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Rx for America: Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues

Posted on October 6, 2021

Photograph of The Little Virtues by Natlaia Ginzburg

I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s essay collection, The Little Virtues, in a class on post-World-War-II Italian literature during a college semester abroad in Venice. It felt like the first time I had really discovered a writer as an adult reader, despite the fact that Ginzburg was assigned reading. She resonated deeply, especially the last and eponymous essay in the book, in which Ginzburg gives parenting advice on, among other things, the subject of money. The thrust of the piece is that we tend to focus on little virtues at the expense of the great ones, like thrift over generosity. The problem here, Ginzburg points out, is that “the great can also contain the little, but by the laws of nature there is no way that the little can contain the great.”

Even then, thirty years ago, I thought I probably wouldn’t have kids (I didn’t), so my smittenness with the essay wasn’t over the idea of saving nuggets of wisdom for my future as a mother. Rather I was struck by how at odds Ginzburg’s advice was with what I had gotten from my own parents, and how much her advice made sense.

For example, Ginzburg writes “As soon as our children begin to go to school we promise them money as a reward if they do well in their lessons. This is a mistake. In this way we mix money—which is an ignoble thing—with learning and the pleasures of knowledge, which are admirable and worthy things.” I had been rewarded for scholastic achievement starting in the fourth grade when I was paid to memorize multiplication tables, all the way up to a $2,500 check at the end of grad school.

I wasn’t particularly mad at my parents for what I deemed their deficiencies at parenting (although being nineteen, I was judgmental), but rather I think that in reading Ginzburg some part of me opened up to the idea of reading as a way to perpetually parent yourself. I still feel that way about books at forty-eight, and I don’t mean self-help, but mostly memoirs and non-fiction and especially novels, which somehow have a way of using fiction to get at the truest things. For this, her role in making me a lifelong reader, Ginzburg will always hold a special place on the shelves of my heart and home, where I have two copies of The Little Virtues, the better to always have one near at hand.

Periodically something will happen that reminds me of the wisdom of The Little Virtues. Last year it was the occasion of my niece’s thirteenth birthday. She badly wanted a MacBook Pro, and in the months ahead of her birthday started a lobbying campaign with her grandmother (my mother) and me.

She knew better than to ask for the laptop as a gift outright—too extravagant by the norms of birthday gifts in our family—so a couple months before her birthday, she sent my mother a letter with a plan for how she could save up for it, taking into account the money she would receive from my parents for good grades (old habits die hard).

In follow-up calls she planted the suggestion that we might be inclined to contribute to her MacBook-Pro fund as a birthday gift, thus accelerating the realization of her well-thought-out plan. I was onboard, and I was going to suggest to my sister and mother that we all pitch in and give my niece, say, $500 between us to help her reach her goal. But then the spirit of Ginzburg seized me and I decided to just buy her the laptop. I could afford it comfortably, as could my parents and my niece’s parents. Why was the norm of our family not to buy it?

As Ginzburg writes, “moderation in the midst of wealth is pure fiction, and fiction always leads to bad habits. In this way he [a child] will only learn to be greedy and afraid of money…the true indifference to wealth is an indifference to money. There is no better way to teach a child this indifference than to give him money to spend when there is money—because then he will learn to part with it without worrying about it or regretting it.”

In the end, the laptop was not mine to give. I called my sister and her wife with the intent of telling them I would buy the MacBook only to find out they had already bought her a Chromebook for the occasion. It was a well-researched choice, a fancy Chromebook as Chromebooks go, and quite the find in that particular era of the pandemic when laptops and tablets of all sorts were scarce. I was asked to enliven it with gifts of a mouse and stylus which I did, but silently worried about my niece’s potential disappointment. I couldn’t help thinking back to my own parents’ similar displays of frugality, like the time they gave us an Odyssey game console instead of the longed-for Atari.

When my niece’s birthday arrived and the family Zoomed for the opening of presents, the tantrum I feared never arrived. Her reaction was largely one of gratitude with a hint of indifference. Would it have been radically different if she had received the MacBook Pro? I don’t know, but I do know that if I had bought it for her, I would have been disappointed if she had reacted with the same detachment.

My desire to follow Ginzburg’s advice to be “moderate with oneself and generous with others” was pure, but my own hang-ups with money lingered. Ours was never, as Ginzburg described, “a family in which money is earned and immediately spent, in which it flows like clear spring water and practically does not exist as money.” Instead, ours was a home where my father constantly had CNN on mute to monitor the stock ticker, where money existed sometimes “heavily, where it is a leaden stagnant pool that stinks and gives off vapours,” and my schemed generosity had been tainted with the whiff of my own bullshit in the form of expectation. Just as well that my plan had been averted.

More recently I thought of Ginzburg when watching Fran Lebowitz kvetch on the Netflix documentary, Pretend It’s a City. In episode 4, Lebowitz explains to Scorsese, “There’s only two kinds of people in the world: the kind of people who think there’s such a thing as enough money and the kind of people who have money.”

I am definitely the kind of person who thinks there is such a thing as enough money, and with the not-so-small exception of worrying about how I will pay for healthcare in America for the rest of my life, I feel like I have enough money. In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Roxane Gay touched on this same divide among Americans in an opinion piece in The New York Times, writing:

“The United States is not at all united. We live in two countries. In one, people are willing to grapple with racism and bigotry. We acknowledge that women have a right to bodily autonomy, that every American has a right to vote and the right to health care and the right to a fair living wage. We understand that this is a country of abundance and that the only reason economic disparity exists is because of a continued government refusal to tax the wealthy proportionally.

