Nov. 3, 2010

Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2010

Leave Bismarck for Rome, via Minneapolis and Amsterdam

Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010

Amsterdam, 10:00 AM

The airport is the cleanest most spacious and efficient of any we’ve seen, but we stay so focused on keeping track of our passports and finding the next gate that we hardly have time for impressions.

I was startled to see the lights at Amsterdam @ 6:15 AM after hours of darkness accumulated while we flew away from the sun. The flight seemed more comfortable and serene than our other overseas flights. The entertainment centers were much improved with small screens in each seat, complex menus with good maps, music, many movies and a good pasta supper. I willed myself onto European time and slept pretty well while Joanne watched movies. I started two travelers books- George Eliots’s Romolo, about Florence in 1492 and and introduction to ancient Rome by Michael Payne.

I am struggling to accommodate two Italys--two great flowerings of European civilizations, 1500 years apart. On the surface the two don’t appear connected; ancient Rome was stoic, efficient, brutal, civic, driven to conquer and govern. They are famous for importing and vulgarizing its art from Greece.

Then the Renaissance. A culture was graceful, exuberant, and driven to create and speculate. Imperial and magisterial, like ancient Rome, yet exuberantly producing domes, paintings, sculptures, bronze doors, bell towers, perspective drawings: Davinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Fra Angelico, Giotto, Bernini...

The two sides of the Roman culture, the humanist exuberance and the stern civic duty, are exactly presented in Romolo.

These two sides of the Italian culture might express two sides of human nature- certainly two sides of my own training and heritage- “Duty and Beauty”.