Sadly, my computer is now totally dead. The hard drive had been behaving much better, lending further creedence to the loose-connection theory. However, today, it started freezing during bootup at the “Checking NVRAM…” stage of the POST. It’s completely unresponsive. Even more bizarre, if I try to enter the BIOS, it prompts for a password, and I’ve never set a BIOS password for this machine.

I’ve been in touch with tech support via email, and they claim there’s no easy way to reset the BIOS, no reset jumpers like on a desktop. The machine is still under warranty, so I’m hesitent to start tearing it apart and shorting EPROMs based on suggestions from the internet (or Italian hackers). Tech support keeps giving me variations of, “just bring it down to the store”, despite the fact that I’ve told them I’m traveling.

I’ll see if I can get them to pay for repairs at a computer shop here. Alternatively, I may wind up shipping it back the US for warranty service, and then just buying the cheapest thing I can find here, since I’ll be looking at a least a month round-trip. The ASUS eee PCs can be had for around €250, and they’re kind of trendy so I’m sure I could re-sell it easily if/when I got my machine back.

Ugh, super frustrating. If anyone has ideas or suggestions, I’m open.

So, first, the Italian Hackmeeting. My biggest impression on first arrival was just how cool the location was. I think I mentioned this earlier, but the story I heard was that the place was built as a party mansion for a guy with mafia ties. It was pretty huge, with at least two main levels, plus the roof and the basement. There was also a good-sized coutyard with gardens and mosaic tiled fountains that I’m sure were quite impressive at one time. The place now is appropriately graffitoed (Italian word!) and grungy, with some pretty cool artwork and berpunk junk lying around. All in all, an excellent venue for a hackmeeting.

My other major early observation was that Italians eat like crazy. The first night, not everyone had arrived yet (I got in on Wednesday and the hackmeeting didn’t officially start until Friday), so there were only about 20 people to go out to dinner. A sizable number, but enough that we could all sit at one big table at a restaurant. First, we went to a sandwich place called Mr. Pannini. I’m not a big fan of the Italian almost-raw prosciutto, so I ordered the quattri formage…which also came with prosciutto, whoops. This was sort of a stand up/take it and go sandwich place and it took a long time for everyone to get their sandwich. So as we’re leaving the sandwich place, somebody goes, “Hey, you wanna go for pizza?” and most people were enthusiastic about a second dinner. We went to “Times Square Pizzaria” across the street from Mr. Pannini. They served individual 7-inch (18 cm?) pizzas. I got the “Empire State” which was basically a vegetable supreme. The pizza was very good, but it was in no way New York style pizza.

So then, as we’re leaving the pizzaria, another person is like, “Let’s get gellato and coffee!” So we had to go get that, too. In summary, I have no idea why Italians don’t all weigh 300 pounds.

The meetings were pretty cool. I frequently found myself wishing I spoke Italian. Among the presentations I watched, there was one on asymmetric encryption that was pretty interesting and seemed to do a good job of covering some of the history of crypto. I also saw one about some new P2P technology based on bittorrent, but apparently better in ways that were unclear to people who didn’t speak Italian. There was some stuff with ham radio that was pretty cool too, but again difficult to follow.

I had expected the meeting to be a little bit more international in character. There were a couple of Brazilians (from Indymedia, they had also been at the Budapest meeting), one German, and one other American there. The American guy spoke Italian, though. He was a pretty cool guy, but he was also prone to saying things like, “All currency is false currency,” which sounds sort of profound and radical, until you realize that it doesn’t mean anything unless you have rigorous definitions of “currency” and “false”. Now, I’m sure this guy did have those. But they’re so open to arguement that it pretty much defeats the point of having a pithy opening statement.

On Saturday night, they had a band play at the squat, and later I went into town with a guy named Gioseppi, who wore a denim jacket and was really into early-90s grunge and Kerouac. He told me he wanted to visit Seattle because, “That’s where grunge is from,” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the grunge scene in Seattle has been dead since almost before Kurt Cobain’s body was cold.

Almost everyone was quite friendly and welcoming, and willing to try to talk to me in English, but not everyone spoke English well. It was quite isolating, and in some ways stressful to be surrounded 24 hours a day by people speaking a language you can barely understand. My stress was compounded by my laptop’s complete and utter failure on Friday. Some of the hackers were actually really cool about helping me look at my dead machine. I had initially felt bad about asking them about it. End user support is generally considered irritating and not worth the time by most people who actually know something. Plus, it makes me look like a “why can’t you fix your own computer?” moron.