The other United States is committed to defending white supremacy and patriarchy at all costs. Its citizens are the people who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories and take Mr. Trump’s misinformation as gospel. They see America as a country of scarcity, where there will never be enough of anything to go around, so it is every man and woman for themselves.”

What struck me most in these two paragraphs was the insight into our polarization stemming from one’s fundamental view of America as a country of abundance or scarcity, and how as Lebowitz suggested, this point of view doesn’t necessarily correspond with how much money you actually have. We have all read the narrative about Trump voters being the economically deprived who neoliberalism forgot. But we also know that plenty of rich, educated white people voted for him, not once but twice.

Two places where the discrepancy between the abundance and scarcity mindset shows up in policy disputes is college debt and healthcare. The idea of cancelling college debt rankles people, particularly those who were burdened with it and paid if off. It is not fair: about this they are correct. But on this point I am reminded of Ginzburg’s argument for why we should not reward children for good grades.

“…I think we should be very cautious about promising and providing rewards and punishments. Because life rarely has its rewards and punishments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at times they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded that that evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this.”

(I can’t help but think of current events at the time of writing this, namely Marjorie Taylor Greene, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who is newly elected to Congress and who, in the face of reporting on some of her lunatic rhetoric, was apparently rewarded with a slew of campaign contributions. The fact that Ginzburg’s father was Jewish, that she was married to an anti-fascist who was tortured and murdered in a prison in Rome in 1944 for being an anti-fascist, and that she later served in the Italian parliament makes this even more jarring.)

In other words, not cancelling college debt because it’s “not fair” is beside the point, a prime example of mistaking a little virtue for the great one. (And if we want to argue in little virtues, we can look to Germany, which funds college tuition for everyone, even foreigners, because it knows it has a declining birth rate and funding skilled workers is in its best economic interests for the future.)

The same can be said for the line of reasoning that reckons other people’s illnesses are not their financial responsibility and therefore are not in favor of universal healthcare. And yet many of the same people will donate to a GoFundMe for medical bills of somebody, often a stranger, with a financially ruinous illness. The difference between this and voting for candidates who support universal healthcare is that the narrative in the GoFundMe gives the benefactor the illusion of both fairness—the victim seemingly verifiably didn’t deserve this, whereas with universal healthcare maybe the person who is sick smoked or abused drugs—and the feeling of beneficence. Like me and the MacBook Pro for my niece, we need to be appreciated for our generosity. Taxes to fund healthcare just don’t give us that same warm, fuzzy feeling.

One of the criticisms leveled at America by “old world” countries is that we are literal babies, a country less than 250 years old. Our insistence on adhering to a narrative of fairness in a world where history has proven century after century that this is not the case is one way we show our immaturity. The task before us now is to “love good and hate evil,” to side with the great virtues instead of the little ones, lest we permanently become a country of little virtue. We must grow up, and we must parent ourselves. Truth and facts and knowledge still exist, much of it recorded in books. Reading Ginzburg is one way to start.

Europe

Return to Venice

Posted on November 12, 2016

Parking

Last weekend I made good on a promise I made to myself 25 years ago, sitting alone on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute as my semester abroad in Venice ended. Those four and a half months in Venice remain one of the few things I did in college that was worth a damn, a fact I already had an inkling of that long-ago morning. The tourist hordes had thinned, leaving me alone to my woolgathering. This, I thought, is the time of year to be in La Serenissima.

Fast forward twenty-five years as I prepare to leave Berlin for California at the end of the year. Scanning my psyche for any potential regrets after my departure, the only thing that registered was not taking advantage of my proximity to Venice to make a return trip before I go. I booked my flights immediately.

The Alitalia flight landed in drizzle at Marco Polo airport. I made my way to the airport dock to await the Alilaguna blue line—a boat bus—into the city. It’s a leisurely route, stopping in at Murano before making its way down the calf-side of the Venice boot, around the heel and down the toe before heading out to the Lido, then back to San Marco and the mouth of the Grand Canal before finally snaking around to the shin and my stop along the southern promenade of the Zattere. My hotel, an art deco gem called Ca’Pisani, was just a five-minute walk north.

The light was already starting to go, and so I dropped my backpack and headed out into the streets to feel my way to the Rialto Bridge. I had read about a shop nearby selling le Furlane, velvet slippers once worn by gondoliers, that I thought would make nice Christmas presents. Crossing the Accademia Bridge, I recalled my first journey into this part of the city on my very first day in Venice, when my classmates and I had stopped for a picture at the foot of a statue of a winged lion. Later this route became synonymous in my head with a Saturday afternoon outing with another classmate, ostensibly to find ingredients for a Mexican dinner but with several stops for beer and an ear piercing on the Rialto Bridge along the way. Muscle memory took over and I was sure-footed as I made my way through a sequence of corridors and campi that widened and narrowed as if at the whim of a drunken accordion player.

Night walking

Having completed my shopping “chore,” I reversed course for my old stomping ground of Fondamenta Nani, a canal-side calle that’s just around the corner from the hotel. Here I stopped into Cantine del Vino già Schiavi, a wine shop and cicchetti bar, for a glass of Prosecco and a couple of slices of baguette topped with raw shrimp and smoked swordfish (price tag: €5.50).

