Blue skies over a threatened university

After the critical mass, Stefania headed back to Florence, and I went to back to the social center. They were having some sort of special benefit event to pay for the fines levied after a group of antifascist activists disrupted a speech by a right-wing, anti-immigrant Italian politician named Borghezio.

There was a very nice communal dinner that included a pasta course, a meat course, a desert, and an aperitif. I ran into Angelo, one of the guys I’d met at the hackmeeting in Palermo. It turns out he lives in Pisa and studies mathematics at the University of Pisa. He generously volunteered to let me stay with him.

After dinner, there was a screening of video from the event that prompted the fund-raiser. Basically, from what I could tell on the video (which had clearly been heavily edited) Borghezio was speaking at an event in some building, and there were a lot of really loud, angry protesters around outside. The video wasn’t really that interesting. The shots of the protesters were all pixelated to shield their identities, which made it hard to watch. It was mostly just blurry crowds standing around yelling, banging on doors, windows and cars. There were confrontations with the police. Towards the end, Borghezio is hustled out of the building and flees the scene.

After the video, I played 3-on-3 basketball with some Italian guys in the courtyard. I think they assumed that because I was American, I would be better than I actually am. My defense was weak, and I was totally winded after about 5 minutes, but I made a couple layups, one decent jumper and some rebounds. Considering I haven’t played basketball in three or four years, I was quite proud of my performance.

There was also a concert with a DJ in the auditorium. It was a pretty cool, diverse crowd with a surprisingly wide variety of ages and ethnicities represented. Unfortunately, the DJ was pretty lame, it was boring, repetitive house music.

Both Angelo and I agreed on the general suckiness of the music. I asked if there was anything else going on that night. Pisa isn’t really much of a nightlife town, he informed me. But there might be something going on at the occupied University. I was 100% on board with that plan.

We stopped by Angelo’s place and I dropped off my bags, and then we walked over to the university.

It was probably around 1 am when we arrived. There were maybe two dozen people still awake, sitting around outside smoking, or inside drinking; talking. Two guys with acoustic guitars were performing duets of Italian folk songs and protest anthems; everyone else was singing along. There was a large collage taking shape, with photos and text clipped from various newspapers and magazines. The text underneath the picture of the kitten says something like, “This kitten wrote the new education law. You don’t hate kittens, do you?”

I asked if the collage represented any particular idea, or just anything that looked cool. I was told the latter. From a copy of Black Power International magazine (and gold background from a travel ad), I contributed the golden-haloed Barack Obama on the far right, which I thought was at least mildly clever given the near-messianic fervor surrounding our Presidential frontrunner.

To any American students reading, if you’ve ever really really wanted to do vodka shots in the registrar’s office, or drink a beer in your lecture hall, I suggest you occupy your university as soon as possible.

If there was a certain party/festival/sleepover atmosphere, I don’t mean to imply that the students weren’t serious about their political goals. In addition to holding a significant quantity of empty alcohol bottles, the former administrators’ office also held a great deal of paperwork generated by the students themselves. They were researching legislative options, communicating with the media, scheduling and organizing demonstrations, and further coordinating with the protesting high school students. They were writing and xeroxing fliers, leaflets and signs. Posters on the wall included clippings from media coverage, and a detailed explanation of the new law and its ill-effects.

Details of Law 133

I put off writing this post for a long time because I wanted to write something brilliant; something that really captured the feeling of the place. A sense of newness burdened by history. A mix of honest idealism and devil-may-care apocalyptic abandon. Excitement tempered by exhaustion.
A better writer than I might get it really right, but you’ll just have to take my word that it felt like something historically important might be occurring.

This feeling was not lost on the students themselves. Indeed, if anything, there was a level of self-consciousness among them that seemed at times to threaten their effectiveness going forward. It’s never good to be too aware of the potentially momentous impact of your actions.