I managed to get several people interested in it as a fun, curious challenge. Especially cracking the mysteriously-created BIOS password. One guy eventually guessed the password: all 0’s. Whether that comes about as the result of failing memory zeroing out values, or is some sort of default built into the BIOS, I don’t know.

Nobody could actually fix it, but they at least confirmed for me that it’s a pretty serious hardware failure that demands OEM servicing.

Also in the lame and irritating category, I slept on a couch of uncertain providence and awoke the next morning to find my hands and forearms covered with small itchy insect bites. I’m assuming bedbugs (couchbugs?). They’ve stopped itching now and have mostly healed, but it’s a week later and they’re still slightly visible. Lame.

There were a lot of cool things at the conference, however.

As part of a tradition at these hackmeetings, the DHCP was disabled, and anyone who wanted to use the network had to go up to a table where the “DHCP Umano” sat, provide him with your hostname, and he would tell you your IP address. I found this charmingly archaic.

They also had delicious pasta meals made twice a day by a group of volunteers. Anyone who wanted to eat kicked in €3 and was served. In the spirit of the free software movement, every day the pasta recipes were posted outside the kitchen, so that anyone who cared to could inspect the source code and make the food themselves if they liked a particular one.

All in all it was a really good time. It would’ve been better if I spoke Italian, but I met some cool people, including one guy who invited me to stay with him in Rome when I pass through that city.

]]> http://www.withoutatraceroute.com/2008/10/where-was-i/feed/ 2 http://www.withoutatraceroute.com/2008/10/frustration/ http://www.withoutatraceroute.com/2008/10/frustration/#comments Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:38:36 +0000 http://www.withoutatraceroute.com/?p=1078 After the hackmeeting ended, my top priority was trying to get my computer situation resolved. I generally hate solving problems by just throwing money at them (although that’s usually remarkably effective at smoothing away life’s little irritations). Not only does it make me feel wasteful and profligate, it makes me feel stupid that I couldn’t come up with anything more clever than buying my way clear.

However, in this case, the answer was pretty obvious. I had a dead computer that could not be repaired here. I needed a new, working computer. Monday, I went to one large electronics store that had an Asus eee PC 900 for €400, and a Acer Aspire One for €300. I resisted the temptation to just buy something on the spot, did some research at an internet cafe and located some specialty computer stores (God, I wish Europe had Fry’s). Tuesday I spent most of the day (4 or 5 hours) trekking around from store to store comparing prices and seeing what was available.

I finally bought a Asus eee 901 (for €400), which is quite similar to the 900, except it ships with the new Intel Atom processor and a larger battery. This means better performance and longer battery life. I also got a USB drive enclosure (€10) and a 120 GB external drive (€50), since the eee pc has only 20 GB of on-board storage. The guy at the store helpfully loaned me a small screwdriver to transfer the old laptop’s HDD to the enclosure, which then led to this unholy scene:

It's Alive!

From left to right are:

1. My old laptop, plugged into the “power” part of the y-connector USB cable. The external drive I had was failing repeatedly during large file transfers. I suspected that the USB bus on the little eee PC wasn’t supplying enough power, but I didn’t have any more USB ports on the eee pc since the external drive enclosure also asked for the dual power/data USB y-connector. Hence, my old laptop, sans hardrive, still frozen at the POST screen, was pressed into service as a zombie USB power source. Note: I have also used the light from its screen to read a book in bed, making it the world’s most expensive rechargeable flashlight.
2. The external drive in question. The file transfer failures later proved to be software-related. The drive is NTFS formatted, and apparently the default eee PC OS has rather flaky NTFS support. Since I switched to Ubuntu-eee I have had zero problems with it.
3. The eee pc 901, plugged into the “data” portion of the USB connector. In this setup, the eee pc is simply functioning as a conduit to transfer data between the two external drives.
4. The old laptop’s hard drive, contained within the cheapo external enclosure. The enclosure was basically just a little aluminum tin, and it didn’t even fit very snugly; the drive could rattle around inside. I would never use this thing long-term, but it worked perfectly well for emergency data recovery.

A couple people in the hostel came by while I was performing this procedure and looked at me as if I were some sort of crazy mad scientist. I simply explained that I was sucking the soul out of one computer and locking it in the little metal box.

