In Trieste, Italy, at the northern fringe of the Adriatic Sea, I am experiencing what Jan Morris called “Triesticity.” Outside Caffè San Marco, we sit at a square table on a pedestrian street, Via Donizetti, that runs alongside the cafe. The Greek-Italian proprietor, Alex Delithanassis, is smoking a Chesterfield. The French rabbi from the historic synagogue next door, Alexander Meloni, is smoking Marlboro Golds. Caffè San Marco opened in January of 1914, when Trieste was still the main seaport of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Members of the synagogue have found refuge in San Marco ever since.

Delithanassis is Greek Orthodox, but since his daughter attends the Jewish school of Trieste, which is now open to anyone, he regularly hangs out with the Jewish community. And being Orthodox, he’s friends with the Serb Orthodox community, many of whom were refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. There is no other place on earth where the aforementioned dynamics would unfold. Triesticity.

Austria-Hungary controlled Trieste for a few hundred years, that is, before the 20th century and the era of zoological nationalism then reconfigured the area multiple times, taking the city through numerous flags and border changes. After the First World War, Trieste officially became part of Italy. During the Second World War, the Nazis occupied Trieste for a few years and then Tito’s Partisans took over for forty days. Following the Second World War, Trieste became a free independent territory administered in two different zones, one under American and British control, the other operated by Yugoslavia. Then in 1954 those two zones were split, with the northern zone returning to Italy, resulting in the present-day city of Trieste, but with the surrounding area, the coastal lands and the frontiers all going to Tito. When Yugoslavia dissolved decades later, that second zone was subsequently split up again, with portions going to Slovenia and Croatia.

As a result, the majority of Trieste residents these days are native Italian speakers, but in a place where Italian, Germanic and Slavic influence and language all bleed into each other. The geographic borders make no sense to anyone. You meet Italian nationals with Germanic surnames and vice-versa. You meet Slavs whose mother tongue is Italian. You meet Slovenes convinced Trieste belongs to them. Some people even act nostalgic for Austria, people who were never even Austrian in the first place. A tiny percentage even argues to bring back the free independent Trieste.

Nearly every major thoroughfare in Trieste was formerly named something else—the signs were there to prove it—and the city seems to operate outside the linear passage of history, in regards to the ways cities are normally defined by languages, allegiances or relationships to larger regions.

“In Trieste, calling yourself ‘Italian’ is always an individual decision,” one person told me. “Because we’re all mixed.”

Over the course of a few days, I relayed that comment to several other people. All of them agreed.

With such a gorgeous flavor of irreducibility, Trieste feels like a place where a transnational identity—on the level of the city and the individual—becomes normalized, not marginalized or exoticized. You can see it in the architecture, hear it on the streets, taste it in the restaurants or read it in the literature.

Yet the worn-out terminology often used everywhere else—words like, ‘multicultural,’ ‘melting pot,’ ‘tapestry,’ or even ‘mosaic’—all seem irritatingly simplistic when applied to Trieste. In the research I did before my trip, the best term I came across was by the local literary critic Bobi Bazlen who referred to Trieste as a cassa di risonanza—a resonating chamber—where all sorts of opposites co-existed in harmonic interplay, internally and externally. He was referring to the turn of the century, but the term exemplified how I already experienced the world as a harmonization of opposing forces. Far as I was concerned, the term still applied.

Above all else, the city proved the sheer nonsense of categorizing people according to nation states or borders. It seemed like everyone’s identity was formerly a part of some other identity, none of which was reducible to anything “pure.” Many locals I met had a legitimate disregard for absolutist categories. I loved it. Anyone who remained attached to a fixed identity was destined to suffer, as the Buddha said. Nothing was permanent, especially in Trieste.

Yet rather than dwell on the melancholic aspects of such a predicament, in Trieste it became a wondrous condition, allowing anyone to become a traveler, a person whose very nature impelled him or her to cross some sort of categorical boundary, or border, just for the sake of crossing a border.

Well-known Trieste writer and decades-long Caffè San Marco regular Claudio Magris referred to such a condition as confine dentro—the border within. In the introduction to an anthology of his travel writings, Magris wrote: “There is no journey without crossing borders—political, linguistic, social, cultural, psychological, even the invisible lines that separate neighborhoods in the same city, the barriers between people, the twists and turns that in our inner recesses obstruct our own way.” Only a writer from Trieste would have said it that way.

Magris carried on a long tradition of scribes at Caffè San Marco. During the cafe’s initial incarnations, every literary troublemaker showed up. The novelist Italo Svevo. The poet Umberto Saba. Students, journalists and intellectuals of all flavors. Magris was now in his eighties and had his own table.

“It’s that one right over there,” said Delithanassis, pointing to a large rectangular marble slab in the corner. “He’d sit there for hours.”

As a result, I wanted to move into this ancient coffee shop and pay homage to the giants of literature, the famous writers who once called Trieste home, so there I was, revisiting Caffè San Marco. It felt like a pilgrimage, albeit a secular one.

To be sure, throughout the world one found cafes that banked themselves on past writers who frequented their tables. Everyone wanted to visit an iconic hangout to sip an espresso where their heroes once did. That much was not unique.

But Caffè San Marco was different. Much of the interior remained from when it first opened in January of 1914, five months before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of World War One.

In a less volatile part of the world, a cafe opening at that time would not seem so significant. Yet even as Trieste was the third largest city in the Austro-Hungarian empire after Vienna and Prague, Italian irredentism was percolating out loud.

As Delithanassis showed me around, he pointed out examples of Venetian empire symbolism hidden in the décor of the place. The marble tables, all original, featured cast iron legs with lion’s paws at the bottom—the Lions of San Marco, the symbol of Venice. In those days, the lions also symbolized anti-Austrian sentiment. It was like a secret code for Italian irredentism, the movement to unify all Italian-speaking territory. When original owner Marco Lovrinovich, an irredentist, opened the café, everyone understood the dual meaning of the name.

As we sat at one of the marble tables, Delithanassis pointed out the bronze-colored stuccos on the walls, which were also original, although when the San Marco first opened they were brazenly tricolor. Lovrinovich had hired another irredentist, Napoleon Cozzi, to give the San Marco an Italian style décor.

I continued to look around. Ornate frescoes, old-world mirrors and historical photos of the original cafe hung on the walls throughout the establishment. The booths and chairs were darker than the darkest espresso. A multiple-tiered tray on the bar was filled with oranges. The same tray could be seen in a historic photo from 100 years earlier.

Delithanassis was a busy person. He jumped up and down to deal with employees, event planners or even just to slip outside for another Chesterfield, but he always came back to answer my questions. He then brought over a well-used shop copy of Stelio Vinci’s book on the 2014 San Marco centenary and plopped it down on the marble table. Caffè San Marco – Un secolo di storia e cultura a Trieste 1914-2014 included 150 pages of stories and classic photographsThere was not yet an English translation, but Delithanassis hoped that someday it could happen.

The history was indeed a star-studded affair. When the Great War erupted, Caffè San Marco was home to a secret passport forging operation for any anti-Austrian patriot trying to escape into Italy, so the cafe soon became the gathering place for Italian irredentist youths and young Jewish people from the synagogue, who were sometimes just as marginalized in Austria-Hungary as the Italian irredentists, although there was some overlap.

As a result, Austro-Hungarian troops destroyed the place and shut it down, although the fire department was able to save most of the inside. The cafe remained unused for several years until it reopened after the war, eventually passing through several ownership groups including a 50-year run under the proprietorship of the Stock family. Magris himself was then one of the prime movers who helped rescue San Marco from uncertainty when it briefly closed in 2012, writing a passionate newspaper editorial in support of saving the place.

In the opening chapter of his 1997 book, Microcosms, Magris furnished a masterwork of essayistic prose about Caffè San Marco, not only depicting the matrix of characters therein, of which he mentioned more than once the itinerant scholar type who accosted decades-long regulars with the same dumb questions about Trieste—exactly as I would have done had I discovered him sitting there—but also supplying slices of history that helped inspire later books, including the Jan Morris work.

“The San Marco is a real cafe—the outskirts of History stamped with the conservative loyalty and the liberal pluralism of its patrons,” wrote Magris, adding that any place where just one tribe sets up shop is instead a pseudo-cafe. Didn’t matter if such a place was frequented by “respectable people, youth most-likely-to, alternative lifestyles or à la page intellectuals.” All endogamies were suffocating, he wrote, as were colleges, university campuses, exclusive clubs, master classes, political meetings and cultural symposia. “They are all a negation of life, which is a sea port,” he wrote.

Magris was right. Sea ports were different types of cities, where the gloriously convoluted residue of history washed up on the shores of every person’s identity. Especially in Trieste, such was life. One singular, classifiable demographic could never possess Trieste. And Caffè San Marco really was a microcosm of the city itself.

