Week One of Italy: A Brief Stop In France, Denials, and Multiple Cloisters In One Place (multiple times)
It's wild to me that I only have two weeks left in this trip! It's felt like such a long time and such a short time at the same time, and I've made so many memories. I'm both really excited to get home (and back to UIUC) and sad to be leaving Europe. By the time I get home, I'll have been here for over six months, which is far and away the longest I've ever been out of the country, and longer than I have ever consecutively lived somewhere other than home. A little crazy.
But this week has been a really good one! My cousin joined me at the beginning of the week, and it's been really nice to have another person along, especially since he's a very good navigator (saved my life in Venice!) (not literally. just figuratively.) But also it's great to have someone else to talk to and bounce things off of, even if I'm very much not used to travelling with another person. (Haven't done that since the end of May, and even that was just for one day! This is three weeks.)
Also, this was an eleven cloister week. Plus two cloisters that I got some amount of notes on but not a full survey, and one non-cloister current-use Dominican garden that I surveyed. (That's a total of fourteen, if you lost count.) Which does, in fact, average out to two surveys per day, although that's not quite how it went down. (But I am exhausted! Next week may be even crazier. Oh boy.)
Last Saturday, which I'm counting as part of this week (since I had already posted this post by the time I went) I was back in France for two days, in the Avignon area, not to far from Aix-en-Provence, and I got to visit what was quite possibly my favourite cloister so far this trip: Senanque Abbey, in Gordes.
Senanque is a Cistercian abbey which dates from the 14th century, and in addition to being architecturally stunning (I really can't get over how much I love Cistercian architecture, which is ironic, because my other favourite architectural style is Gothic, and the two could not be more different) the monks run an active lavender farm. Which means that the fields around the abbey are full of lavender, and you get views through the lavender to the abbey, and it's spectacular.
The cloister itself made me smile--it's possibly the smallest I've surveyed yet (although one of the ones at Scala Coeli in Cordoba may have been smaller) at 23 paces square. And such a human-scale place, in a very different way than the other cloisters I've seen--which have also mostly been human scaled. It's clearly a cloister for a small community, not one for forty friars or monks or what-have-you. And I like that about it, very much.
I also am going to have to eat my words about Poblet from last week, because this cloister also had an irregular planting plan within a squared plan, and I think it worked quite well in this cloister, which makes me think that a lot of my sour grapes about the irregular plantings at Poblet were not necessarily justified, but rather a reaction to being hangry and having to look up so many plants on my phone. (It did help that I knew most of the plants growing at Senanque already.) I will say, though, that the fact that all the squares (it's subdivided into nine) in the Senanque cloister except one (the old fountain house) were surrounded by box hedges, which gave it a much more uniform feel than the cloister at Poblet. If Poblet had hedges, I think I would give it an easier stamp of approval. :)
One interesting tidbit from Senanque is that the fountain house, specifically, was destroyed when the abbey was looted during the Napoleonic Wars. Since the fountain house of the Couvent des Jacobins, in Toulouse, is also destroyed, I'm wondering if the looters had something specific against fountain houses, or if that's just a coincidence. Not sure...
After Senanque, I took a twelve-hour, five-train journey to Milan, where I met up with my cousin! The next day's task was Santa Maria delle Grazie, which was fun in that the main cloister we saw was the sacristy cloister, which was become the "cloister of the frogs" because the fountain is now made with frogs shooting water out of their mouths. Also, it has four Magnolia stellata that I am positive are gorgeous when they're in bloom.
However, it was disappointing in that of the other two cloisters, I got a look through a grated door at one, and a glimpse of another through a stained glass window. I even went and asked both the info desk (for Da Vinci's Last Supper, which is in the refectory of the convent) and the gatewoman of the Dominican Community. No dice. Although that did leave us with quite a bit more of the day for sightseeing, a mixed blessing.
Our next stop was Venice! I am a huge fan of Venice. I know it has its problems...Rick Steves speculates that in twenty or thirty years, it may be just a "decaying playground for adults" with no native city life to speak of (or else underwater, I suppose) but it's such a beautiful city, and I love wandering through it and enjoying the microclimates and the tiny viewpoints and the water traffic.