As for the other step in this process, getting my old laptop back home for warranty servicing, that’s proving significantly more difficult. I went to a Mailboxes Etc outlet in Palermo, and they told me they could ship it UPS 1-week shipping for €110 euro, I also went to Poste Italiane, where the guy flat-out refused to ship it at all (I may have been at the wrong window for international shipments). Looking on their website hints that they might ship something of a similar size and weight to my laptop to the Stati Uniti for €76, which is still way, way more than I want to pay.

A few days ago, I went to another Mailboxes Etc. that quoted me €90. So far, I have been unable to locate anyone who will do very slow, very cheap by-sea shipping. My best bet may be to hold out until I meet an American traveler who’s returning to the States in the near-future and see if they’d be willing to take my laptop with them and then drop it in the domestic post once they hit North America. I’m also hoping that perhaps when I get to Rome, I’ll be able to find a better shipping option.

I finally got out of Palermo. I’ve decided that I want to visit the Aeolian islands, which are a series of volcanic islands off the coast of Sicily. Apparently they’ve only recently become a tourist destination and are still lightly frequented during the off-season(i.e. Now). In any case, I needed to get out of Palermo. It was dirty and noisy and crowed. “Clusterfuck” is the only word that adequately describes the traffic situation in Palermo. I feared for my life every time every time I set foot on the street. People I met at the hostel said that Palermo reminded them of Morocco or some Latin American countries more than Europe.

This is what large parts of Palermo look like: cars parked randomly and garbage on the ground.

Other parts are quite beautiful, however

The hackers were really cool, but I slept on a couch of somewhat questionable providence and woke up with my hands/forearms covered with insect bites of some sort (couchbugs?). I would’ve left Palermo sooner, but I was trying to get things straightened out with my computer problems. I did buy a new machine, it’s an Asus eee 901 and so far I’m pretty pleased with it. I’ll try to write a detailed review later. I’ve been trying to find an affordable way to ship my broken computer back so it can be warranty serviced, and so far have not been having much luck. UPS wants €110 for one-week shipping; Postale Italia wanted €76 for the same timeframe. I can’t believe that there’s nobody who will ship by boat instead of by plane and do it for less. I guess all of that stuff must just be container ships at this point, and there’s no money in shipping anything less than a container-load. Today I putzed around trying to find some more shipping options; I tried to go to a DHL retail location, but either the address on the website was out of date, or the map was misleading, because I wasn’t able to locate it.

Finally, I decided I needed to leave, even if I had to haul the broken computer with me for a while. I caught the last train out of Palermo to Milazzo, which is the point of departure for ferries (and hydrofoils!) bound for the Aeolian islands.

Right now I’m at the train station in Milazzo. My train got in at around 11 pm, and I was originally planning on making at least some effort to find a hostel. However, it was raining lightly and the train station doesn’t appear to be anywhere near the city center (or maybe it’s just a very small city) but the station seems to be pretty much out in a field. Factor in the fact that the station itself is quite nice, totally deserted (there don’t even appear to be janitors or security personnel here—although there is somebody sleeping in an RV in the parking lot), and you can see why I didn’t have any desire to go wandering mapless through a field in search of hostels which may or may not exist, may or may not be booked up or expensive. The main building of the station is open, as is the 2nd class waiting room (where I am now) which features a spacious and relatively comfortable bench to sleep on. The bathrooms are also open, which was nice for me to use the facilities, brush my teeth and so forth. The bathrooms also contained the only accessible electrical outlets, which I availed myself of to charge my laptop and my camera batteries.

Charging in the bathroom

I read a bit, hung my towel up to dry, emptied everything out of my backpack(s) and cleaned up / reorganized it, watched Futurama on my laptop, and now I’m thinking about going to sleep. The first ferry is at 6 am (from a sign posted outside the [closed] tourist information office), but I doubt I’ll be up that early. Unless I’m roused by cleaning people or something.

Considering this night isn’t costing me anything, I’m very pleased with the quality of the facilities.

Bench, sweet bench

If only they had wireless internet, I might just stay here for a couple of nights. Sadly, they do not, and I will be missing the Sarah Palin / Joe Biden smackdown. I hope it turns out to be hilarious.