In Microcosms, Magris went on to describe the variety of folks at San Marco. He mentioned old long-haul captains, students revising for exams and chess players oblivious to what went on around them. There were “spirited old men inveighing against the iniquity of the times,” “know-it-all commentators,” “misunderstood geniuses,” and of course “the old imbecile yuppie.” In other passages, Magris compared Caffè San Marco to Noah’s Ark, a Platonic academy, and a hospice for the brokenhearted. Microcosms was required reading for any intellectual traveler to the Northern Adriatic.

When Delithanassis acquired San Marco, he already owned a small bookshop and publishing house across the street, so he just moved the bookshop into San Marco instead, where he was now re-establishing the cafe as a literary and intellectual nerve center of Trieste. Located to the left as one walked in, the bookstore was a perfect enhancement to the San Marco mystique. A poster showed me that author events were unfolding on a regular basis.

Such was the future of Caffè San Marco. A literary coffee shop reborn for the modern era.
Later as we reconvened outside on Via Donizetti, which was permanently closed off so that San Marco could fill it up with outdoor seating, Meloni and Delithanassis continued to smoke Marlboros and Chesterfields. They were both collaborating on a new calendar project, one that would include every possible religious holiday for every possible denomination or faith. They joked it would enable people in Trieste to get more days off.

“People tell us Trieste is the Napoli of the north,” said Delithanassis. “Nobody wants to work.”
We laughed out loud. For once, I wanted a smoke. But all I could do was listen to their stories and relish in the Triesticity of it all.

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Banff Avenue in the roaring heat, in the town of the same name, in the summer of 2012. Vacationers paraded up and down the finely-swept sidewalks. They wore shorts, pushed double-strollers, devoured ice cream and took photos of the cranky mountain peaks. While scrambling to replace camera batteries, parents and their teenagers looked for bison burgers or killed time until a $75-dollar fondue extravaganza of snake and alligator. A seemingly endless traffic jam of car-jeep-crossovers-green, maroon, black, red or blue-but all very outdoorsy-looking and many with canoes or kayaks strapped to their tops, honked every two seconds, each making illegal left turns or looking for parking where there wasn’t any.

Yet the cranky mountain peaks oversaw everything, especially in the back streets, where I stole a glimpse. I too snapped a few shots.

Cyclists appeared everywhere too. Spandex-clad athletes, either in packs or just resting in the public spaces, were omnipresent. One gray-haired cyclist from Calgary, a guy about 50, covered in multicolored spandex, asked the woman at the information booth if there was a Quiznos sandwich place anywhere near here. She said no, only Subway, so he settled for instructions on how to find it. Harumph, he said.

Behind us, the cranky mountain peaks seemed to know they would outlast all the tourists. And the cyclists. And the car-jeep crossovers.

I wound up a block down the street, to the sound of a steel drummer doing Brahms and the earthy aroma of burning hickory in a sidewalk display-fireplace while I scoped out a public artwork: Three raven sculptures, each on a thin 30-foot-tall pedestal, surrounded a large cement area, circular and open. You know the Maltese Falcon, the jade bird Bogey gunned for in that flick? That’s what the ravens looked like. The hardened detail. The austere menacing profile, both ominous and delicate. One raven stared downward from his post, one gazed forward, and the third one looked upward, although slightly hidden by a few tree branches.

It didn’t feel like I ‘discovered’ the ravens. On one hand, yes, I asked the woman at the info booth after reading about the ravens in her brochure, but it felt like the birds discovered me instead. This wasn’t easy. The third raven, for example, found me as I was looking for the other two. The brochure hadn’t described the birds, just that three of them stared down on Banff’s Heritage Square, which, turned out, sat right behind the steel drummer and the smell of burning hickory.

Among a slew of other things, ravens represented the Jungian Shadow, the darker side of the psyche. Writers inspired by serendipity often insisted on a life of travel for precisely this reason: to weave separate contexts together; to experience a heightened sense of awareness; to discover their own multidimensional selves. And the raven was a symbol of creativity, magic and finding balance — perfect for a traveler on Banff Avenue.

Raven imagery followed me for the rest of the trip. Creativity shifted into high gear and dominated the scene, beginning with the Three Ravens Restaurant, just one component of the Banff Centre, a world-renowned collaborative arts incubator and conference facility luring creative types from all over the world. Steeped in First Nations iconography, the landscape of this place inspired anyone who visited. It was a multidimensional, experiential vortex, a synesthetic interaction of different creative disciplines. Dancers collaborated with sound artists. Composers pooled resources with Processing programmers. Painters, sculptors and ceramicists set up shop and reaped influence from the staggering scenery enveloping the entire campus.

For example, music students coming here for work-study programs could even utilize “practice huts” integrated into the wilderness across the parking lot from the music building. As I skulked around the area, I heard students practicing trombone, piano and cello. A deer sauntered by for half a second. At more than one moment, a raven flew overhead.

The Banff Centre hosted numerous artist residencies all year long. Creative types made their way here and thrived in a visionary environment that placed them in constant contact with other artists, writers, researchers and other passionate, focused people. I was envious of anyone with passion and focus, so maybe that’s why I was here.

But categories didn’t matter. Creativity did. Everyone seemed to play off each other’s presence.

The aptly titled Kinnear Centre for Creativity & Innovation opened two years ago. On the wall inside the Maclab Bistro were the words, “May creativity, collaboration and friendship flourish in this place.” Even the employee vans were crafted with the tagline: Inspiring Creativity.

The Three Ravens restaurant, I was told, opened in 2008. The name was chosen from a staff contest. Maybe the raven watched over the Banff Centre in ways only the indigenous masters would understand. It was a magical, inspiring place. Roaming this campus, one was destined to create. The muses of serendipity would emerge, helping anyone to resolve his or her inner conflicts through creativity-precisely the mechanisms ravens tended to catalyze, according to the ancient archetypes.

Speaking of archetypes, during one particular aimless drift, I randomly ascended the staircase in the Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives, only to see a complete set of Carl Gustav Jung’s works, right there, at the top of the stairs. My gaze went straight to it. I had made the ascent, arrived at the top, and there he was. Jung. All of him. Talk about symbolism. I couldn’t have planned it better. I couldn’t have planned it at all.

The Banff Centre integrated me into its interdisciplinary arts and innovation vortex for what seemed like only a few brief days, but during my short experience, so much transpired behind every door, I couldn’t keep track of it all: A group bus tour of 50 seniors stopped by to eat and explore. The audio designer Shawn Murphy was lecturing in the Film & Media department. I infiltrated opera rehearsals for both Don Giovanni and the Secret Garden. In another building, a week-long leadership development program was unfolding.

All around me, there existed master classes, workshops, gatherings, research and collective theorizing. At nighttime, over in the theater building, The Club, a 180-capacity Cabaret-style venue, was rocking and jammed to the gills.

All the while, a special Banff Centre extension of dOCUMENTA (13), the provocative contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, also unfolded around me, as part of the Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) residency program. Scholars, radicals and cultural theorists exchanged ideas in all formats.

I departed the Banff Centre totally inspired, but I needed a coda, a final section of the symphony. Thus entered the Canmore Folk Festival, just down the highway, where I happened to witness a huge raven tearing up a dead animal in the middle of the road. The ravens in Alberta were gigantic, longer than my forearm.

At the festival, the legendary Ian Tyson talked on stage about his new album, The Raven Singer.

I’m not making this up. Neither did I know about this ahead of time, nor did I plan in advance to visit Second Story Books and randomly pluck a Mordecai Richler book off the shelf, only to see a raven on the cover. As I departed, I noticed the building next door was called Ravens Court.

I loved this stuff, worshiped this stuff, adored this stuff. Synchronicities were evidence of the muses at work. I was in the right place.

Even after I left Alberta proper, the ravens were with me everywhere. They were my friends, my brothers, my inspiration.

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“…to tell his whole story in the past tense would bore him a great deal
as well as sadden him a little.” – Lost Horizon

“We only sell tea to go,” says the woman at Ten Fu Tea in the Aberdeen Centre shopping mall in Richmond, British Columbia.

Motionless and disappointed, I contemplate leaving but something tells me to stay. Outside in the mall, the low-frequency roar of a water fountain complements the higher-pitched Chinese instruments—erhu and pipa—that I hear emanating from the canned system. Inside Ten Fu, as I start to nose around, I see a wide variety of loose leaf pu’erh, oolong, and black tea. Tiny $150 cast-iron pots occupy the shelves like royalty. Statues, gifts and figurines abound. I order pu’erh in a paper cup, hoping its earthy muse-like tendencies will harmonize the eastern and western spheres of myself.