There are no tables here, no place to cordon yourself off and make a pseudo-private space. Instead you must jostle with your fellow man to place your order and stake your spot either at the bar or along the rear wall lined with shelves of wine. It is a microcosm of the city itself where the lack of cars creates a communal life of pedestrians that’s disappeared in many cities and suburbs today. As Tiziano Scarpa wrote in his charming cultural guide, Venice is a Fish, here is a place “where privacy doesn’t exist. You are constantly meeting people, you greet them seven times a day, you go on talking as you part, until you’re twenty metres away from each other, raising your voice as you disappear into the crowd.” I may have come to Venice on my own, but it’s not a place where I feel alone.

For dinner, I walked the few steps to Taverna San Trovaso, the restaurant that was a special treat in my student days. Several of my classmates had affairs with waiters here—I was far too prudish for such things, thus I always paid for my gnocchi ai quattro formaggi—and I couldn’t help examining my gray-haired server for a hint of recognition. I had a table in the far corner from where I could survey the crowd as it gently but surely filled the dining room: a German couple, a local family, a beautiful young woman reluctant to remove her sunglasses or cashmere beanie, who seemed to be known to the staff and was dining with an equally glamorous middle-aged woman.

***

Courtyard at Museo Fortuny

On Saturday morning, there was more rain. I did a quick tour of the nearby neighborhood where I had lived in college, including a visit to Santa Maria della Salute, near “the point,” where the Grand Canal opens into the lagoon. The wind was at war with my umbrella, and I stepped inside the central apse of the church for a moment’s reprieve. Outside on the steps I had noticed a beggar on his knees, unprotected from the elements with an upturned baseball cap in front of him. His position on the spot of my 25-year-old reverie seemed symbolic and, on my way out, I gave him some coins. Later that afternoon we would cross paths on the other side of the Accademia, proving again that it’s hard to be alone in Venice.

The early morning pilgrimage over, I headed back towards the Rialto to spend the remainder of the morning discovering something new, Museo Fortuny, on the site of Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei. I had been led to it via a series of serendipitous connections made over the course of the year: a rainy day visit to Kelmscott Manor, William Morris’ Cotswold home, that had sparked an interest in his work and art, followed by an excerpt from A.S. Byatt’s book, Peacock and Vine, introducing me to Mario Fortuny, a Spanish designer, painter and architect who had much in common with Morris.

Yann Sérandour’s Cactus Show & Sale

As I paid for my ticket, I was disappointed to learn that a contemporary exhibit was on display—I had been expecting to see Fortuny’s workshop—but that disappointment turned to delight as I ascended to the darkened second floor of the palazzo. Here contemporary pieces mingled with Fortuny’s lush tapestries and oil paintings inspired by Wagner’s operas. A black-and-white video installation hung above a low-slung couch, piping out horror film music box melodies. There was a stack of vintage luggage and a series of photographs of a bearded lady’s head in a bell jar. An ante room held one of Fortuny’s large-scale models of an opera theater accompanied by life-size velvet theater chairs. Around the corner, Yann Sérandour’s Cactus Show & Sale cleverly juxtaposed a large-scale black-and-white photograph of a cactus sale with an assembly of mid-century branch-like tables topped with books on cacti. The combined effect was as lush and creepy and playful and atmospheric as the city outside.

It was time for lunch and my destination, Al Covo, was on a route that would allow me to tick off the obligatory visit to St. Mark’s Square. I had a notion to stop into the Florian for an apertif, but the arcade was jammed and unpleasant and I was relieved to get back to the open air of the Riva degli Schiavoni, where workers were busy assembling platforms and ramps for the possibility of flooding, the city’s famed acqua alta. I was early for my 1:00PM reservation but happy to get out of the rain and to have the pleasure, as the night before, of watching the dining room fill. It was my first meal at Al Covo, which I had read about online, and I was relieved to hear only Italian voices at the tables around me.

There is a special pleasure in dining extravagantly alone. In my younger days I trained myself to eat out solo by carrying a book, but now I don’t bother. I’d much rather shamelessly eavesdrop, or at least attempt to, as on the table next to me that alternated between French and Italian and then English, when they asked me if I minded their dog, a handsome, sullen Italian pointer named, rather unfairly, Brutto—the Italian word for ugly. I did not mind Brutto and, seeing that I would be offering no scraps, Brutto took no mind of me either. I worked through four courses, mostly of creatures from the nearby lagoon, accompanied by Prosecco and local, organic Pinot Blanc, biding my time until the tide receded.

Gelateria Nico on the Zattere

The only downside of a luxurious lunch was I had no interest in dinner. Instead, that evening I took a walk to Campo Santa Margherita, site of our favorite dive bar during my college days. It had changed names and was populated only by two sullen old men, so I kept walking towards a light at the south end of the square. The shining beacon was a lively bookstore, Libreria Marco Polo. There was a small English-language section and it seemed the right time to make a start on the Ferrante Neapolitan quartet. I bought My Brilliant Friend and a turquoise library bag bearing the shop’s name in red. On my way home I stopped in Cantine del Vino già Schiavi again for a glass of red wine.

***

Dorsoduro

I had saved a visit to Peggy Guggenheim’s small but perfect collection of twentieth-century art for my final morning in Venice. The house where I had lived during college was next door to the museum, and I had visited weekly on the evening it was free to students. By the time I left, I had memorized the walls. It was, then, a relief to find the first room hung exactly as I remember it with my favorite, Magritte’s Empire of Light, retaining pride of place on the back wall. I have always been a sucker for his literal surrealism—it appeals to my left brain—and I had it all to myself in the opening minutes of the gallery.

