This was a wild week just in terms of the number of places I've been! (Five cities total...but who's counting?) The week ended with the cancellation of what was going to be the Calabria leg of the trip because the rental company refused to give me a rental car (long story, but let's just say I have some Thoughts about Company Policy That Doesn't Comply With Stated Italian Law). The good news is, I have a new place to stay, and will just be hanging out in Sicily over the weekend. There are worse places to get 'stranded'.
My surprising chill-ness about being refused a rental car aside, I feel like I have the travel edition of senioritis--I'm going to be home (for the first time in over six months) a week from tomorrow, and I kind of just want to be done travelling. Soon! Soon I will be done!
Even aside from all of the travel craziness, it was a, count them, twelve cloister week, if one includes all the cloisters of Montecassino (which I do). I'm pretty sure I've surpassed the forty cloister mark, although I'll need to go back and count when I'm done with the trip!
On Sunday, my cousin and I took a day trip to Bologna. That hadn't been on my original itinerary, but after I saw the place where St. Dominic founded the Dominican Order, in France and the place where he was born, in Spain, I figured it would be a nice full-circle moment to see the place where he's buried, in Italy. And that happens to be Bologna--where they also have a beautiful cloister. I wasn't sure we'd get to see the cloister, because it was a Sunday, but it was open, much to my delight. It's a good example of a cloister that's clearly used, but which also adheres to a geometric pattern.
It's also an interesting one, because one of the apses (I think that's the correct term in this case?), the apse with St. Dominic's body in it, protrudes into the cloister, meaning that the geometry has to go around it, although they've adapted it to that admirably.
Monday was a crazy transportation day--we took two trains from Florence to Montecassino, took the bus up there (during a thunderstorm!) and then back down, and then had three trains to get to Naples, where we had to take a taxi to our lodgings. (I have to say, Neapolitan taxi drivers are INSANE and while I wasn't scared at any point, it was definitely the most roller-coaster-like experience I have ever had while in a car. I loved it. I'm pretty sure my cousin hated it.)
Montecassino was really beautiful and amazing to see! It was the site of the first real Benedictine abbey, and while it has of course been rebuilt many times, including after it was destroyed by the Allies during WWII (an absolutely futile bombardment, since it was not a military instillation, and there were no German soldiers there, just refugees and monks, many of whom were killed).
There are many cloisters there, from the four "formal" cloisters that form a t-shaped axis around which the other monastic buildings are arranged to the little tiny cloisters and courtyards that pepper the museum complex that's built into the monastery. I recorded seven in total, and one courtyard with a similar drainage system!
My favorite was the 'entry cloister', the only one that had in-ground plantings, and was also frequented by two cats. It was a more freely-planted cloister than I would have expected for Montecassino, but had enough regularity that I approved.
All of the cloisters are interesting, in that in all of them, water from the roofs is drained directly into the cloister, which is designed to handle it, either by sending the water to drains at the edges or at the centre (with different types of slope, as you might imagine). This is my favorite way that a cloister deals with drainage (rather than having downspouts that go directly into the ground, which I think misses a service that the cloister can provide) and it was really fun to be there during a thunderstorm, because I got to see a lot of the water flow in action!
Naples, where we arrived from Montecassino, was an interesting place to visit in that it feels like a much more run down city than any other I've encountered in Europe. Parts of it almost feel like parts of Texas, which is really disorienting.
But it's been one of my favorite places to stay, because I got to stay with the Dominicans of the Sanctuary of the Madonna dell'Arco, and they were incredibly welcoming and kind, and I had a great time hanging out with them.
The cloister at Madonna dell'Arco is definitely distinct among the cloisters I've visited so far in that there's a massive sinkhole in the center currently that they're working on repairing! Apparently, there was an attempt to bring the cloister up a little higher from the level it was at, and it was too much for the structural integrety of something and there was a collapse. Indeed unique. One of the things I really enjoyed about it, though, is that even while having a very 'classic' foursquare cloister configuration, it has plenty of space for the Dominicans to host events and spend time in it, if they wish.
While in Naples, I also visited San Domenico Maggiore, which was, sadly, one of the worst maintained cloisters I've come across so far. I did find that fun, though, in a way, because I got to do the detective work to figure out what would have been planted in various places before the weeds took over. I didn't do too shabbily, if I do say so myself.
Come to think of it, the fact that both of the cloisters in Naples had something rather majorly wrong with them is amusingly appropriate for Neapolitan cloisters.
The next stop was Sicily, which was exciting in the way that realizing that you actually don't have a reserved berth on a twelve-hour ferry ride is always exciting. However, Adversity Was Overcome (mostly by dint of sleeping on the floor) and I was perky enough to survey two cloisters immediately after getting off the ferry (and a shot of espresso) so all's well that ends well.
The two cloisters in Palermo, San Domenico and Santa Caterina d'Alessandria, were actually two of my favorites from this trip so far, despite the amount of headaches Santa Caterina caused me because of being complex.
San Domenico's cloister makes me happy because it really embraces its locality in its design. It doesn't try to pretend to be somewhere else than Sicily--instead, they have massive palm trees and banana plants. (I'm curious to investigate/analyze the use of palm trees vs. cypresses. They serve similar but not the same purpose in cloister design, in my experience.) The other thing that makes me happy about San Domenico is the (granted, dry) excessively Dominican fountain design, with the black & white tile. :)
If San Domenico made me happy because of its, for lack of a better term, terroir, Santa Caterina makes me happy for similar reasons (including the use of variously colored tiles for paving, something that feels very regional and I haven't seen anywhere else) but also because of its really varied planting palette (everything from pomegranites used as bushes to hibiscus to orange trees to snake plants to roses) and the way that it manages to feel like a cohesive whole despite that diversity--or maybe because of it? It's the most ridiculously photogenic cloister I have yet encountered, and that's saying something. It's currently open to the general public and there's a dolceria in one of the old cloister buildings (the last Dominican nuns who lived there died in 2014, and it now belongs to the diocese), so when I was there, it was full of people eating gelato and cannoli and trying to beat the heat. Very different from the environment of any other cloister I've visited, but fun!
See you all next week!
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