Asian and Asian Canadians make up about 60 to 70 percent of Richmond’s population, much of which is Hong Kong Chinese. Parts of Richmond remind me of Hong Kong, but without the density and without the skyscrapers. Hundreds of Asian restaurants, eateries, tea shops and hole-in-the-wall joints populate the landscape. Eccentric old side-streets bisect lengthy Los Angeles-style thoroughfares.

Everywhere I roam, Asian-themed shopping centers seem to emerge over and over again. Some are new and shiny, while others evoke more grungy atmospherics. Aberdeen Centre is one of the newer ones. On a previous Richmond visit, in 2004, I got to see the mall when construction was still underway. Now it’s a shiny, angular and well-illuminated place thanks to multicolored glass paneling on the top floor.

All in all, Richmond is a righteous town in which to explore one’s lost eastern half through the muse of tea. I don’t mean “lost” in a negative sense. To paraphrase Ikkyu, the heroic drunken Zen monk of yore: If I don’t have a destination, then I can’t possibly get lost.

The senior-aged woman inside Ten Fu looks horrified by yours truly when I walk in. Maybe she’s not accustomed to a Zappa-looking freak with a Moleskine notebook ordering a dark pu’erh, claiming it connects him to the earth in some strange quasi-yogic psychobabble.

There’s no place for me to camp out with a pot, but somehow she can tell I’m a serious tea drinker, so she fills a plastic steeper with pu’erh leaves and lets me hang out and stare at all the multicolored tins of tea and Buddhist figurines. After a few minutes of my lazy browsing, she motions for me to park myself at a ceremonial mahogany table near the back, where I take a cup of the tea. A laughing Buddha statue sits in front of me, with large auburn mala beads hanging around his neck.

She slides me a bowl of pumpkin seed candy, fantastic mega-sugary stuff, and then moves away to help other customers, all Chinese. I assume I’ve won her over. She no longer looks horrified.

I can only guess what’s happening. Since a majority of westerners roll in and order something like the stock Jasmine tea in a box—the generic uncreative stuff—maybe she assumes I’m a different kind of customer, that is, one who at least knows pu’erh, one who has a preference. As my wannabe Zappa-turned-Kerouac self sits there scribbling in my notebook and scarfing the pumpkin seed candy, there’s nothing for her, or me, to be confused about. By now, the pu’erh has elicited serenity of the utmost sort.

Dharma and the Mysterious Third Ingredient

Directly across Cambie Street from Aberdeen Centre, the Vancouver International Buddhist Progress Society occupies the sixth floor of the Radisson Hotel building—the only such scenario on earth. There’s a temple, a bookstore, classrooms, a jewelry and souvenir store, plus a tea shop. Upon my arrival, I’m the only one in the tea shop. Everything seems the same beige color: the tables, chairs, walls, everything. Soft piano jazz emanates from the speakers above me.

An older Chinese lady toils away behind the counter and looks utterly horrified when I walk up. I guess I still don’t look like a tea drinker. She hands me a laminated menu and I scan the offerings. Pointing to ginger longan tea, I say, “This one.” She speaks no English, but she acquiesces and motions for me to sit anywhere in the shop, which is still empty.

I slither into a table at the front corner as she gets on the phone to call someone. I understand no Chinese, but I can tell she’s phoning for help. Within a minute, a young woman comes over from the temple area down the hall and informs me that the tea shop doesn’t take cash. I have to get a meal ticket. And my pot of tea is seven dollars. No problem, I say, getting up.

After walking over to the temple area, I see a few ladies behind a check-in table, wearing what look like red flight attendant uniforms. I give them the cash and they issue me a small laminated ticket. The temple is closed off at the moment, so nothing’s going on. I migrate back into the tea shop and give the woman my ticket. She apologizes in Chinese for the trouble, managing the word, ‘sorry’ in the middle somewhere.

The tea arrives ten minutes later. A see-through glass pot reveals strange unidentifiable meaty-looking mélange in the infuser. Turns out it’s ginger, longan and something else I can’t identify. In fact, it’s hard to tell the ginger from the longan.

The tea is amazing. A sweet fruit-like symphony of taste seems to sand down the edges of the ginger notes. Gorgeous. Sad to say, I feel ashamed to admit I don’t know what a longan is. I should.

I ask the woman about the ingredients and she can’t answer. But she manages to say, ‘ginger,’ ‘longan’ and one other ingredient, in Chinese. For that third ingredient, she apparently only knows the Chinese word. After looking at the pulpy experiment enshrouded inside the tea infuser, I am obsessed to learn about this third ingredient. Some kind of fruit, but I can’t tell.

The woman can sense my intrigue, so she dashes out of the shop and returns a moment later with the janitor, a short elderly Chinese man wearing shop overalls. He had been pushing a wheeled garbage can down the hall.

“Do you need help?” He asks.

“I just want to know what’s in this,” I reply, pointing to the infuser. All three of us then laugh. Ginger, longan and some other Chinese thing? I ask.

“I don’t know how to say that in English,” the janitor says.

I ask the janitor to write it down in Chinese, which he graciously does. I then blast it all over Facebook so my Chinese friends can translate. Turns out it’s a dried red date, or something similar.

The mysterious third ingredient. I probably could have figured it out, but I just like saying that phrase: “The mysterious third ingredient.” It has a ring to it. I can’t tell if I’m in a Graham Greene story or a cold war-era John Le Carre novel. But I am serene in the mystery.

When I get up to leave 45 minutes later, I am still the only one in the shop. The woman says thank you in English. I attempt to say xie xie but fail miserably.

Go West, My Wayward Son

If Richmond constitutes an intrinsic place to salvage the lost Eastern half of myself, then Victoria just across the water on Vancouver Island presents an opportunity to salvage the lost Western half. And when those two eventually meet and fuse together, the result is Shangri-la, as we will see.

For starters, I’m at the end of the tea bar at Silk Road Tea, just outside Victoria’s Chinatown, looking at a wall of oolong, black, white, green and herbal teas. Tourists enter the shop straight off the bus seemingly every five seconds. Gifts and tea supplies occupy shelves everywhere. As I spend an hour with a pot of earthly-dark brown pu’erh, I scope out numerous designer tea steepers, infusers, mugs, timers, strainers and displays of exotic glassware, ceramic and cast-iron tea sets. The tourists and nuclear families seem startled and horrified at some loudmouth like me sitting at the end of a tea bar, carrying on about tea as the muse of creativity, fusing the mental with the physical.

The barista dude is an expert. He waxes poetic on all things tea, not just for me, but to anyone who comes in. The pu’erh is connecting me to the earth, so his commentary is refreshing. Not very many people walk in and order pu’erh, he tells me. They usually want the floral stuff.

In my best sober Jack Kerouac English, I say to the barista dude: “You know, I just need to find some esoteric Chinese place with lizards crawling across the fibrous wooden floor, tons of ginseng root hanging on twine, fucked up herbs in every tin cylinder, and a cast iron pot of earthy pu’erh, blacker than the ace of spades, bark-tasting, the kind that shatters the space-time continuum and reconnects me to Tang Dynasty hermits. And then the solitude will be enhanced even more. Know any places like that around here?”

He can’t recommend any, but he appears sympathetic. In any event, Silk Road is unique among tea shops. Each tea has a title and a subtitle. Alchemist’s Brew is “Tea of Transformation.” Herbal Chai is “Cosmic Consciousness.” Sublime is the “Monk’s Elixir.” That last one calms me down, considerably so.

Love and Wisdom

Victoria’s Chinatown is not that big, just a few blocks, but it’s the oldest one in Canada. After leaving Silk Road, I go through the Gates of Harmonious Interest right to Venus Sophia where I find the Prince of Darkness. That is not hyperbole. That’s exactly what unfolds.

The Gates of Harmonious Interest are 40-feet high. The structure is a landmark built in Victoria’s sister city, Suzhou, and presented to Victoria in 1981, partly to memorialize the 61 Chinese-Canadians who fought and died in World War Two. The monument symbolizes a combination of opposites, yin and yang, or to be more precise—unity in duality. Male and female lions grace each side of the entrance. Singh means lion, so I feel at home. Just down this particular street, Fisgard, I discover the goddesses of love and wisdom.

Venus Sophia is a tea shop and vegetarian eatery filled with eclectic furniture, paintings, vintage bicycles on the walls, Indian travel books and tea supplies. A golden pu’erh beckons me and I slide into a corner table after ordering a pot.

Victoria is definitively British, but from the view of my western half, this place, Venus Sophia, this soothing little sanctuary in Chinatown, this gorgeously oddball tea shop, puts me on a course toward finally harmonizing the inner polarities. For a moment, I feel a sense of belonging. No more of this Nehru-style, “mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere,” stuff.