Yesterday started out lame, but wound up rather awesome. The train station people were very nice about not deliberately waking me up and rousting me out. A janitor came in around 7:30 I think, I sort of half woke up, but he didn’t say anything and even mopped around my bags on the floor. I thought it was nice of him; maybe he was just happy to have an excuse not to mop that part of the floor. The tourist office in the train station never opened, but I caught a bus down to the port.

At the port, I got seriously jerked around by the guy working the ticket booth for the ferry out to the islands. First he sold me an €11 ferry ticket, then he told me the ferry didn’t leave until 6:30 pm (they’re on the off-season schedule now, with less frequent service), but there is a hydrofoil leaving at 12:15. It was only about 10 am at this point, so I’m like, “Fine, can I get the 12:15 instead?” And he does some fast change action where he takes back my ferry ticket, and all the change from the €20 bill I’d handed him. Then, he doesn’t give me a ticket, and he says “Ok, come back here at 12.” I was was like, “What?” but he was very insistent like, “It’ll be fine, you come back at 12 now,” and hustled me out the door of the ticket office before closing it and locking up.

I spent the next couple hours buying some groceries to take with me to the islands to save money on food, and then waiting in the tourist office at the port (where I discovered a hydrofoil trip is supposed to cost €16.50, not €20).

When I did go back to the ticket office (at 11:45, not 12), there was already a mob of people there, and I had to wait. I got to the window and it was the same guy; sure enough, he wanted to charge me again for another ticket. I stood firm and was like, “No, I already paid you, you need to give me a ticket.” he finally relented, only by then the 12:15 hydrofoil had sold out, so I had to wait for the 1:15.

I’m still not completely sure what to make of this situation. It’s possible the guy intended to take back the ticket and all my change and give me back the €20 note, in which case it was an innocent mistake and he wasn’t intending to rip me off. On the other hand, he was very pushy and obnoxious. A guy who lives in Milazzo later told me that the ferry operators have a reputation for being jerks to everyone, locals and tourists alike.

I think the lesson for me is that I need to be less worried about looking like a jerk, and more worried about getting ripped off. I should’ve been clear about the price, and I should’ve demanded a ticket or my money back on the first go around. This is hard for me, because I’m generally a pretty easy-going guy; especially in foreign countries where I don’t always understand the way things work, it’s easy to come off as the pushy, demanding tourist.

The hydrofoil was pretty cool. Boarding was an adventure, though. The Italians in general do not do lines. Everyone just mobs around a narrow gangplank and shoves their way forward. I got elbowed in the face by a woman who could’ve been my grandmother.

The trip took about an hour and a half. I’m really glad I decided to come here though. Lipari is incredibly beautiful. Accommodation prices are way down during off season. I’m staying at an apartment rented by a nice old Italian lady who speaks basically no English. I have my own private room with private bathroom (this is a first for me on this trip), a balcony with a view of the Mediterranean, a refrigerator, and there’s a shared kitchen here. All for €20 a night. When you consider that I paid €18/night for a bunk bed in a hostel dorm in Palermo, you can see why this is awesome.
I wandered around the town of Lipari, which is the largest town on the islands, but still quite small and charming. I walked up the hill to see the castle or fort at the top, and I was recruited by a very nice old man to come see the Lipari Maritime museum (which was free). He spoke no English, but was incredibly enthusiastic about showing me the different exhibits in the small museum. At the start, he asked me, “English?” which I took to mean, “Do you speak English?” and replied “Si”, but he took to mean “Are you English?” and so he made a special point to emphasize any time the museum’s exhibits made reference to somebody British. I tried to appear suitably impressed by photos of the British royals’ 1960s visit to the Aeolian islands. The museum was a weird mix of “Here’s people who’ve visited here” photos, historical relics from early ships from the area, and a LOT of exhibits about fishing: different types of nets, traps, spears, hooks, etc. In what has been a recurring theme on my trip, the old man took me for a very detailed tour, talked to me excitedly in a language I didn’t understand, demonstrating with pantomime how to use the various fish-catching implements, and I tried my best to show interest.

Afterwards, I visited a very beautiful church on top the hill, with a well-preserved “Norman knave” (this was what the sign said, I was unaware that the Normans were in Italy). But beautiful churches and antiquities are a dime a dozen in Italy. What made this church awesome was that it came equipped with its very own kitten! He was quite frisky and curious, attacking my shoelaces and the straps on my backpack. He also wore a collar that appeared to made from rosary beads. Sweet.