Next I lingered on a couch with Jackson Pollock and hunted down the Joseph Cornell Wunderkammer that had moved from its former location in the hall. When I finally found it I also found something new: a Max Ernst collage with an inscription explaining it was about the Postman Cheval, a French postman who built a Palais Idéal from found materials in his spare time over the course of 33 years. I had never heard of Cheval and was intrigued. As with Morris and Fortuny, this was a new piece of silk in my cultural web: a thread to follow beyond Venice—perhaps to the palace in Hauterives one day—but one that will forever be, in my head, connected to this city.

Although the weather didn’t call for it, I ordered a Campari spritz in the museum café, along with a timbale of vegetables from the nearby island of Saint Erasmus. It was only 11:00AM, but I wanted a last meal in Venice before heading back to the hotel and then the water taxi awaiting me next to the Accademia Bridge.

Leaving in style

This mode of transport isn’t cheap—it costs €100 more than the Alilaguna boat—but it is an instant mood booster. It’s also a threefer: you get a ride along the Grand Canal, then alongside gondolas through an interior canal that cuts across the ankle of Venice, and finally across the lagoon to the airport at full bore. It also saves an hour on the Alilaguna, so I looked at it as buying an extra hour on my last day. It still felt like I was leaving too soon, but, as the saying goes, best to leave the party while you’re still having fun.

Ciao, bella. Next time I won’t wait another 25 years.

Europe Random

Opa

Posted on October 2, 2016

Opa on his 100th birthday

I, of course, didn’t know Opa until he had retired to Florida in a house just a third of a mile from where we also moved when I was six months old. I wouldn’t have picked up the information that he had earlier lived in St. Martin, Aruba, New York, Paris, and Cairo until I was at least a few years older, but relics of these past lives were everywhere in that tract home on Selby Drive—from a dinner gong to gilt-edged mirrors to the curvy armoire in the guest bedroom. It was these objects that made the most vivid impressions on me as a kid. The den at the front of the house was a veritable treasure trove: the oil portrait of Oma, the writing desk and letter opener, the camel saddle, and the cow bells and various tchotchkes on the bookshelves. Each time I visited I did a physical survey, scanning the shelves, tinkling the bells, turning over a six-sided clear acrylic picture frame in my hands.

All this stuff was downright exotic; to a kid growing up in the deep suburbia of southwest Florida it may as well have been plonked down from outer space. This was, of course, long before the Internet put the whole world in the palm of your hand. Coincidentally, Opa’s den also held a physical copy of that era’s Internet: a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This was a nod to the importance of intellect and knowledge and, in the pecking order of reference materials, a step above the World Book Encyclopedia they had at my elementary school library.

If there was a whiff of pretension about those encyclopedias—or about any of the aforementioned objects—its smell was sweet. Pretension has negative connotations, but it’s the grease on the wheels of social and economic mobility, and I think Opa knew that. He also deserves credit for it. I spent hours on the floor of that den working on school reports with an open volume from his shelf, his house serving as both a literal and figurative reference library for me for a world outside of Fort Myers.

When I was a teen, Opa’s time working abroad and his multi-linguism also impressed me. I was resentful French hadn’t been passed down to my father and then to my sister and me, although there was admittedly nothing to stop me from learning on my own other than a tin ear and a lack of discipline. I like to think my own globetrotting adult existence owes something to his legacy, and I always got the impression he approved of—even took pleasure in—my choices, including my British husband. There was a rapport between Opa and D., a sort of mutual recognition of a fellow bon vivant. D. always looked forward to visiting Opa and being offered an ancient liqueur as an aperitif or digestif, depending, as Opa explained it, on the time of day. When I wrote postcards on vacation, Opa’s was the only one for which D. commandeered the pen.

Some years ago when D. and I were living in the UK, we were given the set of keys to a vacant apartment in Paris. We took advantage of our good fortune as often as we could, and one of the routines we most enjoyed was going for lunch on Rue Cler. It’s a pedestrianized street filled with produce stalls, specialty food shops, and the kind of outdoor cafés where all the chairs are facing out for maximum people watching. It’s also quite near the Eiffel Tower and, in my head, where Oma and Opa lived when they lived in Paris. I’m not sure where I got the idea—maybe the neighborhood was pointed out to me on a childhood visit to Paris with my parents or, more likely, it’s just something I heard over the years. In any case, as we made our way to Rue Cler on each visit I always pointed out a particularly beautiful stretch of mansion blocks to Douglas and said “That’s where Oma and Opa used to live.” Whether or not they ever did is beside the point. Even in that tiny den at the front of his house in Fort Myers, Florida, he managed to open up the whole world to me.

When Opa sold his house and moved into the nursing home, most the totems of his past life were dispersed amongst us. The cowbells and camel saddle now sit in my own den in California and, judging by my niece’s interest in the bells on a visit a couple of years ago, still hold the same allure for kids. On my visits to Opa in recent years, I always saw him in the common area of the nursing home—a pleasant enough environment but one stripped of the context his possessions had provided. The last object of his that I ever saw was a small rectangular painting he had made through an art program at the facility: a picture of a palm tree on an orange background set somewhere in the West Indies. He must have been thinking of going home, and it’s comforting to know he finally arrived. He will be missed.

Europe Walking

Walking to Paris

Posted on June 20, 2015

Making strides in his campaign
to convert me to his pedestrian ways

Last month we walked to Paris. To be more specific, we walked the mile and a half from our apartment in Berlin to the Hauptbahnhof, boarded a grey and red Deutsche Bahn train to Cologne where we changed to a burgundy-colored Thalys train to Paris, then disembarked at Gare du Nord and walked the two-and-half miles to our little hotel on Île Saint-Louis. Three days later we did the same in reverse.

