers. But the managers admitted that some people ask for a ride up.

We left our backpacks at the sanctuary, walked down to the bus and rode part way to Riomaggiore. At a crossroads we got off and walked up half a mile to another hillside hamlet called Groppo, headquarters of the modern, spotless Cinque Terre Cooperative Winery. In the tasting room the co-op’s president lustily poured three single-vineyard white wines made from Vermentino, Bosco and Albarola grapes. They were dry and pleasant, evoking citrus and honeysuckle.

“A century ago 4,000 acres of grapevines grew here,” the president told us with a sweep of his callused hands. “Now we have 250 acres. The co-op’s 160 growers’ average age is 75,” he sighed. “The park hasn’t solved the basic problem of an aging population, and young Italians don’t think working the land or making wine is fashionable.”

Some of them do. On the way back up to the sanctuary by bus and on foot later that afternoon we met an enthusiastic young park employee, Francesco Franceschetti. “Since the national park was created in the year 2000 there’s no unemployment in the Cinque Terre,” he said. “We’ve reclaimed over 25 acres of terraces. Organic basil for Genoese pesto grows alongside the grapevines. There’s enough work to keep us busy for decades!”

Back up at Montenero that evening we savored more of the same delicious pesto made with the co-op’s basil, and more fresh seafood, this time in a vaulted dining room from centuries past. When it came time to head to bed, the sanctuary’s laconic managers handed us flashlights.

“We’ve put your backpacks in Teodora,” said one cryptically.

“Watch out for wild boars,” said the other. “Walk up, turn right then left. Good night.”

Somehow we thought we had booked a room inside the convent. No. We were to have our very own cottage.

We saw no boars in the beams of our flashlights but had a fun time finding our way in the dark on a steep, narrow, tangled path through terraced woodland. “Teodora” turned out to be a reconverted winegrower’s hut the size of a one-car garage. The back wall was carved from a gray rock face. We clambered onto a tiny loft and slept lulled by the waves breaking 1,400 feet below. It was so quiet that we could actually hear them-and the grunting of boars, which have invaded the Cinque Terre and the rest of the Ligurian coast.

Our next morning’s walk was on the meandering Via dei Santuari, an old mule path and pilgrimage route. It ran about 7 miles and took us maybe 3 hours. Riders on horses, a horse-drawn carriage and several mountain bikers passed us-making us feel crowded. A handful of grapegrowers returned greetings from their suspended terraces. The discourse had a surreal quality.

Every vineyard, we noticed, is surrounded by handmade tree-heather fences. The climate is mild in the Cinque Terre, one man explained, but winds are often strong. “Without the windbreaks the grapes won’t ripen,” said a stooped, wizened woman busy cutting and weaving heather.

At noon we walked into the compact, perched village of Volastra. The park has funded blanket restoration and every house seemed to have been freshly painted in the requisite operetta-set pastel pink or lemon. Riomaggiore stretches about 1,000 feet below.

The ancient Romans called Volastra “Vicus Oleaster,” meaning a place where olive oil was made. It still is. Twisted olive trees sprout everywhere. Appropriately the village trattoria, also run by the park, is named Gli Ulivi-the olive trees. In the blissfully cool dining room painted with rainbow stripes on the walls, we feasted on half a dozen fresh fish antipasti, some of them drizzled with Volastra’s own light, fruity oil.

Feeling no worse for wear, we picked up trail #6/d in front of a weathered church that was roofed and faced in Riviera slate, with a belfry covered by scale-shaped slate tiles. An easy hour of level contours led through vineyards, olive groves and kitchen gardens hovering above Manarola, Corniglia and Vernazza, the next 3 Cinque Terre villages far, far below.

The grade to the ridge on trail #7/c brought back memories of the crazy climb up from Portovenere. It took us an hour to reach 2,000 feet, gulping air all the way. Once up we spent the next 4 hours marching on the crest through tilting chestnut groves and cloudbanks. Keyhole views of the coast or Apennines alternated as the path shuttled from one side of the ridge to the other. Luckily, when evening started painting the pinnacles around us, we tramped into the Sanctuary of Nostra Signora di Soviore, above Monterosso.

Soviore is still a working convent. Bells rang. Nuns came and went. But after 8 hours and about 16 miles of up-and-down, we were pleasantly fatigued. The best we could manage was to gaze in a daze at the miraculous Madonna in the convent’s gold-encrusted church, the object of pilgrimages, then head for the refectory. After a surprisingly sumptuous meal in the vaulted dining room, in the company of jolly pilgrims and other hikers, we tumbled into bed.