The only downside I’ve found in Lipari so far is that all the internet cafes (there are 3) seem to be run by some sort of internet-cafe monopoly cartel called “Internet Point”, and they all charge €6/hour for internet access, which is absurd. I understand that many things on the islands are more expensive because they need to be shipped in, but it’s not like they have to haul the internet in on a boat. I’ve taken to drafting my posts, but not posting them so as to not waste money there.

On Sunday, I rented a little scooter and set out to circumnavigate the island. The scooter was way, way more fun than it had any right to be. It was bright yellow, and the right mirror was broken off which gave it a silly, lopsided appearance. But it was fast enough to be fun and exciting without being overwhelming. I got it up to about 60 km/h (around 40 mph) on some of the more wide-open stretches. Actually, the only scary parts were trying to turn around slowly or maneuver carefully down a narrow street without running off the edge of the road (I almost ran into a ditch a couple times) or scratch up the side of the scooter (which would come out of my deposit).

Anyway, the scooter was awesome and I really enjoyed it. It was a great way to get around to see the whole island of Lipari, which isn’t actually that big. It was about 37 km for the road all the way around. I took it at a pretty leisurely pace, stopping in some of the small towns and to do some hiking, and it still only took me about 3 hours. After that, I just raced up and down windy hills until it was time to return the scooter.

Stromboli has been erupting continuously throughout recorded human history. And it’s a long one, the Aeolian islands have been continually inhabited since before the ancient Greeks. While Plato was holding forth at the Academy, Stromboli was erupting. While Jesus Christ was dying on a cross, Stromboli was erupting. While the Vandals were sacking Rome a few hundred miles to the North, Stromboli was erupting. While kingdoms and empires rose and fell, Stromboli was erupting. Watching molten rock fountaining from the ground, the same way it has for at least the past 2,500 years or so (and in all likelihood, much longer than that) one can’t help but feel that there are forces in the universe which operate on their own timescale—with utter indifference to human affairs—like the callous and capricious gods of antiquity. These are forces of nature so vast and grand the human mind struggles to comprehend them. There’s no reason to believe Stromboli couldn’t go on erupting long after our species has vanished into extinction.

The hike to the crater took about 2.5 hours, and was fairly strenuous with an 800 m (2,600 feet) elevation gain. I went with an almost entirely Francophone tour group, but the guide also took the time to explain things to me in English. It’s actually against the law to hike the volcano above 400 m, except with an organized tour group. I suspect this is more of a money-making scam on the part of the local government than a genuine safety requirement: €3 of the price of every guided trip goes to the government.

The trail is quite obvious, both going up, and coming down. And the overlook point is far enough back from the crater that there was no significant danger. The only real danger could come from flying debris expelled by the crater (which apparently does happen occasionally, as evidenced by my damaged helmet) but other than telling us when to put on our helmets, there’s nothing our guide could have done to keep us safe from chunks of flaming rock falling out of the sky. A few well-placed, multilingual warning signs and perhaps a control booth at the bottom of the trail to keep the numbers of hikers in check during high-season would do plenty for safety.

It was especially surprising because the National Park Service at Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii doesn’t seem to have any problem with people hiking out to see the Kilauea lava flows unescorted, something I did myself a few years back. I’m used to the United States being worse than other countries when it comes to putting in place onerous “safety” requirements, coating things in soft foam rubber and putting up signs telling you not to climb on things.

Other than the fact that both experiences included volcanoes, hiking Stromboli was about as different as possible from Kilauea. Whereas the approach to the Kilauea flow is across a vast, otherworldly level sheet of freshly (within the last 20 years) cooled volcanic rock, most of the climb up Stromboli is fairly ordinary mountain trail hiking, with only occasional sections where volcanic ash has killed off the vegetation. While Kilauea produces a stream of lava flowing into the sea, and associated boiling saltwater; Stromboli has exploding, fountaining showers of lava from three separate points inside a much larger crater.

It was a pretty fantastic experience, and well worth the added trouble of getting to this relatively remote island. The village of Stromboli is nothing to write home about, only about 350 people live there, and the economy seems largely dependent on volcano tourism. I spent €20 to stay at a vastly inferior hotel, but only for one night. The next morning, I headed back to Milazzo, bypassing the medicinal mudbaths on Volcano.