The decision to walk from our apartment in Berlin to the Hauptbanhof was merely pragmatic; construction in the city has rendered a good section of the route impassable by car. But I had long thwarted my husband’s ambition to walk—he’s an avowed pedestrian—from Gare du Nord into the center of Paris based on the belief that it was too long which, perversely, was a view I had formed while making the same trek through the traffic-snarled streets of the City of Lights in the back of a taxi. When I finally looked up the route on a map, I was shocked to find it was less than three miles. I could hardly say no.

Adding to the decision to make our journey to Paris one in which we cleaved to the earth rather than ascended to the heavens was the spate of recent airline disasters. A German Wings pilot had just crashed a plane into the Alps and I was still unsettled by the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 a year earlier. Despite the fact that a rail ticket cost about three times more than a flight, I had no problem justifying the expense. In the words of Will Self in his memoir Walking to Hollywood, “I could no longer cope at all with the infantilizing demanded by…air travel. It was over. No more would I dutifully respond to those parental injunctions go here, go there, empty my pockets and take off my shoes. Never again would I take my underpants to see the world, which meant in turn that never would the world witness them espaliered on a hedge.”

Serious walking gear

Instead my underpants would be folded neatly into a sage-green backpack I had purchased for the express purpose of our ambulatory adventure, along with a pair of pink-and-white-striped slip-on sneakers that, while not exactly Parisian in sartorial tone, seemed a better option than the American-in-running-shoes cliché. In addition to being a way to avoid death in the skies, walking to Paris had also been an excuse to go shopping.

***

There is something extremely liberating about arriving at your destination and stepping onto the platform with nothing more than a backpack, a superior smirk your only concession to the lengthy taxi line you pass as you head straight out to the street and on your way. I had hoped to stop for a drink at Albion, a wine bar near the station, but it was not yet open for the evening. Still, I liked the idea that, on foot, serendipitous stops could be accommodated.

Mistinguett at the Moulin Rouge
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Instead we headed down the old Roman route of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin, dotted with hair salons catering to women of African descent and Turkish coffee shops filled with men playing cards. A lone boutique had raised the flag of gentrification with its window displays of artsy journals and minimalist housewares. It’s the kind of shop you might just as soon find in Portland as in Paris and for which I am loathe to admit I’m a target market, but we had somewhere to be and didn’t linger, even when we passed the spindly beauty of the 10th arrondissement’s city hall or through the arch of Porte Saint-Martin, a war monument erected by Louis IV. After the fact I read about two more landmarks we had passed on the street, the theater Le Splendid, where Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett (a contemporary and competitor of Josephine Baker) once performed, and Lévitan, once a Jewish-owned furniture store that was turned into the Paris annex for Drancy, an internment camp, during WWII. Along a single street we had managed to walk the history of Paris.

la porte Saint-Martin

Before long we emerged into the piazza of the Centre Pompidou, then zig-zagged through the narrow boutique-lined streets of the Marais and onto the island where, after attempting to check into two hotels that weren’t ours, we finally made it to our room in the Hôtel Des Deux Iles. By five o’clock we were back in the Marais, firmly planted in the brasserie-style chairs in front of Au Petit Fer à Cheval and drinking the pichets of Chablis we ritualistically use to commence a weekend in Paris. We had arrived but, as the saying goes, it was the journey that mattered.

Europe

Weekend in Leipzig

Posted on June 13, 2015

Once part of the GDR, Leipzig played a crucial role in the downfall of East Germany that’s often overshadowed by the symbolism of the fall of the Wall in Berlin. These days, along with Berlin and Dresden, it’s one of the most vibrant cities of the former East.

Courtyard of Hotel Fregehaus

Arrive in style
Leipzig’s grand Hauptbahnhof lends credence to the theory that train stations are the penises of urban planning. It’s a short walk from the city center, where we stayed at the Steigenberger Grandhotel Handelshof. The hotel spans a city block and was impressively remodeled four years ago. While I suspect they will regret some of interior design choices—the black Lucite chandelier over the bathtub comes to mind—there was no faulting the extraordinarily friendly service from the hotel staff. For a more intimate experience, try the stylish Hotel Freghaus situated in a historic house around a courtyard flower shop. Its neighbors include a terrific vintage store and Leipzig’s stunning Museum of Fine Arts.
Hotel Fregehaus, Katharinenstraße 11, 04109 Leipzig, tel: +49 341 26393157

Café at the Museum der bildenden Künste

Neomodern
Regardless of where you’re staying, the Museum of Fine Arts (Museum der bildenden Künste) is worthy of at least an afternoon musing the world-class collection whose origins date back to early nineteenth century. These days the collection intersperses new with old in a stunning modernist setting. The architecture that houses the collection, designed by Karl Hufnagel, Peter Pütz and Michael Rafaelian, is as special as the collection itself, which includes a swathe of contemporary artists who are either from or working in Liepzig. My favorite “discovery” was local painter Neo Rauch, which I promise has only the tiniest bit to do with his first name. Rauch has a studio at the Spinnerei, a former cotton mill that’s been converted to an art complex of studios and galleries in the western Leipzig district of Plagwitz. Both the neighborhood, centered around Karl-Heine Strasse, and the Spinnerei are worth a visit.
Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Katharinenstraße 10, 04109 Leipzig
Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Spinnereistraße 7, 04179 Leipzig

The Spinnerei

City of Music

Our weekend in Leipzig coincided with a festival celebrating the 1,000-year anniversary (yes, one THOUSAND years – in your face, America) of the first recorded mention of Leipzig. The festivities included everything from really bad American rock bands to choral music, only the latter of which is fitting for the city that was once home to Bach, Wagner, Schumann, Mahler, and Mendelssohn. Bach conducted choirs at both St. Thomas Church, where he is buried, and St. Nicholas Church, whose pale pink and green ceiling is as pretty as a box of macarons from Ladurée. Under the parsonage of Christian Führer, the church also played a central role in the 1989 demonstrations that helped lead to German reunification.