Venus Sophia even sells Oso Negro coffee from not too far away. A blend called Prince of Darkness stares right at me from the shelf. Unfortunately, a complimentary blend, Princess of Darkness, is sold out. There’s none left. Somehow, I find this to be symbolic of my whole journey, in some strange Jungian, animus-and-anima sense.

Kipling’s Empress Muse

The Canadian capital of high tea, Victoria’s Fairmont Empress, was the first property to establish the concept of British-style high tea society anywhere in North America. I also learn, via some impossible cosmic transmission of tea sommelier knowledge, that Rudyard Kipling considered this hotel to be his muse. He drank tea here about the time it first opened, in 1908.

In fact, Kipling visited Vancouver Island a few times. Fortunately or unfortunately, he didn’t have to deal with convoys of tour buses all day long, or incessant amounts of whale watching rubberneckers from across the planet, but he raved about the island in various letters and other writings. He praised Victoria as a fine Devon-style country land where retired civil folk from the good old British Empire could sit around and productively loaf. Photos of Kipling, among various royal family members, highlight quite a few walls, in and about the property.

The tea room, a mammoth space, (for a tea room, that is), serves 500,000 cups of tea each year. I am grateful for the Devil’s Chocolate and Pistachio Battenberg, the Rose Petal Shortbread, and the Cognac Port Pâte on Sun-dreid Tomato Bread, all while I consume the Empress special blend of Assam, Kenyan black, Kenyan green, Sri Lankan Dimbula and Keemun. The special blend is a copper-colored symphony of notes and flavors, although my orchestration chops are long gone, so I can’t describe the different ranges of the instruments and how they complement each other in this fabulous blend of tea.

Since I am the only Zappa-looking dude in the whole place, which is filled with tourists and nuclear families, I sense a tad of uncomfortable stares, especially from the old blue-hairs. But I am dressed at least as good as most of them, oddly enough.

The Muse as Connection Machine in Shangri-la

Finally, the two halves meet and I feel integrated. Two lion-like statues on West Georgia Street in downtown Vancouver are my signals, my signposts, declaring that I have found Shangri-la. Everything comes into perspective, here, amid towering skyscrapers, glass, foliage, dismal skies, shopping, lattes, high finance, urban parks, plus outdoorsy-jacket-and-shorts-wearing cyclists in the pouring rain, and all the things that characterize Vancouver, one of my favorite cities on earth. And the Shangri-la Hotel is now the city’s tallest building.

Throughout the hotel, certain rooms and spaces are named after characters and scenarios from Lost Horizon, the book that gave us the word, Shangri-la. The hotel brand started in Singapore, the lion city, hence the two lions out in front. Again, my surname means lion so everything comes into perspective.

The Shangri-la brand already fuses east and west, even if it seems dumb and cliché to say it that way. Heck, these days, Vancouver feels just as much a part of Asia as it is a part of North America, really. Which is why I love it so much.

In Shangri-la, I feel more at home here than anywhere. No more disenfranchised Nehru stuff. I am serene, at least during the afternoon tea. As a result, I don’t even have to look for an excuse anymore. Everything about the Shangri-la, including the tea service, fuses native with exotic, intimacy with distance, east with west, yin with yang, serenity with chaos. That is the whole idea, from top to bottom, inside and out, around and between. I think the ancient alchemists were right when it comes to merging opposites and transcending duality. One becomes a more integrated person, as a result.

In the Shangri-la, Xi Shi is the bar where the tea service is presented. I am grateful to experience the Szechuan Peppercorn Creme Brulee, the Mango Cream with Sago and Pomelo, plus a Black Sesame Macaron atop a tiered platter next to my Single Estate Oolong from the Fujian province of China.

As I take in the last drop, realizing that each and every sip of tea is indeed a journey, like the aphorism goes, I notice the in-house guitar player is playing and singing a serene jazzy version of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” Way down past the lobby, I can just barely see the traffic outside on Georgia Street, but I hear none of it. I feel very, very Zen inside this place. There is no need to explore this land any further. I am done.

I end up leaving the hotel, and British Columbia, with my own hardback copy of Lost Horizon, a special version published by Shangri-la hotels, for which I am yet again very grateful. A piece of velum lies inside the front cover, regaling me with a quick history of the entire Shangri-la brand. I’ve read parts of the book before, but this copy is unique.

With the Single Estate Oolong still warming my system, I skip to my favorite passage in the book, where the belligerent Christian missionary woman is completely baffled by the monk’s life:

“What do the lamas do?” she continued.

“They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom.”

“But that isn’t doing anything.”

“Then, madam, they do nothing.”

“I thought as much.” She found the occasion to sum up. “Well, Mr. Chang, it’s a pleasure being shown all these things, I’m sure, but you won’t convince me that a place like this does any real good. I prefer something more practical.”

“Perhaps you would like to take tea?”

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“The professional art dealer is a profession that only makes sense if you do it with your heart,” explains Angela Rosengart, as she leads me through the ground floor of the collection that bears her name. She wears a pink sweater highlighted by a necklace of gold-colored pedants. Her silvery hair is tied back tight around her head. Speaking from half a century of art acquisitions, she continues, adding that a dealer shouldn’t get too attached to the paintings. If that happens, you’re in trouble, since you might find it difficult to sell them and maintain the business.

Angela is the daughter of Siegfried Rosengart, who passed away in 1985 after a lucrative career as one of the 20th century’s most distinguished art dealers. Based in Lucerne, Switzerland, he and Angela operated the business together for decades, often purchasing works for their own personal appreciation rather than for any intention of moving them as product. In the process of becoming close friends with Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee and nearly every high-profile European artist from the 1940s onward, the Rosengarts amassed an unrivaled collection. As dealers, they knew everyone.

After her father died, Angela eventually created a foundation to keep the paintings and make them publicly available. Since 2002, the Rosengart Collection, now over 300 works, has occupied the austere neoclassical building at Pilatusstrasse 10 in Lucerne, formerly the Swiss National Bank, just a few blocks from where the Reuss River flows into the lake. Upon acquiring the old place, Angela hired the Basel-based architect Roger Diener to transform the building into a museum-style structure with subtle lighting and wide spaces to enhance the viewer’s experience of the artwork. Much of the original ornamentation remains. Diener wanted a simple look. Nothing superfluous, nothing grandiose.

“He understood painting and he was fond of old buildings,” Angela tells me.

Picasso was a friend of the Rosengart family, so the entire ground floor features his works, mostly from the later decades. One moves through the work chronologically. For example, one gallery is primarily dedicated to the ’50s, while the next covers the early ’60s. There are many paintings of Picasso’s various lovers.

Picasso even famously sketched and painted Angela Rosengart herself. Another floor features David Douglas Duncan’s photographs of Picasso at work in his studio, including a few shots from October, 1963, with Angela sitting in a chair, as Picasso draws her.

“I had to sit there and endure the looks from his eyes,” Angela tells me. “The looks were like arrows.”

As we move through the rooms, I can feel the sheer vitality of Picasso’s output emanating from the walls of Pilatusstrasse 10. It’s like stepping into his very own studio. For example, as we turn a corner, Angela leads me into another space featuring some of Picasso’s etchings from 1968.

“He did something like 347 etchings that year,” she explains. “He would complete one after the other.”

Nothing beats exploring a three-story art collection, guided by the benefactress herself. I’m almost star-struck. It’s hard to speak. Yet Angela is no rock star. During my tour, tourists filter through and ask the inevitable vacuous question: Which painting is your favorite? But Angela says there’s no way to answer. It changes every day. This is also how writers respond when readers pry into which story, or book, or column is the most favorite one, a question no writer can answer, except to say, “That’s like asking which one of your children is the most favorite one.” So I get it.

With the utmost of humility, Angela won’t even refer to the works as a collection. Instead, she repeats over and over that she “simply has beautiful pictures.”

Aside from Picasso, the beautiful pictures include works by Paul Klee, Matisse, Monet, Kandinsky, Leger, Braque, Seurat, Renoir and Cezanne. With even more humility, Angela reiterates that the entire “collection” happened by accident. She and her father never planned to present them as a “collection” of any sort.

“The paintings were acquired over the years and we just didn’t want to part with them,” she admits.

In fact, her father never even planned to be an art dealer in the first place. That was likewise accidental. Initially, Siegfried served as general manager of the Lucerne branch of the Munich-based Thannhauser Gallery before taking over the gallery himself in 1937. After that, he operated the business as sole owner under his own name. His life just unfolded in such a way that he became a world-renowned dealer and agent.

Angela grew up with it all. At age 17, she purchased her first work, a piece from the Paul Klee estate. She paid fifty Swiss Francs, one month’s salary at that time, for a piece titled Little X. The piece now adorns one wall in the museum.