My own camera was not really up to the task, but if you’d like to see some nice video that gives a good sense of what the eruptions actually look like:

Milazzo is quite nice, if a bit sleepy during the off-season. As a town of only about 32,000 people, it’s MUCH more relaxed than Palermo (pop. 675,000). The difference was immediately apparent the first time I rode the bus in Milazzo. The police had blocked off a section of the bus route, so the driver took a detour: he went the wrong way down a one-way street into opposing traffic. But he did it carefully, and he stopped for a pedestrian!

The only sort of major “sight” in Milazzo is the castle. It’s not really a castle in the sense of a king and royal court living there, but rather more of a military fortress. Built on the hill overlooking Milazzo (a place of strategic importance, it would seem), the fortress was constructed in various pieces by many different groups.

The earliest sections are Arabic, dating from the 800s, followed by a larger castle built during the Norman period in the 1200s, and then in the Arragon period in 1400s. The latest major construction was by the Spanish in the 1500s who added a double-wall around the outside of the castle (with the space between the walls filled by sand). However, the castle continued to be used as a prison the way up through the 1970s, and there is some modern construction evident: a guardhouse; little air-raid huts for the guards built during the 2nd world war. Even a little garden that was dedicated to Mussolini (although he never came to see it).

There is also an old domed cathedral (Duomo) on the grounds of the castle. It’s no longer used as a church, though; because Garibaldi’s army used it as a military hospital, thereby de-consecrating it. The altar and almost all of the religious artwork were removed to the New Duomo in town, leaving a strangely austere aesthetic. Oddly enough, the cathedral is under the administration of the city of Milazzo, but the rest of the castle is owned/administered by the regional Sicilian government.

The woman who showed us around the castle was really quite nice. She didn’t speak English, but there was a Dutch couple there, and the wife had studied Italian language and literature and so spoke quite fluent Italian and English, She translated for me and her husband. Officially, our guide was only an “assistant” not a tour guide. She said she had never been given any training, and was in fact technically not allowed to speak to tourists or give them any information about the castle. She was just supposed to walk with us and make sure we didn’t steal or destroy anything. However, she was actually very informative and seemed to know a great deal about the castle and its history. Neither I nor the Dutch couple could figure out why they would ban her from giving information. Finally, the Dutch woman asked her and she said that in order to be an official “tour guide” you need special paperwork and authorization. Apparently, being a tour guide is a “protected” (this is the word the Dutch woman used) job in Italy. So basically, it’s some insane government or union regulations.

Despite her government-mandated mute ignorance, our un-guide was actually quite knowledgeable about the site. For example, the residents of the castle put eels in the main cistern to eat insects and other pests and ensure that the water always remained clean (if you don’t mind drinking eeley water, I suppose). She pointed out the the spot where executions (hangings or shootings) took place, and the only building still standing from the village that used to exist inside the castle walls, an old monestary/convent. According to legend, one nun who didn’t respect the vows was buried alive in its walls.

The castle was also the site of other morbid curiosities. In the 1930s, they discovered a torture cage with body/skeleton still in it (photo–replica skeleton–below). The body was still wearing some shreds of cloth, and so was able to be identified. Apparently he was an Irishman conscripted into the English army. He had been planning on defecting from the English army to the French one, but the English caught him, and so tortured and executed him. “Everything here is about death,” noted our non-guide.

Departing Milazzo, I took an overnight train to Rome. The only really noteworthy part of the train ride was that because there’s no bridge between Sicily and mainland Italy, they load all the trains onto ferries and sail them across the gap. It’s pretty cool that they just drive a whole train onto the boat. During the short, half-hour ferry ride, you can get off the train and wander around the ship. It was mostly pretty empty, with only a few vending machines and some nice views of the harbor lights to offer.

I had forgotten how incredible Rome is.

Caution – The Eternal Post: This post will be long and may contain a brief discussion of non-Euclidean geometry. You have been warned.

For 500 years, Rome was the most important place in the world in a way that no other city ever was before, and it seems doubtful that any city will ever be again. The world is simply too decentralized and multipolar today.

Since my overnight train got in really early in the morning, I had to wait until the guy I was staying with got off work. Wandering around Rome, without any real plan, I stumbled upon the Basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, which turned out to be the ruins of an enormous Roman baths complex that had been renovated by Michaelangelo into a beautiful basilica. The point is that Rome is absolutely lousy with stuff like this, and you can’t turn around without tripping over a stunning Roman ruin, or a priceless work by a Renaissance master or a Catholic church built out of solid gold or something. Rome has a metro system, but its very small and perfunctory for a city of this size, with only two lines that don’t really go very many places. It’s like somebody told them that major cities need to have a metro, so they built one. Anyway, they’re finally building a third metro line, but the signs for the construction read “ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATION … (and metro line 3 construction)” which is just a testament to the realization that any time you dig anywhere in Rome, it becomes an archeology expedition.