Nikolaikirche

Faustian Feasting

Our most memorable meal of the weekend was in Auerbach’s Keller, located at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the entrance to Mädler Passage, a shopping arcade whose roots begin in the sixteenth century when the rector of Leipzig University opened a wine bar in the courtyard (how very civilized). The restaurant is famous for being a setting in Goethe’s Faust, scenes from which are depicted in murals on the restaurant walls. It’s definitely touristy—mannequins of historical characters astride wine kegs in one corner of the building do nothing to lift the tone—but the food and the atmosphere were still hearty. We feasted on soups made from root vegetables, beef roulade, and potato dumplings then immediately went back to the hotel and slept as if we had tilled fields from dusk til dawn. On my next visit, I’m looking forward to trying some lighter fare at the recently opened Tacoholics in the Plagwitz neighborhood.

Auerbachs Keller, Mädler Passage, Grimmaische Str. 2-4, 04109 Leipzig

Tacoholics, Karl Heine Straße 58, 04229 Leipzig

Signage outside Tacoholics

Spy Story
On our final morning in Leipzig we visited the former local headquarters of the Stasi which has remained largely intact as a memorial and museum, the Runde Ecke, since the fall of the GDR. The displays are in German, but 4€ rents an audio guide in English. The technology employed by the GDR to spy on its own citizens is so outdated it looks laughable, but there’s little that’s humorous here—aside from the can of Florena Action aerosol hairspray in a display case dedicated to disguises. The whole experience is more poignant in light of recent revelations about the NSA and makes the Germans’ empathetic view of Ed Snowden entirely comprehensible.
Museum in der Runden Ecke, Dittrichring 24, 04109 Leipzig

“Everything in view” at the Museum in der Runden Ecke

More pictures of Leipzig here on Pinterest.

Europe Uncategorized

Life on the Rails: In praise of the road well traveled

Posted on April 26, 2015

In my last post before we left for a stint living in Berlin, I made a list of all the things I still wanted to do in the Cotswolds. Now that we would be less than a two-hour flight away, I thought I would finally get around to marking some things off this Cotswold bucket list.Our first visit back to the Cotswolds was last weekend, and I managed do exactly none of them. Part of the problem is that we like the things we usually do so much that we lack the motivation to do anything else. With walks through scenery like this just outside our front door, who could argue?

We even like the things we don’t like, or more precisely, we love to hate the same things over and over again. Case in point: we went to dinner with our old chums, Rupert and Ralph, at our local inn, the Wheatsheaf, on the Friday night of our visit. The menu featured a battered brill with petite pois and potatoes that sounded suspiciously like fish and chips for £25. Still, two of our party chose to order it, making a point of telling the waiter they would have the “£25 fish and chips.” It was delicious if ridiculously priced, and for the remainder of the weekend we revelled in repeatedly sharing our outrage. Undoubtedly we’ll eat there again next time we’re in town.

My husband’s and my travel predilections are so strong that our Facebook posts look like they’re on an annual repeat cycle, and our friend Rupert likes to poke fun at our predictability. “Back on the rails,” he’ll note every time he recognizes one of our check-ins at favorite restaurant. “Choo choo” is another shorthand favorite.

He is perhaps to blame for why I am feeling a bit defensive about taking the road well traveled. It is not a fashionable choice as anyone who knows the last three lines from Robert Frost’s famous poem will tell you.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

And everyone knows these lines of the poem because they are ubiquitous. Just yesterday I saw them artfully scrawled on a chalkboard in a Scandinavian clothing store in Berlin. This ubiquity, of course, defeats the whole purpose. If everyone takes the road less traveled, then it’s no longer the road less traveled. The road less traveled becomes nothing more than a formula, the irony of which found expression last year in the normcore movement, an equally self-aware propensity to be anti-fashion (think mom jeans, polo shirts). But I digress from my point, which is the first three lines of the poem. They’re less well known (the road less traveled, if you will), and I take my inspiration there:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

Of our beloved homes in California and the Cotswolds, my husband has often said how he wants to live in both at once. We long to “travel both and be one traveler,” but, in the absence of the science to enable that, we have settled on trying to craft a nomadic life so that we may spend time in both. The same applies to visiting other places we love and repeating the experiences from previous visits. In doing so, we create a routine that is nothing less than a sense of home. We are carving out a way to “be one traveler” however infrequently we visit.

One such beloved spot is Paris. We have a visit planned in May, but I can tell you now how the weekend will go. We will stay in a charming but microscopic hotel room on the Île Saint-Louis from where each morning we will jog a loop around the islands before breakfasting at the bar at le Louis IX, which seems to be a favorite of Parisian garbage collectors. Then we will rent bikes and ride to the Eiffel Tower before lunching on the terraces of Tribeca on the pedestrianized market street, Rue Cler. There we will admire the manners of small French children out for lunch with their families and envy the achingly chic French teenagers smoking Gauloises between bites of steak tartare.

Picture of Au Petit Fer A Cheval from 2011. Look on Facebook for another one just like it next month.