Eventually Angela joined on as co-owner of the business and although the father and daughter made a living buying and selling works of art for decades, they often found themselves in a dilemma. In their hearts, they really didn’t want to get rid of anything. They developed a personal attachment to many of the works.

None of which could have been planned. Growing up, Angela never dreamed Pablo Picasso would eventually draw her likeness five times. He gave her all the drawings, a few of which also hang in the collection.

“I like to say I snuck into immortality through the back door,” she tells me, with a subtle grin.

I get the feeling she’s probably rattled off these lines before, but if I had received my own portraits directly from Picasso, I’d repeat myself a thousand times. I’d shout from the street corner. I’d run down to the bar and tell the story over and over.

Yet Angela doesn’t need to show off. She instead exudes an overflowing sense of gratitude, humility and a Zen-like serenity—all of which is infectious. As we stand there, tourists continue to filter through and pillory her with the same questions she’s been asked for decades. She rolls with it. There is no ego. In fact, it feels no different than a hostess introducing me to her family, the paintings being her kin, of course.

We then move into yet another room. Gracing one wall is the painting, Dancer II, by the Catalan master Joan Miro.

“He was a friend too,” Angela adds.

Finally, we descend into the basement, formerly the vault of the Swiss National Bank, now split into separate rooms dedicated entirely to the Swiss artist Paul Klee. Over 100 of Klee’s watercolors, drawings and paintings hang chronologically, providing tremendous insight into the evolution of his various styles and themes.

In the basement, the walls seem three feet thick. It cost $100,000 to break through one wall in order to divide up the space. The concrete floor is now covered with 100-year-old wood flooring that Diener discovered in an old home. The flooring gives the basement a homey feel.

“It has a new life,” Angela says.

Angela never married or had kids. She tells numerous visitors that the paintings are her children, a line I again sense she’s been forced to repeat many times.

Through Angela, I experience a living connection to some of the twentieth century’s most illustrious artists. If she indeed snuck into immortality through the back door, then I am now one trans-generational Kevin Bacon degree of separation from Picasso, Miro, Paul Klee and Chagall. Only in Lucerne could I say this. No matter what happens, Angela will live forever through this immaculate collection, an inspiration to anyone whose life has unfolded by accident.

The post The Rosengart Collection: It All Happened by Accident appeared first on Traveling Archive.

The beaches of Rimini were deserted when I arrived to write my story. From the waterfront road, I could wander down any short side street and then pass through abandoned play lots, vacant volleyball courts, rows of empty changing facilities, shuttered beach bars and cordoned-off areas normally packed elbow-to-elbow. The tourist season was long gone, most of the waterfront was shut down and I felt like the only one around.

As I opened a waist-high wooden gate and then walked onto the beach, the desolation was inspiring. Empty sand stretched across the horizon, from left to right, as the metallic blue of the Adriatic Sea washed over the beach, only to recede, and then repeat. Slowly. Patiently. The sea was not in a hurry. It had nothing but time.

A dismal overcast sky harmonized the scene, reminding me of a Fellini quote: “You always need an excuse to set off on a journey. In the same way you need an excuse to start a film.”

I’m not even sure I agreed with that quote. Yet it came to me, right there on the beach in Rimini, Fellini’s hometown.

The son of a traveling salesman, Federico Fellini was born in 1920. He won five Oscars, four for Best Foreign Language Film, and the last one, in 1993, for lifetime achievement. He passed away later that year.

The port area of Rimini, and the Adriatic in general, inspired a multitude of imagery in Fellini movies, playing a significant role in his cinematic art, even though he never actually filmed a single scene here. He reconstructed everything in the studio, most often at Cinecitta in Rome.

Standing on the sand, I saw only a few footsteps from other people since the whole area was empty, but the presence of those footsteps spoke volumes. I Vitelloni, an early Fellini film from 1953, included a few scenes from this beach. Roughly translated as slackers, layabouts or bored provincial slobs, the vitelloni were dudes that loafed around, engaged in petty crime and squandered all their potential.

The sand reappeared in La Strada. Nowhere was Rimini specifically mentioned, but the film began and ended on the beach. Anthony Quinn’s emotional breakdown in the sand went down in history as one of the most dramatic scenes in all of Fellini’s oeuvre. I could not walk in the sand, here on this beach, in Rimini, without that scene entering my head.

As I stood there watching the Adriatic roll over the sand, I also heard Nino Rota’s trumpet motif from the La Strada soundtrack. It wouldn’t leave my head. One of the greatest film composers of all time, Rota was better known for the Godfather soundtracks, but he was also one of Fellini’s most dedicated collaborators. He wrote the music for almost every Fellini film, many of which featured the sea as a backdrop, a character, or a minor role.

Of course, I couldn’t leave out Amarcord from this walk along the beach. More than any other Fellini enterprise, Amarcord depicted childhood memories, family squabbles, friendships and various eccentric characters all over Rimini during the fascist era, including important episodes on this very beach. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, this beach is where the townfolk came out to worship the Rex Ocean Liner, pride and joy of the fascist regime, as it sailed past the port. Even if the version of Rimini depicted in the film was entirely from Fellini’s head, Amarcord to this day continued to saturate the entire Rimini area.

With Fellini, one could never tell if his material was wholly autobiographical, if characters or scenes were based exactly on his life, the antics of his pals, or if he just made everything up. As with any poet, it was all of the above.

Fellini Museum: Dov’è Nino Rota?

To celebrate the centenary of the maestro’s birth, the Fellini Museum was scheduled for a 2020 debut, but Covid-19 put everything on hold. The museum did not open until August of 2021.

Now, two floors of Rimini’s Renaissance-era fortress, the Sismondo Castle, were filled with multimedia exhibits, demonstrations, costumes, letters, documents, videos and replications of movie sets, all dedicated to the life, work and poetic legacy of the man himself.

Upon entry, a spiral installation sculpted with various script pages descended from the ceiling in the foyer. The first room was then dedicated to Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina. Numerous vertical video projections graced each side of the space, all depicting Giulietta in various films and in various stages of her life. Each projection rotated through different images over and over, creating a funhouse effect. The changing video panels directed me straight to the end of the space, where I saw the ramshackle motorcart from La Strada — the actual motorcart Giulietta and Anthony Quinn used in the film.

Due to her superb performances in Nights of Cabiria and La Strada, Giulietta was a major reason why Fellini won his first two Oscars. Especially in those two movies, Giulietta portrayed characters from the backwater countryside and gritty underbelly of Italy in 1950s, allowing Fellini to highlight people and environments normally ignored by society. The curators did the right thing by making her the focus of the first room upon entry to the museum.

Up and down two whole floors, various other displays extrapolated dimensions of Fellini’s life and art. One room featured wooden Catholic-style confessional structures, through which viewer/participants could watch video interviews with Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni and several more. A huge larger-than-life statue of Anita Ekberg from La Dolce Vita was sprawled across on the floor of another space. Behind her, a monitor revealed montages from the film. Yet another space was dedicated to costumes Fellini used in his film, Casanova. 

Other spaces provided video boards with various scholarly texts and books on Fellini, including one space designed to replicate Fellini’s home library. Bookshelves adorned one wall, while a few coffee tables offered books for everyone to peruse. Two video screens played a film explaining various influences on the maestro, including Jungian psychology, the I-Ching and authors like Jorge Luis Borges.

The famous Book of Dreams was featured in another room. In 1960, the Jungian psychoanalyst Ernst Bernhard encouraged Fellini to write and draw his dreams. The result was an incredible diary full of writings, drawings, colors, erasures, playful fantasies and unspeakable fears. Fellini’s process of internal excavation, a constant dialog with his inner life, proved fundamental to his journey from the 1960s onward, as he dove into the works of Carl Gustav Jung. Beginning with 8 1/2 and Juliet of the Spirits, Jungian psychology played a major role in Fellini’s artistic experience, although the seeds were present in his earlier films.

Sonic-wise, the museum was loud in all the right ways. Each exhibit bled over into the next one. From the start, Nino Rota’s main melodic theme from La Strada carried throughout the castle. As I moved up the stairways and passed through subsequent displays, I could hear it the whole way through, coming in and out, as if that film penetrated everything else. The tune was already in my head before I even entered the museum. And there it was again, everywhere.

Rota’s music played an integral role in Fellini’s career. The two were inseparable. As soon as you heard a typical Rota motif augment a particular scene or character, you just knew you were watching a Fellini film. Even people with no musical knowledge have pointed this out.

On that note, I was disappointed to see nothing in the museum dedicated to Nino Rota. I even wrote in my notebook, “Dov’è Nino Rota? Where is he?”