After the basilica, I walked over the the Italian national library. I like libraries, they’re like churches of knowledge. Both the British Library in London and the Library of Congress in Washington DC are enormous, imposing structures with classical pretensions. I was expecting something similar from the Italian Biblioteca Nationale, but I wound up being disappointed. The building itself is fairly large, but it’s modern architecture and not particularly impressive. It looks more like an office building than a temple. On the other hand, I suppose Rome figures it has absolutely nothing to prove when it comes to classical architecture.

On the other hand, the Italians were much nicer about letting me into the reading rooms than, say, the British. In order to get a reader’s card at the British Library, I needed a note from my history professor to the effect that I needed certain resources (namely a 1992 Irish economic report) which were not available elsewhere in the UK. To get into the Biblioteca, I just filled out a form and showed them an ID. I got a nice little library card too; I think I’ll start collecting them.

The collection itself seemed quite good. I flipped through a journal of Semiotics in the humanities reading room; in the pure science/mathematics reading room I read several chapters of a very good book by one Morris Kline entitled “Mathematics for the Nonmathematician” (I just now found that several chapters are available online as PDFs, chapter 1, 2, 6). Despite being somewhat dated: 1967 copyright; sample logic puzzle: “Two married couples need to cross a river using a boat that only carries two people; how can this be accomplished without leaving a woman alone with a man who is not her husband?”, it did a good job of presenting some fairly complex mathematical concepts in a way that was neither dumbed-down nor inaccessible. One thing I’ll say for academic works from the 1950s/60s, they assumed that university students could pull their own weight without a lot of handholding. Klien’s book, geared as it is toward nonmathematicians, also delves deeper into the social and epistemological implications of the topics he covers than the typical math textbook.

Particularly interesting was the chapter on non-Euclidean geometry. Kline makes a case that the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry represents the single most “fundamental and…far-reaching” revolution in human thought since the 1800s. He argues that prior to the arrival of non-Euclidean geometries, it was almost universally believed that mathematics (and Euclidean geometry in particular) represented real, fundamental truths about the universe, rather than being simply one of a number of internally consistent logical systems that are useful in certain situations.

He does a good job of starting with the parallel postulate and then showing how by changing the assumptions made about parallel lines, you wind up with different geometries. He also touches on some of their applications such as curved surfaces (i.e. globes) and relativistic space-time.

Anyway, later I met up with Carlos and we went out to dinner with his girlfriend and some of her colleagues at a social co-op pizzeria. Then, on Saturday he showed me around the city a little bit. I had done a lot of the standard tourist stuff on my first visit to Rome two years ago, so we skipped that. We went to Jewish quarter, which is very nice. It has quite a different feel from the rest of Rome. It’s much calmer and quieter, in contrast to the noise, bustle and insane traffic of the rest of the city center. Carlos said he actually really dislikes living in Rome, but he can understand why it’s a cool place to visit.

Carlos and his girlfriend were absolutely wonderful hosts, and fantastic cooks as well. Carlos also told me his definition of a hacker, as simply “A person who doesn’t know enough. They always want to learn more, understand more,” which I rather liked.

On Sunday, I was going to go to St. Peter’s Basilica, because I remembered it was one of only two churches in Europe that really blew me away (the other being Sagrada Familia in Barcelona). However, when I got there it turned out that Pope Benedict XVI was celebrating mass in St. Peter’s Square (actually ovoid) in front of the church. All the seats were taken by the time I arrived, and the square was pretty well filled, but not so tightly packed that it was hard to move around. One source I found lists a maximum of 350,000 for St. Peter’s Square. I’m assuming that’s if you jam them in, but there could easily have been around 100,000 people there when I was there.

The Catholic Church doesn't mess around

The mass celebrated the canonization of four new saints (to round out the 2,500-some-odd ones they already have). There were large groups of pilgrims present from many nations, especially (based on the flags waving) Columbia, Ecuador, India and Switzerland. At the end of the mass, the Pope gave a brief address in several different languages. His words as spoken are here, and in English translation here. Pope Benedict seemed quite comfortable in Italian and his native German, his English was heavily accented but understandable, ditto Spanish, and I would assume for French; he seemed to struggle a bit with Polish.