In the early evening we will head over to Le Marais, where we will drink a glass of wine at La Belle Hortense, a combination bookshop and wine bar. I will wander around the shop caressing the books and wishing I could read French. I may buy one anyway. Once we spy a free table outside at the bar across the street, Au Petit Fer à Cheval, we will rush over and grab it and drink more wine than we meant to before heading to the establishment next door, Les Philosophes, for dinner. The only Parisians in the place will be the waiters, who will accept my husband’s request for his steak to be “bien cuit” with a surprising lack of fuss; I will have the honeyed duck confit. After dinner we’ll stumble back across Pont Louis Philippe and collapse into bed before getting up the next day and doing most of it all over again.

And this road well traveled is how every few years we get to “be one traveler” who lives in Paris, too.

Cotswolds Europe

Down and Out in Paris and London

Posted on June 27, 2011

For several years now I have held the view that London is only for the very young or the very rich, and that therefore Samuel Johnson of the “…when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” quip was full of crap. One place I never expected to tire of, however, was Paris. Thanks to the largess of a friend of my sister’s with digs on the Île Saint Louis and the ease of traveling by Eurostar, Paris has been a favorite weekend destination for husband and me since we moved to England. And we could think of no better place to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary last week.

But things did not begin well. We had flown to England for a few nights in the Cotswolds before heading to Paris, and on that first Saturday we drank too much wine at a sardine BBQ at the wine bar. I awoke on Sunday to find ten strips of raffle tickets in my purse that I only dimly remembered purchasing and had no idea in aid of what (this being the season of village fêtes, the possibilities were endless). Unfortunately this was not the worst after-effect of such indulgence; that was left for Monday when the two-day-deferred-morosity that is the mark of such excess set in on our train ride to Paris.

Upon our arrival the first thing we noticed was the traffic. The midday taxi ride from Gare du Nord to the center of Paris was painstaking, with every hundred-meter progression feeling like a major victory. Once on the the Île Saint Louis we observed the crush of humanity outside Notre Dame and remembered it was June and American kids were out of school. We pressed on, literally, stretching our legs on a jog to the Tuilieries and back. In the early evening we headed to our favorite café in the Marais for a glass of wine. The people watching from a pavement table was still the best in the world, but the man hawking jasmine garlands was more aggressive than usual. This was nothing compared to the affront I felt when we sat down for dinner at the bistro next door and discovered our waiter was Irish. Was it too much to ask to be treated rudely by an old French waiter for your anniversary?

The week continued and so did the list of irritations. The workers at the Musee d’Orsay went on strike closing the museum for the day. There was a hair in my turkey club at our favorite lunch spot on the Rue Cler. It rained. I got bit by mosquitoes. The stench of urine on the cobbled banks of the Seine marred our morning jogs. Of course there were pleasures—aside from the turkey club we ate and drank very well—but even those were suspicious given my ill-timed decision to pick up my reading of Down and Out in Paris and London on our last day. In it Orwell expounds on his life as a plongeur in the bowels of a Paris hotel kitchen; I can only the hope the filth has subsided since he worked in the city in 1928. By the time we boarded Eurostar back to London, the mutual feeling was of relief.

Yesterday the Cotswolds had its first true summer day, and we were there. We rode our bikes out through Hampnett and Turkedean, then Notgrove and Guiting Power, stopping for lunch at the Black Horse in Naunton, weaving through the day trippers in Lower Slaughter and Bourton-on-the-Water before heading back through Farmington and home. Poppies rouged the apple-green cheeks of the hills, and fields of linseed blooms in a sheer lavender hue provided the dose of Impressionism we had failed to get from the Orsay. It was by far the best day of the vacation.

Reading back over this I am aware I sound like a spoiled brat complaining about getting to spend a week in Paris. On the contrary, I count my lucky stars every day that I have the kind of life right now that affords me such whims. I know that one day before long we will be back in the U.S. where if we are lucky we will be employed, and such employment will be rewarded with a paltry ten days vacation in a currency that doesn’t go far in Europe. When we decided to go to Paris for our anniversary it was precisely because we were thinking we won’t always have Paris. What I forgot is that, God willing, we’ll always have the Cotswolds.

Cycling Europe

A Week in Provence Part 3: Aups – Tourtour – LA?

Posted on September 10, 2010

Day four and I was grateful for the distraction of a day of cycling. It was a steady but pleasant ascent for the first hour. In La Bréguière we stopped at a small outdoor café for coffee. Across the street several games of pétanque were underway in the square in front of the mairie. The only other table was occupied by a group of four, one of them wearing a windbreaker from the Saint-Maximin pétanque club. On the table was a torn baguette and an open can of some dubious looking pâté. The leader of the pack — trim, cropped white hair and beard, shirt unbuttoned to the navel — was opening their second bottle of rosé, undeterred by the fact that it was 10:30AM on a Sunday.

“How French is he?” I whispered to husband.

I wanted to be charmed. I wanted us both to be charmed. But living in a small village as I do, I knew enough to know that if you lived in La Bréguière, this boisterous Gaul would quickly become a bore. I paid for our café crème at the bar beneath the watchful gaze of a mounted boar head wearing sunglasses, and we headed off to cross the scrub forest Domaniale De Pélenc. It was only 10km, but it was hot and dull and undulating. The market town of Aups was a welcome sight, and after a quick walk around the streets behind the market square we sat down in the shade of Auberge de la Tour. Pizza, postcards, and a pichet of rosé later, we headed out for the final push to Tourtour.