Anyone unused to very large, very heavy bronze church bells should bring industrial earplugs to Soviore. The convent’s campanile rang on the quarter hour through the night.

After breakfast a solicitous nun assured us that switchback mule paths dip from Soviore down to Monterosso, the northernmost and biggest of the Cinque Terre, in about 90 minutes. “See the crowds on the beaches?” she pointed, beaming proudly.

But our lonely route pointed north to Levanto. We followed the rocky ridge trail up and over hulking Monte Focone to Punta Mesco, an impressive headland. A ruined hermitage and lighthouse there provided more of those see-forever views, enabling us to retrace our zigzags from Portovenere via Montenero to Soviore. As if on runner’s high, I felt strangely invigorated. The final 2 hours of cliffs, forests of live oaks, and terraced olive groves were a breeze. They eased us down to the walls of Levanto, and our afternoon train to Genoa.

Triumph takes many forms. Ours was a minor, but rewarding one. Not only had we done 40 magic-mountain miles in three days. We’d also helped the local economy, and seen and enjoyed the Cinque Terre without running into a single human traffic jam.

An American author and journalist based in Paris, for the last 25 years David Downie has been writing about European culture, food and travel for magazines and newspapers worldwide. His nonfiction books include Enchanted Liguria, Cooking the Roman Way, The Irreverent Guide to Amsterdam, andthree critically acclaimed volumes of travel, food and wine in the Terroir Guides series: Food Wine the Italian Riviera & Genoa, Food Wine Rome, and Food Wine Burgundy. Downie’s travel memoir Paris, Paris: Journeys into the Heart and Soul of the City of Light is being reiussed in 2011 by Broadway Books. His latest books are Paris City of Night, a classic thriller set in Paris, and Quiet Corners of Rome (spring 2011). Please visit David Downie’s website, DavidDownie.com.

[Photos: Flickr | pizzodisevo; in da mood; travellingtamas; pizzodisevo; soa2002; SteveBrownd50; rayced; Goldmund100]

Letter from Rome: The view from the Janus Hill (or, How some Romans think of Rome)

by David Downie on

A few minutes before noon Saint Peter’s begins caroling its bells. This tintinnabulation began at the beginning of time and presumably will continue until the end of it. The Vatican’s bells are followed by 900 other lunch bells ringing from 900 lesser churches scattered among the city’s Seven Hills. As the ringing reaches noontide paroxysms, a cannon springs out of a bunker atop Rome’s highest hill and blasts a single deafening shot. It silences the bells for a second, perhaps two.

The cannon is kept on the Janiculum Hill underneath panoramic Piazzale Garibaldi. In the center of this square, an imposing equestrian monument to General Giuseppe Garibaldi reminds Italians of the glories and sacrifices of nationhood. Hero of the Roman Republic and Risorgimento, Garibaldi is the country’s George Washington. From the 1840s to 1870s he fought bloody battles on the Janiculum-and elsewhere-to unite Italy, drive out foreign occupiers and cast off the proverbial papal yoke.

Mounted atop his charger, Garibaldi’s bronze effigy seems to smile at the stroke of midday. He is not smirking at stunned tourists. Famously anticlerical, Garibaldi’s cannon blast is a daily raspberry aimed at the dome of Saint Peter’s a quarter-mile north. Or at least so it seems to me. The juxtaposition symbolizes the tragicomic struggle of Italian society to reconcile anarchic, secular, hedonistic republicanism with the timeless-some might say anachronistic-strictures of Roman Catholicism.

The view from Piazzale Garibaldi stretches from Saint Peter’s across Rome’s monument-studded center to the Alban Hills and Appenines. Wander up the looping, landscaped staircases from the Vatican, or the low-lying Trastevere quarter along the Tiber. Or do as the natives do and roar up under the towering sycamores to take the air. The Janiculum is cooler and windier than the rest of Rome. Once here, belly up to the balustrade of Garibaldi’s panoramic terrace. Itinerant rose-hawkers, most of them illegal immigrants, will thrust long-stemmed roses into your hands.

Like the hawkers, the roses do not come from Italy, once Europe’s biggest grower and exporter of flowers. They come from Holland, Morocco, Turkey, or Spain. The hawkers and their roses are the modern-day equivalent of the slaves and colonials, and their exotic wares, that the Romans dragged home to the seat of empire. Now they come of their own accord. Unlike the provincials of old, they rarely set down roots.