I met a freshman physics major who told me that she was exhausted, but she didn’t ever want to go to sleep. She said she felt like she was experiencing history being made, and she didn’t want to miss a second of it. Over the course of the two days I stayed there, it seemed clear to me that the students in Pisa were acutely aware of their radical predecessors. In their sartorial choices and music selection, they seemed to be taking cues from both Latin-American revolutionaries and 1960s student radicals.
Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” played frequently.

At one point, a yellow bandanna tied around one guy’s bicep slipped off and dropped on the ground. I picked it up, “Hey, you dropped your bandanna,”
I said, handing it back to him.
“Oh, thanks,”
he replied.
“You wouldn’t want to be the only one without a bandanna,”
I joked.
“In the movement, you need to have one,” he answered with apparent seriousness.

Despite their affinity for bandannas, their movement is uniquely grounded in the 21st century. One of the first things they did was to establish a blog/website, complete with live webcam feed. The technology team had posted a detailed flowchart of goals, including a presence on MySpace and Facebook, video conferencing with students at other universities and a simplified system for students to upload photos to a communal Flickr account.

Tech Goals

The students also upgraded the technology hardware as one of their first actions. Shockingly, there was no wireless internet in the building before it was occupied. Perhaps this is emblematic of the degree to which the university is underfunded. The students bought a wireless router and installed it in the main lecture hall. It was actually a really crappy router that seemed to drop the WAN connection about every couple hours or so. I felt kind of terrible for the student tasked with providing IT support for the activists. He spends half his life rebooting that router. He told me that a few nights previously, people had roused him out of bed at 4 am to fix the router. I was tempted to just buy him a new router.

After the first couple days, the administration shut off internet access in the occupied buildings. This is the 21st century version of throwing in tear gas canisters. There were special sub-protests (“Give me connectivity or give me death?”), meetings and internet access was eventually restored.

As the night wore on, Angelo suggested, “Hey, you wanna just sleep here tonight?” I believe my response was “Awesome”.

Now, we had to go back to Angelo’s place to retrieve our sleeping bags and such. The students had been locking the gates to the university at night and Angelo was concerned that if we left to get our stuff, they might lock the gates and nobody would be motivated enough to rouse themselves and let us back in. Then, he hit upon a brilliant social engineering hack to guarantee that we would be re-admitted.

There is a certain pastry shop in Pisa where the employees come in around 3:30 am to begin baking pastries for the morning. Although the shop doesn’t officially open until 6 am, it’s known among young people that if you hang around in the alley behind the bakery, you can usually buy pastries in the middle of the night.

Angelo found a small brown paper sack and went around to all the students at the university asking if they wanted these pastries, and collecting money from each of them. He promised that we would return with the pastries (and, coincidentally, our sleeping gear). We immediately became the two most popular people at the university. Two kids even volunteered the use of their bicycles, which we accepted.

We biked over to the alley behind the bakery. It was clearly a happening nightlife spot in Pisa, because there were already about a half-dozen people there ahead of us waiting for the shop to “open”. I felt irrationally sketchy hanging around in an alley with a bulging paper sack full of cash at 3:45 in the morning. After about 15 minutes, the back door opened and one of the bakers took orders. Angelo confessed to me that he’d only ever ordered one or two late-night pastries at a time, and wasn’t sure how the mass-order would go over. However, when we stepped up, Angelo asked if we could order 40 pastries (half creme-, half chocolate-filled), and the bakers didn’t seem fazed in the slightest. We handed over the contents of our cash-sack and waited for another 20 minutes for our order to bake. The bakers had some trouble packing all the pastries so that we could carry them while riding a bike, but a combination of tinfoil trays, paper wrappers and repurposed plastic garbage bags got the job done. We swung by Angelo’s flat and I picked up my sleeping bag and a change of clothes.

Returning to the university bearing fresh-baked pastries, the gates were opened and we were received like conquering heroes. Thus, one of the universal principles of university students the world over was reaffirmed: they LOVE cheap, unhealthy food in the middle of the night, and they’re lazy about going to get it themselves. This fact is the only thing keeping Mix Bowl in Claremont, California in business.