This was some of the nicest riding of the trip, hugging mountains to the left and, to the right, views across the Var of olive groves and villas. After about 10km, we started the final ascent through the winding main street of Tourtour, past its square and a few kilometers further to the Auberge St Pierre. The hotel is set into a hillside with a stone terraced pool and its own herd of bell wearing goats. There was also a tennis court, jacuzzi, and sauna, which, along with the village of Tourtour, were just enough to keep us busy for the two nights we were there.

The last day of cycling was both the longest and the easiest. We stopped in Entrecasteaux for coffee and quiche aux poireaux from the boulangerie, but otherwise focused on getting back to Le Thoronet. That night there was a wild storm. Thunder rolled through the hills and lightning floodlit the room. It was a perfect metaphor for an epiphany, but I had already had mine. When you start vacationing in places that remind you of home, maybe it’s time to go back.

Cycling Europe

A Week in Provence Part 2: Battle of the Farmers Markets

Posted on September 10, 2010

On our third day we freewheeled into Barjols for a visit to the market. I had read about the markets in the south of France in books by Elizabeth David, the English equivalent of Julia Child. And in Los Angeles, a chef acquaintance of mine used to talk about how these markets were the only ones she had ever been to that were better than the Santa Monica farmers markets. I had expectations.

The market was in a small square off the main road (where I spotted the woman in the photo reading). It was petite, just four stands. There was a handsome man selling handsome melons from Fox-Amphoux and another with stacks of gleaming eggplants, red peppers, and perfectly imperfect blush coloured tomatoes. Opposite was a stand specializing in goats cheese, each crotin hand decorated with either golden raisins, fresh herbs, or pink and black peppercorns. And finally there was the elderly lady tending her long table of almond biscuits in shades of pastel that matched the houses and shutters. The market was small but perfectly formed, and yet all I could think of was how the Santa Monica farmers markets spilled out for blocks, dwarfing this. And you could get chilaquiles. Husband was rubbing off on me.

I spent the afternoon by the pool finishing a mystery novel set in Marseilles, the kind of thing you are supposed to do on vacation. Husband lasted about an hour poolside before he retired to our stuffy room to text R&R with tips about their imminent vacation to — where else? — California.

Cycling Europe

A Week in Provence Part 1: Where Not to Take a Husband Homesick for California

Posted on September 9, 2010

I first read Peter Mayle’s rural idyll classic, A Year in Provence, in 1993. Last year, twenty years after it was first published, I read it again. The tales of languorous life in rural, sun dappled France had lost none of their appeal despite the fact that I now live in my very own rural idyll. This coupled with the fact that husband has put a two year deadline on moving back to California steeled my resolve to visit the region, and I’ve just returned from A Week in Provence.

The adventure did not start well. After landing in Nice we had a three hour wait for our train northwest into the Var. It was enough time for a seaside lunch in a posh restaurant had one been prepared and made such a reservation. One had not. We ate rubbery mozzarella panninis and nursed pastis in a smelly cafe with a view of an overpass while husband waxed lyrical about Los Angeles. It was the ocean front approach to Nice airport that did it. Even I saw the resemblance to flying into LAX.

Once in Les Arc the perpetually smiling Belgian, Ludmilla, met us at the station to drive us the remainder of the way to Le Thoronet, where our bicycles, dinner, and a night’s rest awaited us. All were in order but the steak — rare despite husband’s request for bien cuit — and the good night’s rest — blame smokey sheets and a barking dog. Buoyed by a triple carbo whammy breakfast of tartine, croissant, and pain au chocolat, we pedalled out of Le Thoronet and made it to our first winery, Domaine Sainte Croix La Manuelle, by 10:30AM the next day. The ride thus far had been indecipherable from say, Topanga Canyon, and now we were in a tasting room as modern and customer friendly as any in Napa. We were humored by a Frenchman with excellent English (if you clicked on the link, he’s the tall one in the back) who explained the difference between Crémant and their sparkling wine technique while upselling me on a jar of lavender honey.

We left our purchases for Ludmilla to collect — one of the perqs of being on a supported ride — and continued on the vineyard lined road to Carcès and on to Cotignac. Here amongst the plane trees on the main street we selected a table at the nicest looking of the plentiful cafés and restaurants, La Table de la Fontaine. I was worried for a moment we had chosen style over substance, hoodwinked by the wrought iron chairs, red patterned tablecloths and broad, cream coloured umbrellas, but the escargot Provencal put my mind to rest. Inside each of the eight miniature egg cups was a snail resting on a bed of tomato concasse surrounded by a moat of garlic butter and topped by a pillow of toasted crouton. Heaven. And they cooked husband’s filet de bouef bien cuit.

As we earned our lunch on the steep climb out of Cotignac, husband’s thoughts turned back to California. And it was more than a little like the Hollywood hills with all those Spanish tiled roof tops below us. As we rode on to Pontevès, the resemblance to southern California only grew. There were the same pink oleanders as those that line my grandmother’s driveway in San Bernardino, the scent of pine, the scrub clinging to rocky, terracotta-coloured soil. Even the houses behind our hotel looked like a miniature version of the terraced streets of Silverlake. In the center of town there was a departure with a medieval tangle of houses accessible only by pedestrian alleys, each with their door open and a beaded curtain for privacy. We wound our way to the ruins of the feudal château, backlit with rose gold light, and took in the 360 view of the mountains. Husband was back in California, granted a California of one hundred years ago. He sunk into a homesick slump eased not even by the evening’s daube Provencal.

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