Fortunately, though, there was indeed a separate section of the museum dedicated to the late Tonino Guerra, the renowned poet and screenwriter who worked with Fellini on Amarcord and a few others. Guerra was Fellini’s age and grew up in the nearby village of Sant’Arcangelo. As a poet, he wrote simple verse in the Romagnolo dialect, hardly any of which has been translated into English. His screenwriting career, which spanned 50 years, led him to work with some of the giants of European cinema. He cowrote many of the classic Antonioni films — L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse, Red Desert, Blow-Up and Zabriske Point — and also worked with Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos. He won lifetime achievement awards at several different festivals.

It was for Amarcord, especially, that Guerra came to collaborate with Fellini. Together, they first wrote the book, then the script, although Guerra is hardly mentioned in the voluminous decades-long analysis and discussion of the film. Fellini gets all the credit. It was refreshing to see the contents of the Tonino Guerra Museum in Sant’Arcangelo — Nel Mondo di Tonino Guerra — temporarily relocated to the Fellini Museum. One can watch video interviews with Guerra and view his visual art and ceramic sculptures, in addition to his poetry.

Follow Your Own Footsteps

In Rimini, a massive amount of work was done to document every possible structure all over town, every street or every plaza that had anything remotely to do with Fellini. There were lists, addresses, and lists of addresses. It went on and on. One could choose however many footsteps to follow, if one was into that kind of thing.

For starters, I popped into the lobby of the Grand Hotel, the property featured in Amarcord. It was open for all to see.

In a 1967 essay titled, “Rimini, My Hometown,” Fellini wrote about the eccentric characters and experiences of his youth. The whole essay is essentially a blueprint for Amarcord, including extensive childhood memories of the Grand Hotel.

“We would roam around it like mice, trying to get a glimpse of the inside,” he wrote, adding several hundred more words about the property’s mystique, its allure, its exotic wonders. One day, he finally did get inside, noting a smell of wax polish, as there was in the cathedral on Sunday mornings. It was silent and peaceful like an aquarium. “Then gradually I saw sofas as big as boats, armchairs bigger than beds, the red strip of carpet slowly curving up the marble steps toward the gleam of colored glass; flowers, peacocks, snakes, luxuriously interlaced, their tongues intertwined; from a dizzy height, miraculously suspended in mid-air, hung the biggest lamp in the world.”

Every time Fellini came back to Rimini, he stayed in room 315, which is now a highly requested room with a balcony facing toward the sea.

After the Grand Hotel, another spot demanding my attention was the newly restored Cinema Fulgor, also a masterpiece from Fellini’s youth, although when the young Federico first discovered the place, it was hardly the opulent attraction it is now. It was a “warm sewer of vice” he wrote. The experiences of Fellini and his friends in this theater inspired the notorious scene in Amarcord where Titta tried to put the moves on Gradisca as she obsessed over Gary Cooper on the screen.

The real-life Cinema Fulgor had long since fallen into a sad state of disrepair until just recently. Now it constituted a separate annex of the Fellini Museum. Inside, red velvet seats complemented lavish gold trimmings. The seats were comfortable, impossibly comfortable. I didn’t want to get up.

Any degree of Fellini ghost-stalking eventually led one over the Tiberius Bridge, en route to Borgo San Giuliano, Rimini’s historic quarter, the village where parts of Amarcord took place. Formerly a gritty rundown fishing village, the Borgo was now transformed into a civic pastiche of dreamlike murals featuring characters from Fellini films. The houses were fixed up. The facades were vibrant and colorful. The Festa del Borgo San Giuliano erupted every two years, attracting tourists from all over Europe.

The Tiberius Bridge itself was a masterful structure built by the Romans 2000 years ago. During World War Two, the Germans destroyed many of the bridges in Rimini, but for whatever reason they were not able to take out the Tiberius Bridge. These days, many Roman bridges remained throughout the land, but the Tiberius Bridge was one of only a few still used for everyday traffic.

After Fellini’s funeral in 1993, his casket arrived in Rimini, where thousands gathered throughout the streets for the motorcade. The procession eventually passed over the Tiberius Bridge.

If one was going to walk in the footsteps of Fellini, the journey necessitated a walk in the footsteps of his funeral. As I took a nighttime stroll across the bridge, the blues came over me. The sky was turning into a deep, dark azure color, as was the Marecchia River. I stood there for quite some time, just watching the pedestrians amble in front of me.

Elsewhere in town, I slithered in and around numerous other Fellini-related locales, so much that it became overkill. If anything, all poets and novelists can learn from Fellini, in terms of how to properly fictionalize childhood memories and then transform them into usable material.

The following morning, I headed back toward the beach, although I took a circuitous route. Instead of heading along the canal and right up to the channel harbor, I crossed the center of town, navigating cobblestone pathways past the main shopping district of handbags, banks, cafes, outdoor seating and gelato joints, and then straight past the other side of the train station, so that I could arrive at a more southern portion of Viale Regina Elena, the road running parallel to the beach.

Much of the commerce along Regina Elena was shut down since the tourist season was over. The street was devoid of traffic except for a few construction workers or city employees wearing fluorescent orange and yellow work jackets. Only a few restaurants remained open, along with immigrant-owned corner markets and trinket shops.

Old hotels and new hotels alike, hundreds of them, remained closed for the upcoming winter season. They stood along the road and the maze of side streets, forming a complex patchwork of emptiness. Small handfuls of locals wandered around, happy to conduct their business during the quiet part of the year.

But I was not traversing the beach district for the commerce. I was here for 26 different streets renamed after Fellini films and screenplays. Each was a tiny side street that ran perpendicular to the beach, between the main road and the waterfront.

Oddly enough, many of the streets were formerly named after composers, but had long since been renamed after the maestro himself. Via Johann Strauss was now ia La Dolce Vita. Via Mozart was now via I vitelloni. Via J.S. Bach was now via Le notti di Cabiria. Who needed Bach and Mozart when you could name streets after the town’s most favorite son? As a result, one could literally walk through the entire film career of Federico Fellini over the course of a mile or so. What a concept.

Back to the Beach

Continuing on Viale Regina Elena eventually put me right back at the Grand Hotel, where a nearby street was renamed after Giulietta Masina. There seemed to be a collective effort to acknowledge Giulietta, not just Fellini. And rightly so.

All this time, the sea was only a few moments away, and since La Strada, 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita all concluded on the beach, I headed right back to the sand one last time. The entire beach remained empty and desolate, although the sun was now overhead in the sky, so I could see at least a few other people way off in the distance.

On the sand, I did not collapse like Anthony Quinn at the end of La Strada. Unlike Marcello in La Dolce Vita, I did not project my failed journalism career onto a dead sea monster and there was no blond woman trying to save me. There was only the clear metallic blue of the Adriatic Sea. I could only imagine the stories it held.

Something about the Adriatic seemed different than other bodies of water. I couldn’t explain how, but I could see why it left such a mark on Fellini.

The Rimini of today didn’t even resemble the imaginary version Fellini depicted in his films, but maybe it served as a lesson. A reminder. A testimonial to how a genius could process his childhood trauma, run tests in the laboratory of his inner self, fabricate whatever components he needed, and then use it for creative purposes, all while continuing to dream.

Everything from my trip came spiraling back to the present moment. The theme from La Strada. The murals of Borgo San Giuliano. Giulietta’s likeness across 20 hanging video panels. The poetry of Tonino Guerra in Romagnolo dialect. Those red cushy seats at the Cinema Fulgor. All of it, together, formed a matrix and danced around me, just like at the end of 8 1/2.

I even heard Fellini from the great beyond, applauding me, encouraging me from his grave.

“End the story on the beach,” he said to me. So that’s what I did. I took one last look at the deserted surroundings. Then I turned around, left the sand, and went back out the wooden waist-high gate toward the road.

The post The Rimini of Fellini: The Fellini of Rimini appeared first on Traveling Archive.

The lobby opens into a welcoming restaurant where even more old volumes follow the wall, continuing far beyond the bohemian lamps, art deco trimmings, limestone flooring and framed antique mirrors. In the spacious eatery, hotel guests and locals harmonize the opposing forces of contemporary décor and classic accoutrements, as if they, themselves, are the fortifying ingredients in some strange act of Jungian alchemy. In that sense, Carl Gustav Jung would be proud. I can almost imagine him in the corner, whispering into his mustache, just as I’m starting to do myself.

As John Berger wrote, Geneva is a place of convergence. For centuries travelers passing through here have left letters, instructions, maps, lists and messages for Geneva to relay to other travelers arriving later. Geneva is a library archive of human predicaments. She stores them all with a mixture of curiosity and pride, wondrous if not indifferent, but nevertheless impressed with the variety of people that landed in her lap. It’s a great town for me to sift through the psychological remnants of authors that preceded me.