The first place I surveyed was part of the Ospedale Civile, the Civil Hospital, which took over the buildings of the Dominican convent there. There was a funny (slightly stressful) moment where we tried to go in the main entrance of the hospital, and the security guard was like "THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM" and made us go out, even though there were clearly other tourists going in, which was frustrating. However, I realized that the actual cloisters (as opposed to courtyards, I think) were attached to the church of San Lazzare dei Mendicani (an appropriate name for a Dominican church in the middle of a hospital, methinks), one on either side, and very similar. They were really fun to survey--they had the most trees of any cloister I've visited so far on this trip, and that made them very shady. I will say, though, that I was eaten alive by mosquitoes again which got old very quickly (especially since we were there for nearly two hours!).
The second place was the non-cloister current-use Dominican garden, which the Dominicans of the Basilica of Sts. John and Paul (Giovanni e Paolo), which used to own all the buildings of the Ospedale, call the "garden of the apses" because it's constructed in the tiny space between the apses of the Basilica, and the street. I appreciate this, as a monastic/religious life garden nerd, because that's the place where the Paradise would have been placed in a Benedictine Abbey, which the Novices would often use for recreation.
In any case. They have created an impressively Paradisical space in such a small area, and I really enjoyed seeing it as a data point for Dominican hospitality and modern Dominican gardens, even if it's not a cloister in any meaningful sense of the word.
Our third city this week was Florence! I really enjoyed my time in Florence, even though it's quite a bit more touristy and crowded than I would like. (I'm someone who, in high school, categorically declared that she didn't like Prague at all because there were too many tourists, which should give you some idea of my position on the matter.) The gelato helps. Anyway...
The first stop was Santa Maria Novella, with a grand total of four cloisters (the fifth, the old Infirmary Cloister, is being used for parking, which is rather depressing): the Great Cloister, Cloister of the Dead, Green Cloister, and Dati Cloister.
The Great Cloister is the largest cloister I've yet surveyed, but also the second cloister I've come across that was set up for a concert, with an entire stage and raised seating area. It's not the most inspiring in terms of plantings--just grass and cypresses, although cypresses are never boring, in my opinion--but it's a really lovely, peaceful place in the middle of a very busy part of the city.
The Cloister of the Dead is at least the second of that name that I've encountered, which I find very interesting, since typically Benedictine cloisters weren't ever used for burial (that was what the cemetery was for, obviously) but apparently there may have been a cemetery there before the cloister was, and the area just continued to be used for the same purpose.
And lastly, the Dati Cloister, is just a tiny little space meant (it appears) to catch rainwater, maybe for a cistern. I'm looking forward to doing more research on that genre of cloisters, and comparing it to some of the aljibe cloisters I encountered in Spain!
The second church was San Marco, which is somewhere I've wanted to visit ever since I was really, really young, after hearing my parents talk about it. There are three cloisters there, the cloisters of San Domenico, Sant'Antonino, and the Spesa Cloister. I providentially emailed ahead to the Dominicans there, even though I knew at least one cloister was open to the public, who told me that I should email the museum, who let me know that technically only two cloisters were open to the public, but that if I came and asked for a certain curator, I would be welcome to see the one that wasn't (San Domenico) as well. Crisis averted!
The San Domenico cloister, as the name would suggest, has a massive statue of Saint Dominic in the center--the largest statue I've yet to encounter in a cloister (and I haven't encountered many statues, in general, either). Other than that, and the fact that it had two wells/fountains and neither of them were in the center, it wasn't especially notable in any exceptional way.
The Sant'Antonio cloister was similarly simple, but instead of using box or lavender or any of the things I would have expected to be used to edge the beds, they used something that I believe is Lantana montevidensis, or wild verbena. It's very pretty--little purple flowers all over--but quite unexpected. This cloister is also notable, though, because of the incredible Fra Angelico crucifixion painted on one wall. It was quite distractingly beautiful when I was trying to do my survey.
The Spesa cloister was quite similar to the Dati cloister, both in size and function, except that it contained several pots with orange trees and palm plants.
And after I was finished with my surveys, my cousin and I got to walk through the rest of the complex and see all of the Fra Angelico works in the chapter house and the friars' cells, which was mind-blowingly amazing, especially since Fra Angelico is one of my favorite artists.
It's been a crazy week, and next week will probably be just as wild, so stay tuned! :)
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