All forty pastries were devoured in a matter of a few minutes. I felt bad for the students who had somehow missed the boat on the pastry-ordering. They would trickle in in ones and twos, see everyone eating, and pick fruitlessly through the empty remnants of the packaging before wandering off, dejected.

Full of pastry, I suddenly got really tired. Most of the students were sleeping in the large lecture hall. In contrast to the stone or concrete floors found in most of the building, the lecture hall had relatively warm wood flooring. For novelty’s sake, I laid my sleeping bag out on the vacant lecture dais and quickly dropped off to sleep.

I woke up around 11 am, feeling refreshed, if a bit sore and stiff. Note to university administrators: when students are allowed to manage their own affairs, not a single event is scheduled earlier than 12 noon.

Many students were already preparing a communal breakfast/lunch. I’m continuously in awe of the Italians’ ability to cook good food for enormous numbers of people. This particular meal required the use of the largest pasta pot I’ve ever seen. It took three people to manhandle it out to the curb and pour the water off into the storm drain. Other students barbecued sausage and ribs on an improvised wheelbarrow-grill. Warm, low-grade supermarket beer also made an appearance.

After lunch, there was a really large meeting in the auditorium for local high school students. In addition to trying to organize themselves, the University of Pisa served as an organizing focal point for several local high schools. I was impressed by the turnout among the high school students, mostly filling the large lecture hall (perhaps a thousand seats). The high school students seemed to be diverse in both age and level of attentiveness. Those in the back chatted and flirted like they were still in class, while, near the front, their peers (assisted by a few university students who seemed to be deliberately trying to stay out of the middle of it) debated and deliberated. If the university students were copping Latin American revolutionaries and 1960s radicals, the high school students were taking their cues from the university students: an imitation of an imitation.

Late in the afternoon, Angelo suggested we go back to his place to shower and relax a bit before a meeting he described as “important” that evening. Apparently the student activists had secured an audience with the University Senate (I get the impression this was sort of equivalent of the Board of Trustees at an American university), an administrative body that includes one or two token student members. The meeting at the university that night was to decide on what to present to the University Senate.

This meeting got going around 9 pm and went on for a long time. Many students seemed quite agitated and angry at times. Afterwards, talking to one of the girls who had been one of the leading participants in the discussions, she told me that the meeting had been incredibly frustrating and very little had been decided. The vast majority of the debate was over how decisions should be made. Early on, the student activists had rejected majority-voting as a decision-making method in favor of agreed consensus. But that was in the first few days, when it was a relatively small group of people. At the time I arrived, the University of Pisa had been occupied for eleven days. Now, with a lecture hall audience of several hundred, many of the newcomers had been demanding to know why no votes were being taken.

I shared my view that while consensus-agreement might be a more ideal decision-making method; when dealing with groups larger than a dozen or so, it simply wasn’t practical.

It was clear to me that most of the students were very committed and sincere, doing the best they could, but failing at times. For example, the group in charge of press contact had forgotten to call reporters about the critical mass event. So no reporters were present to preserve the text of my stirring oratory for posterity. Watching the students discuss, debate, argue and explain, I had the feeling that it might all be for naught; that the real decisions were being made by people in power, people who weren’t paying attention and wouldn’t have cared even if they had been. When asked about the student demonstrations, the education minister was quoted as giving a one-line answer, “I don’t understand them.” These pessimistic thoughts made me feel very old and very cynical. I couldn’t honestly say what more the students should be doing.

However, by the end of the frustrating meeting, I wasn’t the only one with a dim view of the future of the students’ movement. Angelo said he wasn’t sure what would happen next. He told me that the science and math departments were having their own meeting on Monday, to talk about taking action independently of other groups. The girl I talked to earlier told me that she was going home to take a shower and sleep in her own bed for the first time in eleven days, but vowed to return.

Angelo and I also retired to his flat for the night, and I slept on a real mattress. We also watched Italian Spiderman.