These days, of course, Geneva is more known for international peacemaking vibes and financial networks. The United Nations headquarters are here. So is the Red Cross and the World Health Organization. Sheikhs, oligarchs and spies are probably here everywhere too. If I want to see a white Rolls Royce with Qatari plates, I don’t have to venture very far from my hotel.

There is more, however. Much more. Any sugary listicle would include Mont Salève, Jardin Anglais, the Carouge neighborhood or the Jet d’Eau, Geneva’s defining landmark, a fountain right in the middle of the lake, surrounded by majestic five-star hotels and views of the French Alps. One of those hotels, the Beau-Rivage, is perhaps Geneva’s most definitive accommodation. Across the street, right at the waterfront, sits a plaque devoted to Empress Elisabeth of Austria, aka Sisi, who was stabbed to death in 1898 by an Italian anarchist, just after Sisi left the Beau-Rivage.

This is more my kind of landmark. I have spent much of my adult life drilling beneath the bourgeoisie and surrendering to the gritty underside of history, both at home and abroad, going half-crazy and half-broke in the process. So, in Geneva, a bastion of luxury and wealth, this is where I go: beneath the bureaucrats. I am here alone on business — what little business I have left — and in Geneva I cannot seem to roam anywhere without the ghosts of artists, writers, painters, crooks and lecherous raconteurs reeling me in, even if a plaque was all it took. And nearly every block includes a plaque referencing a notable person who spent time there. What a beautiful way to experience a city — proof, I hope, that I made the right choice by not choosing anything in life except to keep writing and never give up. The dead have left their shadows in my path.

Five minutes down the street from the Hotel Rotary and across a cement pedestrian bridge over the Rhône, the tiny Île Rousseau is a classic meeting spot. Named after Jean-Jacques himself, the patch of land features a statue of the Swiss philosopher amid a cluster of colossal sycamores, their branches stretching out in all their fractal glory. A flower bed sits in front of the statue and a small makeshift coffee shop lurks a few feet away. The miniature island used to be a private garden for the Hotel des Bergues, the city’s first modern hotel circa 1834, and also the place where James Bond stayed for a night in the book, Goldfinger. It’s now a Four Seasons.

In the 19th century, a group of Russian anarchists lived at the nearby Hotel Russie overlooking this statue. Huge fans of Rousseau, they wanted a place to live where they could always see the man. The anarchists are long gone, as is the Hotel Russie, but Jean-Jacques remains. Everyone from Byron to Tolstoy traveled to Geneva specifically inspired by Rousseau. After reading Byron, Thomas Cook decided to start the world’s first travel agency, which, in turn, led to generations of Britons coming to Geneva. They all have Rousseau to thank.

Across the water from here, in the 19th and 20th centuries, one would have found the old Café du Nord — “rendez-vous des étrangers” says an old guidebook — where the painter Gustave Courbet, along with fellow exiled French troublemaker, the journalist Henri Rochefort, would gather to drown their sorrows. Located inside the old Hotel de la Balance on Grand Quai, (today Quai Général-Guisan), Café du Nord attracted at one time or another the likes of poet Rainer Marie Rilke, theater director Georges Pitoëff, Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár and the painter Alexander Archipenko. Molnár showed up at the end of the 19th century, as a journalist on assignment to cover the trial of Sisi’s assassin. He spent entire days in the Cafe du Nord. Lenin would visit him there. Molnár would later return in the 1930s, exiled from Hungary during the war. He wrote about the refugee life in his book, Companion in Exile.

Many more writers left legacies at Café du Nord. Oscar Wilde once showed up, after complaining that Mont Blanc was now a tourist trap, robbed of its splendor, with only spinsters ascending its heights. He disliked Switzerland, adding that the country produced nothing but theologians and waiters.

Many addresses in Geneva recall similar stories. Courbet, for example, even rented a shop near rues Chantepoulet & Cendrier, a few steps from my hotel, where he exhibited and sold his work, although the locals were indifferent.

Since the nearest one can get to the actual dead is in the cemetery, Berger and countless other scribes have made pilgrimages to the gravesite of Jorge Luis Borges in the Cemetery of Kings. Officially the Plainpalais Cemetery, the humble piece of land is located in the neighborhood of the same name, which is also the part of town where Frankenstein’s monster committed his first murder. Only people with specific connections to Geneva are allowed to be buried here. The Protestant Reformer John Calvin gets his own monument, but no one knows exactly where he’s buried. Other legends underneath the grass at Plainpalais include the composer Alberto Ginastera, the feminist writer Alice Rivaz and the conductor Ernest Ansernet.

The more I sink beneath the bureaucrats, the more ghosts begin to reveal themselves. Geneva was a town where exiled troublemakers came to print their pamphlets without being censored — Lenin, Machiavelli, Montaigne and Montesquieu especially. In fact, it seems like every taboo-shattering writer, composer, painter or journalist ostracized in their home towns wound up in Geneva at one point. The roll call includes: Franz Liszt, Gustave Courbet, Ian Fleming, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Disraeli, Gauthier, Somerset Maugham, Byron, Casanova, Voltaire, Colette, Victor Hugo, Nabokov, Stendhal, John Ruskin, Tolstoy and Carlos Fuentes. I only have time for a few of them, but Geneva makes me long to join that list.

Now, some people dismiss the use of past literary vibes to harmonize the current day. It’s a hallucination, they say. An illusion. The Geneva of today is not the Geneva in which these exiled raconteurs lived. That Geneva is long gone.

If so, then just sitting here next to dead authors on the shelves of the Hotel Rotary, I have fallen into Geneva’s trap. If it’s all a grand illusion, then I am coming on in to see what’s happening. I will surrender to the illusion. The dead can inspire me just like their living counterparts. Like Berger suggested, they have left me packets of instructions. Somewhere in this grand convergence I can find the ambition and the perseverance to keep writing and never give up.

Like Jan Morris once wrote of another city, Trieste, maybe I am seeing Geneva figuratively, not just as a city, but as an idea of a city. Her words apply here as well, since Geneva has a “particular influence upon those of us with a weakness for allegory — that is to say, as the Austrian Robert Musil once put it, those of us who suppose everything to mean more than it has any honest claim to mean.”

Musil, who is also buried in the Plainpalais Cemetery, arrived in Geneva at the beginning of WWII, living just long enough to see the Nazis ban everything he’d ever written back home in Austria. The Clinique des Grangettes property became his home, where he continued to work on the third part of The Man Without Qualities. He died in 1941.

To riff even more on Morris, I could spend my life sniffing the creative breezes of Geneva, especially in Place du Bourg-de-Four, the town’s oldest square. It was here that Courbet the eternal fugitive, and whose ghost I cannot seem to shake, spent time drinking away his days at La Clémence. Unfortunately, the current incarnation was shut down when I stopped by.

From Place du Bourg-de-Four, it’s only a two-minute walk down the cobblestones along rue Etienne Dumont, past a few galleries and high-end retail to Franz Liszt and Countess Marie D’Agoult’s House of Love. The current plaque mentions nothing of their scandalous affair. Marie dumped her husband to run off with Liszt, a relationship that produced their first child, Blandine, who was born while they lived at this flat. While living here, Liszt also taught at the conservatory and wrote a piano nocturne, Les Cloches de Geneve (The Bells of Geneva) to celebrate the birth of Blandine. To accompany the composition, Liszt added a line from Byron: “I live not in myself, but I become / Portion of that around me.”

With all of this in mind, I am sinking, and sinking, deep into the lobby of my hotel, perhaps deeper into oblivion, thinking about Byron’s quote. I live not in myself; rather, I become a portion of what’s around me. Bells ring in my head. Liszt was yet another creative migrant to whom I can relate, sitting in the Hotel Rotary, surrounded by shelved books, torn and frayed authors, library discards and faded volumes. I think even more of those who infiltrated Geneva before me, leaving messages and artifacts for me to explore: Stravinsky. Sir Horace Walpole. Nietzsche. Conan Doyle. Wagner.

My brain merges with dead authors and composers — on the streets, in buildings, on the shelves behind me. The universe is a library, like Borges wrote, and Geneva is an archive of exiled creative troublemakers, all of whom continue to cast their shadows, albeit now eclipsed by the bureaucrats, the $35 salads and the Rolls Royces. But I summon them all, nevertheless. This is my idea of Geneva and I’m sticking with it.

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Shards of rain and near-freezing temperatures in the middle of December did not prevent me from making a desperate pact with Horace. As a financially hopeless traveling boy, I often asked dead authors for help. I showed up at their graves and pleaded, “I’ll keep writing, you just show me how to pay the bills. Show me how to make a living.” That’s what I said, or some variation thereof.

Otherwise known in Italy as Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the legendary Roman lyric poet Horace was born in 65 B.C., in Venosa — these days about halfway between Naples and Bari, more or less in the middle of nowhere. Horace left a serious legacy. “Carpe Diem” was his signature phrase, long before Robin Williams popularized it again. Seize the day while you still have time.