Sweeping views, sea breezes and globalized commerce are not the Janiculum’s only attractions. This is the least Roman and most Roman of neighborhoods. Atypical, it has few hotels, restaurants and residents-diplomats, clergymen and scholars, and the patients at Bambino Gesù pediatric hospital-and no ancient ruins. Yet it’s the quintessence of the Eternal City.

The Janiculum is named for Janus, the two-faced god of thresholds. It simultaneously looks backwards and forwards, east and west, north and south. Long before Garibaldi, Romans fought Etruscans here, and built the farthest reaches of the Aurelian Walls to enclose the Janiculum’s heights. It’s claimed Saint Peter was crucified where Bramante’s iconic Renaissance Tempietto now stands, flanked by the church of San Pietro in Montorio, on the hill’s southeastern edge. Mussolini used the site for Fascist propaganda. He erected a monument, facing the church, to Garibaldi’s fallen soldiers. Other hallowed nooks, marble plaques and statuary extol Roman patriotism and piety.

Whether Romans today glance at these memorials is questionable. The once fierce tribe is now placid. Its members flock to the Passeggiata del Gianicolo to relax, stroll, gaze, gossip, meditate, make out, jog, sip and snack at Bar Gianicolo, or slurp soda pop from the refreshment stand at Garibaldi’s feet. Surrounded by photographers, they get married where Saint Peter was crucified, because the backdrop is breathtaking.

In leisure and love a country reveals its true colors, making the Janiculum a must for anyone delving beyond stereotypes. Besides, in Italian, “zeitgeist” is l’aria che tira-the way the wind is blowing. No place in Rome is breezier.

The main sources of stress in this otherwise perfect world are the pediatric hospital, and the grim Regina Coeli prison in Trastevere below it. Knots of anxious parents mill around the gravel-filled square facing Gesù Bambino. Like the rose-hawkers, most new parents are not Italian: Italy has negative population growth. They shoot down espressos from the kiosk strategically sited here, or pace back and forth, listening to haunting shouts. The shouts come not from the hospital, but the prison. Inmates cup their hands and call up from the barred windows. Their mates shout back, leaning from the Janiculum’s parapets. It’s a heart-rending slice of Fellini in the age of text messaging.

Naturally not everyone experiences the Janiculum as I do. For one thing, the bells of noon are not lunch bells to Romans, who cannot constitutionally contemplate a meal before 1:30pm. The mad tolling therefore has nothing to do with the crisp-fried Roman-Jewish artichokes, Carbonara or roasted lamb I adore, or the “priest-strangling” strozzapreti all’Amatriciana so many “priest-eating” mangia-preti Romans delight in gobbling, the spicier the better.

For another thing, most Romans are too busy, blasé, and befuddled after decades of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s cult of mindless materialism to contemplate the country’s origin myths. Many seem to have forgotten who Garibaldi was. Some wish Italy would split back into city states.

Though born Catholic, the Romans I know rarely set foot in Saint Peter’s. They would swoon if their children joined the church. Young Italians simply do not become priests, monks or nuns nowadays. How could they? They live at home until age 38. They marry, get divorced, use contraceptives, have abortions, eat chocolate and cakes during Lent, swear a blue streak, and feel no compunction about their sins even if they’re believers. Faith and the Vatican’s rules occupy watertight compartments encrusted with evil eyes and amulets.

But recent scandals have rekindled interest in the age-old yin and yang of Italy. This has swollen the crowds of gawkers on the Janiculum. It’s not only the best and most scenic spot from which to gaze at Michelangelo’s Vatican dome. It’s also a fine transit point for observing foreign pilgrims and clergymen. They too are rarely Italian these days, often coming from far-flung, impoverished outposts of Roman Catholicism. They bustle by in a kaleidoscope of robes and skin-tones, climbing from Saint Peter’s to Sant’Onofrio’s monastery, next door to the hospital, then on to San Pietro in Montorio. Inside these storied sanctuaries, among the haunting images by Il Domenichino and Pinturicchio, a visitor rarely encounters Italians.

Romans watch the parade with bemused equanimity. Celibacy and abstinence? Rome flaunts its cityscape of temptation. The fountains alone are an incitement to lust. Caravaggio’s homo-erotic masterpieces hang in a half-hundred churches. Philandering and homosexuality among priests, monks and nuns is not only tolerated, it’s expected. In Italian, prete means both priest and bedwarmer.