After the mass, the Pope toured around the square in an open-air popemobile. I took a picture, but the way the crowd was, it’s mostly just a picture of his mitre pretiosa (a.k.a “the pointy gold pope hat”).

I was honestly quite surprised at how moving I found the service. I was baptized Catholic and attended a Catholic high school for four years, but I haven’t attended mass in quite some time and I don’t consider myself a practicing Catholic. Still, being there with people from all over the world, the sign of peace offered in a dozen different languages, it was a pretty unique feeling.

Following the mass, I went and stopped by the Pantheon, with it’s ur-dome upon which seemingly every other be-domed building in the world is based. Without a doubt one of the most influential structures in the history of architecture.

I also visited the cats at the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary, which is probably my favorite place in Rome. If anyone reading this likes cats, consider making a donation, they’re a really good organization and there are a lot of abandoned cats in Rome.

After that, I hopped a train to Florence.

When I first arrived, I followed the directions given me by Stefania, a researcher at the EUI I’m visiting with, which had me catch a bus from the train station out to the northwest section of town in the Le Cure district. I was supposed to find the post office in Le Cure and then call her so she could come find me. Finding the post office was easy enough, with helpful instructions from some of the other bus passengers. The second step turned out to be rather more difficult. My Dutch SIM card was out of credit (and despite multiple emails I never figured out a way to ‘top up’ from outside of the Netherlands). I had been counting on finding a payphone, but as the bus headed further into residential neighborhoods, my hopes diminished. Then, salvation! In front of the post office, a payphone! Tragically, it turned out to be the type of payphone which doesn’t take coins, but only cards, either credit cards or “chipcards”

The dreaded chipcard

A brief aside to American readers regarding “chip cards”. These are almost exactly like debit cards, in that they tend to be tied to a bank account and used for small purchases. They also come in prepaid varieties, the photo above is a prepaid one I purchased in the Netherlands. Nearly all European credit cards feature this chip system as well. This is endlessly irritating because you will continually encounter locations which claim to accept cards, but have only chip-readers, no magnetic-strip readers. Compounding the irritation is the fact that, as far as I can tell, the “chip” offers exactly zero added functionality or convenience over the magnetic strip. I suppose it’s not prone to demagnetization, so that’s a mark in its favor. Basically, I don’t care which system card-makers use, all I’m asking, begging even: Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, please pick one system and stick with it. If these chips are really so great, why don’t we have them in the USA? If they’re so great, why do all European credit cards have mag-stripes as well?

In any case, I shoved every card I had into that payphone, debit cards, credit cars, my prepaid chip card, my Pomona college ID. No dice, “Invalid card type” every time. Finally I gave up on the payphone and set about to borrow a phone from somebody. Unfortunately, it was about 11 pm on a Sunday night and Le Cure was DEAD. The first people I found were two winos sitting by the river. I asked them for a phone, because hey, in 2008, even winos have cell phones. One did, but he was out of credit too. They were quite kind about sharing their carton (yes, carton) of wine with me, though.

Walking further down along the river, I finally found two teenage girls sitting and smoking. They claimed to be 19 and 20, but I think a more accurate guess would put them at about 16. They were both excited and overly impressed with my being from the USA/Los Angeles/Chicago. I called Stefania and we did an entirely inadequate job of agreeing on a rendezvous point.
Her: “Are you by a little old bridge?”
Me: “Yes, like a pedestrian one?”
Her: “I know where you are. I’ll meet you there.”
Twenty minutes and three little, old pedestrian bridges later we finally met up.

Stefania’s place is super awesome. It’s the top flat in a four-story building, so it has a nice balcony and skylights. All of her roommates are Ph.D. researchers at EUI as well: another Italian, a Dutch economist (“I’m not an economist, I study economics, but I’m not an economist”), and a Frenchman who works on “the digital divide”. So it’s a very intellectual, international place, and it was a really cool place to stay for a few days. The only major problem is that they don’t have internet at their house, having decided to avoid it on philosophical grounds, “we don’t want to waste all our time online,” which I could sympathize with, if not endorse.

If the wind and tides are just right, you can pick up open wireless in one corner of the balcony with your laptop perched precariously on the railing, tempting the fates with a four-storey drop. So that was fun.