As such, our van motored down the road in Basilicata, the arch of Italy’s boot, with rural badlands surrounding us in every direction. Heritage countryside cathedrals and ancient ruins were on the itinerary, but on the way, though, our guide informed us that a statue of Horace existed in Piazza Orazio Flacco, the main square of Venosa, in the old part of town. Venosa included an old section and a modern section, she said.

“The modern part is the ugly part,” she told us. “That’s where I live.”

Outside the van, shards of rain continued to plummet from dismal gloomy skies. Everything else along the highway seemed various shades of green, with swaths of hilly agricultural lands stretching as far as I could see through the gray veil of weather.

We were not scheduled to spend that much time in the city of Venosa itself. The small village of 11,000 would be empty, our guide said. Due to the weather, no one wanted to be outside. But as soon as I learned that a statue of Horace awaited me, I became obsessed. I needed to see him. I’d previously visited the graves of Hermann Hesse, Leonard Cohen, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges and others, all to make desperate pacts, hoping their spirits could show me a better way to make a living. Horace was not buried here, but his statue would have to suffice.

There was only one problem. The rest of the group did not need to make a desperate pact with a dead poet. They didn’t need to walk through empty streets in the dreary cold drizzle just to see a statue in an empty plaza. Thankfully, the group surprised me. They acquiesced. They went along with my ridiculous idea. Carpe Diem. Take advantage of the moment!

The van dropped us off at an entry point to old-town Venosa, since the vehicle was unable to navigate narrow cobblestone streets. Our entire group then had to walk through the rain for about half a mile into the desolate village, with the guide and I breaking away from the group toward the statue of Horace. It was perhaps a few degrees above freezing and the rain was starting to come down even harder. After 15 minutes, we approached Piazza Orazio Flacco, but the rest of the group needed a place to get out of the rain. It was miserable. I felt like a heel for inconveniencing the rest of them.

Thankfully, lo and behold, as we shuffled down Via Vittorio Emanuele II, we passed by a storefront set back a few feet from the road, in a building centuries old. Everything else in the neighborhood was closed for the afternoon, but Eccellenze Lucane, an organic gift shop, appeared to show some signs of life. Inside, the lights were on and we could see some activity, so we banged on the door and a woman came downstairs to let us in. Everyone in the group began to dry off, remove their gloves and rave over the product line.

Eccellenze Lucane featured a curated selection of local products. It was a lovely wine merchant and a place offering cheeses, grappa, sausages, pasta, jams, wicker baskets, gift packages and a variety of artisanal goods from the Basilicata region. Lucania was the ancient Roman name for Basilicata, so the store’s title simply referred to local excellencies of the region.

Our visit became an unexpected, instant success. Each person found something to take back home. The shop seemed like every textbook hidden local joint one would want to discover on a chance encounter. We couldn’t have planned this visit ahead of time. As the group chatted it up with the proprietor, she opened a bottle of wine and gave everyone a sample. A few members of the group gravitated toward cute wicker placeholders, perhaps meant for carrying wine and cheese, or maybe to hold jewelry. One guy needed to bring home bags of pasta for his friends, so he made a beeline to the pasta shelves, where small packages sold for various prices. The entire group began to whip out their wallets and credit cards. The proprietor was blown away. As the group continued to browse and partake in more product sampling and conversation with the owner, I headed out into the rain to find Q. Horatius Flaccus, as Horace was often abbreviated. Carpe Diem. Live for the day and don’t trust tomorrow. I could almost hear Horace in the original Latin piping through my head.

Sure enough, he was down the street and around the corner. The plaza was so empty I could have shot a cannon without hitting anyone, but there was Horace in all his glory. The icy drizzle still poured from the sky and it was hard to get a decent photo, but my jacket protected me enough to stand there and make a pact with the legendary poet.

“Alright old man, I will keep writing. You just show me how to pay the bills.” That’s what I said to him. Out loud.

But only then did I start to wonder what Horace was really saying in his famous ode that included the words, carpe diem. He was saying, don’t put too much trust in tomorrow. Be grateful for what you have today. Who knows what the gods have in store for any of us. Meaning, I didn’t even need to be asking him for help. Who cared if I ever made a real living as a writer? Maybe I should just seize the damn day, shut up and get on with it.

And that we did. Afterward, several of us had an espresso inside the only other establishment open at the time, a small tobacconist’s shop on the plaza, a place that also sold lottery tickets and other sundries. The guide assumed I wanted American coffee, but I ordered an espresso doppio and some acqua gassata before she had a chance to say anything else.

I was enchanted. Tired, damp and worn out, but enchanted. By sheer chance, we had come to the middle of rain-soaked Venosa during the empty hours of the afternoon. The rest of the group found a spectacular shop to buy just the gifts they’d been looking for, while I found the dead poet I was looking for. Everyone came out a winner in the end. I didn’t need to worry about tomorrow. I had seized the moment.

Eventually the van picked us up on the other side of the village and away we went toward the heritage cathedrals in the countryside. I was alive, here, today, and I was grateful to be in Basilicata. Carpe Diem. To Horace, and to Venosa, I said, Arrivederci, alla prossima. Farewell, and see you next time.

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I have Greece on my mind these days. I am revisiting both Zorba the Greek and Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi. A few recent conversations with a few different friends, brought those books back into my consciousness and how they should be required reading for the herds of tourists who invade the country on a regular basis. Hence, the conversations also brought back a scene from July of 2000 – the last time I traveled to that country.

At that time, I had no job except for a few cobbled-together freelance writing assignments. I held two degrees from the university down the street, but I had drank away any possible academic career and was living on a friend’s floor above a supermarket.

My solution to this predicament: go to Greece.

So there I was, a pre-smartphone summer, and it was way over 100 degrees in the Plaka neighbhorhood of Athens. A squawking battery of American tourist families surrounded me. In a roped-off taverna courtyard with potted plants and dust, hazed with pollution, I occupied one of a hundred tiny square formica-looking tables. A bouzouki player, older than dirt and wearing a sequined vest, plopped himself on a chair by the counter and jammed like there was no tomorrow. With a plastic fork I powered through a dirt-cheap meal on a white paper plate: a slab of tourist Moussaka, plus a native salad and something else buried with an avalanche of garlic. I found it hysterical that the Greeks would bastardize their shtick to the point of force-cramming a “Greek Salad” on throngs of tourists.

I had studied enough to order a litre of beer – megalo meant large – but since I had finished it, along with the next one, a bountiful carafe of retsina now sat in front of me on the faded orange table. While I ingested concrete fumes from nearby sewer construction and god knows what other flavors of pollution, the bone-cold retsina provided a sandy, resin-flavored counterpoint. It is the Greek chilled wine, intended to accompany native food, lift the spirits and ease the pain of a grotesquely hot summer.

None of that pain, however, was even remotely as miserable as one particular American tourist family that paraded right in front of me. The husband wore a t-shirt and shorts, plus glaring white socks and athletic shoes that would have come out oversaturated in Photoshop. The wife’s outfit included a faded paisley mumuu and a flimsy sunhat almost as big as a sombrero. Under her arm she carried a three-inch-thick Lonely Planet book, a pompous tome dedicated to the entire country of Greece. Already engrossed in a clamorous argument and drenched in sweat, the couple dragged their two distracted kids between and around the folks eating at the tables. The husband complained over and over that it was too hot, way too hot. The kids didn’t seem to mind. Their faces were filled with introverted curiosity, like they were continuously trying to figure out something in their heads.

I was somewhat drunk, the conventional pace of time was lost, and I could not stop staring at the American family, as the husband and wife complained about the unbearable Athens heat. “It’s too hot,” they kept saying. “Let’s find a place that isn’t so hot. Why is it so hot here?” And strained variations thereof.

I wanted to howl and break plates, throw a tantrum, and wring them out like soaked bar rags, all while barking: Well, you’re in Athens in July. Of course it’s freakin’ hot. What the hell’s the matter with you? You paid thousands of dollars to bring your whole family across oceans and continents to be here. In Athens. In the summer. Sheesh. Take that nine-hundred-page travel guide you’ve been lugging around the whole country, and flip it open to page three, where it probably mentions the weather and where it probably indicates that July in Athens is hot.

But I felt indecisive, distant and cowardly, so I said nothing. I just watched them leave the courtyard and disappear into a labyrinth of cobblestone walkways, the children still trying to figure out something in their heads. Meanwhile, the dust lingered and the retsina was a glory to behold. The bouzouki player broke out a chromatic gypsy ballad. I closed my eyes and continued sweating. I don’t think I ever wore white socks to Europe after that.

Henry Miller would have been proud. And now I must go back to Greece, tourists be damned.

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