Boccaccio, writing nearly 700 years ago, told many a bawdy tale in The Decameron. Who could forget lusty prelate Dom Gianni, who turned upon Gemmata “the tool with which he was used to plant men,” while her dopey husband looked on?

G. G. Belli and Trilussa, Rome’s revered anticlerical poets of the last two centuries, both Trastevere residents and Janiculum habitués, skewered sinful, sleazy papal tyrants, dressing up with hilarity the corruption, cynicism and perversion of their day.

No wonder few Romans blinked when in March 2010 a Vatican chorister and the pope’s gentleman-in-waiting were caught in a seamy gay sex-and-corruption scandal.

But rape, molestation and pedophilia are different. In a country where every child still incarnates the Baby Jesus, and in a city where the Gesù Bambino hospital stands only a few hundred yards from the pope’s fortress city, how could alarm about the goings-on not have been raised?

Why travel if you live in Rome? Tens of millions of people spend a fortune each year to come here.

Sit amid the mossy busts of Garibaldi’s soldiers on Passeggiata del Gianicolo and listen to older Romans gossip about er Papa and other piquant topics. Soccer, sex, vacations and tax evasion are the most common themes, since the weather is generally good, and the exchange rate for the euro makes no difference as long as you don’t travel. And why travel if you live in Rome? Tens of millions of people spend a fortune each year to come here.

If average Janiculum denizens disdain the Vatican for its perceived hypocrisy, they distrust and despise their government even more, in a colorful, creative way. With their gravely, nicotine-seasoned voices and utterly un-PC opinions, Rome’s tribal elders sound startlingly like Pulcinella wrangling with Arlecchino. The antics of Punch ‘n’ Judy are blasted at high volume from the Janiculum’s dusty little soap-box Teatrino. Everyone knows but no one seems to mind that the Punch ‘n’ Judy soundtrack is now tape-recorded.

Unlike Italy’s politics, the Janiculum is democratic, starting with its demographics. The studiously ragbag teenagers and 20-somethings might even outnumber the retirees. They socialize separately, as never before in Italy, draping themselves over the balustrade at Piazzale Garibaldi, or near the miniature lighthouse and pocketsize amphitheater, both farther north. Here they blare boomboxes and guzzle beer-a recent fad, imported from Northern Europe, Britain and America. They also make pigs of themselves. To these coddled youths, life understandably revolves around consumer electronics, telefonini, motor vehicles and music, plus soccer and sex, in that order. And dogs.

Italians not only jog nowadays, they have also discovered dogs. You will see phalanxes of retrievers and terriers running amok along Passeggiata del Gianicolo, or in Villa Doria-Pamphili, a much bigger greensward nearby. The dogs lift their legs on Garibaldi, and soil the steps of Sant’Onofrio. No one objects. Professional dog-walkers have made their appearance. Like the rose-hawkers, priests and parents, most are not Italian. Neither are the dogs, judging by their names, nearly always borrowed from American soap operas and sitcoms, or reality TV.

Even more than their elders, the young Romans of the Janiculum appear thoroughly globalized in a deliciously provincial, marvelously myopic way. They gulp at the good life as blissfully as fish swallow the Tiber’s murky waters. What about the imploding economies of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain-the PIIGS? The environment? Regionalism? The separation of church and state?

No, grazie, you hear them say, when buttonholed by earnest elders upon the parapets. Rev up the Vespa, Roberto! It’s time for un revival of La Dolce Vita, which everyone knows inspired American Graffiti. Because life in Rome is a revival. “Graffiti” is Italian, exported to America, and reimported with gusto. Every square centimeter of the city is adorned by colorful tags and aerosol art, even the trees and Garibaldi’s men. But this is not new either. The ancients scratched their names in stone. That’s where graffiti comes from.

One chummy curmudgeon I chatted up on a bench by the amphitheater gave me a world-weary shrug. I’d asked him about the fate of the PIIGS. The official acronym of Rome since the time of Caesar, he said waving vaguely at the Forum, has been SPQR. Senatus Populusque Romanus. “It means the senate and people of Rome,” he explained. Emblazed on bridges, manhole covers and parapets, it’s as ubiquitous as the graffiti and garbage. Somehow it survived the fall of Rome. Today SPQR is an initialism for Sono Porci Questi Romani-these Romans are pigs, he added. “And pigs know how to survive,” the man concluded philosophically, forming a good luck sign with his index and baby finger. Well, maybe, I reflected. In any case, they have a pretty wonderful sty.

* * * * *

An American author and journalist based in Paris, for the last 25 years David Downie has been writing about European culture, food and travel for magazines and newspapers worldwide. His nonfiction books include Enchanted Liguria, Cooking the Roman Way, The Irreverent Guide to Amsterdam, andthree critically acclaimed volumes of travel, food and wine in the Terroir Guides series: Food Wine the Italian Riviera & Genoa, Food Wine Rome, and Food Wine Burgundy. Downie’s travel memoir Paris, Paris: Journeys into the Heart and Soul of the City of Light is being reiussed in 2011 by Broadway Books. His latest books are Paris City of Night, a classic thriller set in Paris, and Quiet Corners of Rome (spring 2011). Please visit David Downie’s website, DavidDownie.com.

[Photos: Flickr | Kieran Lyman; Leo-seta; Scott Denham; Scott Denham; summitcheese; gnuckx]

Eternal returns in springtime Paris

by David Downie on

Natives will tell you that Paris has everything necessary for the pursuit of happiness, including songbirds. The intensity and frequency of birdsong signals the end of winter, if not the arrival of spring. Spring comes and goes, hesitating on the threshold. That’s why accordions are Paris’ reliable bellweather. Their wheezing is a sure sign people are back outdoors filling cafés, or draping themselves over the double-backed park benches, staring at buds.

The other day the usual spring suspects began squeezing their red-and-white accordions in the square under our bedroom windows. Listening to them, I just happened to open an email and click a link to the biggest panoramic photo ever taken, “Paris 26 Giga Pixels“, composed of 2,346 individual shots stitched together.

Up came Paris, from the belltower of Saint Sulpice. And up came the accordion waltz from the cult movie “Amélie Poulain.” I closed my eyes. The soundtrack is a masterpiece of nostalgia. Baguettes and berets, Edith Piaf’s raucous croonings, and Robert Doisneau’s black-and-white photos floated above Montmartre painted by Utrillo and Modigliani, the merry-go-round spinning below Sacré Coeur.

The music distills the bittersweet essence of a certain Paris. It’s a Paris much of the world — and many Parisians — desire, a magical city of dreams and memories and merry-go-rounds, abstracted from the globalized, recessionary nitty-gritty of today.I opened my eyes. On screen were the domes and Gothic towers, the neoclassical palaces, the gardens and 19th-Century merry-go-rounds of my home of the last quarter-century. The digital technology is state-of-the-art, the definition astonishingly high. But the high tech didn’t diminish the nostalgic punch.

Carouseling on Amélie’s waltz, clicking, dragging or scrolling, the merry-go-round of images sped up, zooming in and out, unapologetically plucking at heart-strings. The effect was instantaneous and systemic. I reconsidered Paris from a rooftop perspective, eager to see what had changed. I flew to the places I’ve lived and worked in. So much seemed the same, at least outwardly. Better, the panoramic view pushed me out to climb a real tower, revisit Paris, and be an aimless wanderer in spring all over again.

Because the belltower of Saint-Sulpice isn’t accessible, I headed to the Panthéon. En route at arcaded Place des Vosges, the Internauts used free WiFi, blissfully oblivious to the 17th-century bricks and stones. Across the Seine, a carousel spun near giant sycamores in the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s lush botanical garden. To synthesized calliope music, shrieking todlers rode back in time to the days of their grandparents.

The Panthéon rises atop Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, an awkward imitation of the real Pantheon in Rome . A toothy guard from a former French colony informed me gleefully that the panoramic terrace wouldn’t reopen for another week. In the meantime, there was Foucault’s famous pendulum, and the tombs of France ‘s great and good.

Directly beneath the dome, the pendulum dangled from a wire over 200 feet long. Back and forth it swung in the damp gloom, demonstrating the rotation of the Earth, marking the seconds, minutes, hours and days. It was not the pendulum moving forward, but we the public, the church, the city, the Earth, moving around it.

Mesmerized, it seemed to me that the pendulum’s bob was Paris, marking timelessness, while the rest of the universe spun around. Paris was as eternal as Rome, the Eternal City. The real Paris, of the mind, did not exist and could never age.

By comparison, the vaulted tombs of the country’s great men — and one woman, Marie Curie — left me chilled, an exercise in mildewy propaganda. Rome’s Pantheon, dedicated to the pagan gods, was saved by being consecrated as a church. In Paris, a church was saved from Revolutionary vandalism by becoming a temple to the Republic.

The cult of the Republic may once have been a fine thing. It seems less so now, when France’s anti-immigrant policies and reactionary reinterpretations of liberty, equality and fraternity clash with a spinning Earth of many hues and infinite diversity. In the gift shop a visitor wondered why French patriot Léon Gambetta’s heart was in an urn. The attendant replied that a body part was needed. Clearly the cult of relics had not ended with the Revolution, the visitor remarked, buying a mug emblazoned with “Vive la République.”

Down the street in the Luxembourg Gardens, the merry-go-round turned dreamily. Nearby, children rode ponies. Gaggles of pimply teens fiddled with hand-held devices as others devoured obsolete printed matter. Everyone smoked, even the tennis players.

The pendulum swings, the Earth and the merry-go-rounds spin. Paris stays the same.

Skipping Montparnasse, I aimed for the Eiffel Tower, last experienced by me in 1976. Bookstores in the notoriously literate 6th and 7th arrondissements displayed the sensation of late-winter, La Paresse et l’oubli, a novel by 29-year-old David Rochefort. The title means “sloth and oblivion” or perhaps “laziness and forgetfulness.” The cover is wrapped by a banner promising “Les battailes perdues de la vie” — life’s lost battles.

How someone not yet 30 could know such things, be compared to Flaubert and Balzac, dead for 150 years, and how such a clear-eyed and pessimistic oeuvre could be published and embraced by all in a world of corporate sameness, seem unanswerable questions to non-Parisians. The other big literary noise, this one written with tongue firmly in cheek: Mai 1958: Le Retour du Général de Gaulle. Did he ever go away?

At the Eiffel Tower’s base the requisite merry-go-round wheezed. Accordionists serenaded the waiting lines. Why not hang Foucault’s Pendulum here, I wondered?

Riding up, I calculated the number of merry-go-rounds in Paris. There are dozens. Dozens. But there are many more bookstores selling difficult novels. Both are subsidized, like public transit, health care, and much else. Culture is propped up at both ends of the spectrum. French movies are too. And the Eiffel Tower.

Might that help explain Paris’ abiding popularity even among lovers of free enterprise?

Amélie’s waltz replayed in my mind’s ear as I gazed down at 17 centuries’ worth of cityscape, from the Roman baths at Cluny, to the National Library and other remarkable monstrosities of the 1980s and ’90s. The messy reality of Paris glimpsed from above seemed immeasurably more satisfying than Paris 26 Giga Pixels.

Amid the jumble below I spied two more merry-go-rounds, one in the Tuileries and one in front of City Hall, my next destinations. As I walked through the Tuileries, the same children rode the same ponies. Had they trotted over from the Luxembourg or was I hallucinating?

Beyond the merry-go-round fronting City Hall’s neo-Renaissance façade, the line to enter “Izis: Paris des Rêves,” a photo exhibition, was as long as the lines at the Eiffel Tower. ” Paris through a Dreamer’s Lens” is the French Dream, the European Paradise as dreamed by Izraël Biderman, better known as Izis. A Lithuanian Jew determined to escape persecution, Izis wound up in the City of Light, soon dimmed and Occupied. Like other Jews and undesirables, Izis was hunted by Nazis aided by zealous Frenchmen. But he kept loving Paris. It belonged to him and the world, not his persecutors.

Like those of Doisneau or Brassai or Cartier-Bresson, Izis’s black-and-white photos capture the allure, the sleaze, the enchantingly bleak Paris of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Everyone smokes, especially the Résistance fighters. Everyone dresses in the shades of gray that are fashionable again today. One haunting, wall-sized image shows a merry-go-round in the Tuileries, its battered horses standing out against the snow.

On the sidewalk outside City Hall an outdoor exhibition currently hails 150 years of immigration to Paris. As I walked home past it I thought of Izis, Brassai, Chagall, Picasso, Piaf, Yves Montand and others. Many others. I thought of Chopin, a Pole, and how Paris is celebrating his 200th birthday, as if he were a native son. The cafés I looked into were staffed by immigrants. The restaurants, museums, monuments and City Hall were too. Even the accordionists in the square beneath our windows are immigrants. And so am I.

The pendulum swings, the accordions play, people, politicians and recessions come and go on an ever-spinning merry-go-round. Paris remains.

David Downie is an American writer and journalist based in Paris. He is the author of nine books, including Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light and Paris City of Night. He has written for Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Town & Country Travel, Departures, Travel + Leisure, salon.com, and concierge.com. His website is www.davidddownie.com.