Visiting the student activists in Pisa was one of the coolest experiences I’ve had on this trip so far. At times, I felt like an interloper, an outsider, a tourist. While I may feel strongly about education funding, this wasn’t my fight. However, Angelo later told me that he felt like talking to me, explaining the issues to me as an outsider actually helped them clarify their own thinking. And once, when I was walking to the bathroom, a guy stopped me, “Hey, weren’t you at the critical mass? I heard what you said, it was good. Thank you.” So that was quite gratifying.

There was some question as to whether the car would make the 100km journey to Pisa without incident, but it performed like a champ.

Upon arriving in Pisa, we visited was a large social center near the city center. It’s not quite a squat, because the groups using it had a two-year lease from the city that recently expired. They haven’t moved out, and are currently embroiled in a fight to renew the lease. The city wants to bulldoze the building and construct a bus depot. It’s a big structure, and twenty-three groups involved in all sorts of different activities are based there. There’s a group that provides free bike repairs, a group that offers Italian language classes to the local immigrant population, and the hacklab offers tutorials on the internet and computers. Stefania conducted an interview with one of the hackers for her Ph.D. research, and he also gave us a tour around the premises.

Cool broken-computer art piece in the courtyard

The bike repair room

Wall of the library in the social center

After the tour, we were invited to borrow some bikes and participate in the Critical Mass demonstration that evening. Apparently Pisa holds Critical Mass events every month, but they are usually not that large, with only a few dozen people in attendance. This event was different, because instead of the normal organizers, it was put together by protesting university students.

A little bit of background, the Italian government recently passed a new law (“legge 133″) which drastically slashes funding for education in Italy, including universities. There isn’t a whole lot of English-language media on the issue, but Nature has published a couple pieces on the impact it will have on research scientists in Italy. It’s not just the scientists and staff who are upset, though. University students are also righteously pissed off. In protest, students have occupied many of the public universities in Italy in 1960s-style sit-in takeovers, and there have been many large street demonstrations. The University of Pisa (founded 1343!) is one of the more prestigious Italian universities, and, along with some of the universities in Rome, has been playing a leading role in these protests.

So anyway, that’s what this Critical Mass was about, a protest against law 133. Somewhere between two and three hundred people showed up, and even the organizers were suprised by the number of bike-riding supporters. The group assembled in front of the University buildings, and then rode from there to the Piazza dei Miracoli (“Square of Miracles”) in front of the Leaning Tower, making a lot of noise, chanting slogans (“Hands off the University!”—it rhymes much nicer in Italian) and attracting attention along the way. Arriving at the square, somebody broke out a megaphone and people were taking turns addressing the crowd from the pediment of a statue in front of the Tower. One of the teachers whose job is now in jeopardy spoke and was well-received; several students shouted fiery rhetoric into the megaphone.

The guy with the megaphone in the above photo, in particular, seemed to me to be the very embodiment of the dashing, romantic young student-cum-revolutionary. He spent a lot of time with the megaphone.

I was just thinking about how awesome it would be to stand on statues and yell things into megaphones for good causes when Stefania poked me, “Hey, they want people who speak foreign languages to come up and address the tourists.” Somebody spoke in French, and then Spanish; I figured they would easily have somebody to do English, but I’ve found that the Italians are surprisingly self-conscious about their English, even when they speak it relatively well.

It was then that I was really glad I hadn’t shaved in a few days. You gotta look the part, right? I stepped up onto the pediment, megaphone in hand, and discovered to my surprise that it’s not as easy as one might think to ad lib appropriate, inspiring, and eloquent rhetoric when facing a crowd of several hundred students and perhaps a thousand more tourists and onlookers.

I think I must’ve been reading too much American political coverage lately, because on my first attempt I could summon nothing but bland banalities about the importance of education. I said, among other things, “A great nation like Italy deserves a great university system.” and “Education should be a government priority!” Not exactly the stuff of which revolutions are made.

People were supportive though, and after a minute or two, I stepped down. A small, shy Asian kid stepped up after me and addressed the crowds in timid Japanese. He was awesome and everyone loved him. About 10 minutes later, some of the Italian students motioned me over again. Apparently they really wanted English addresses because so many tourists speak English.

On my second go around I felt I did a much better job. I explained to the tourists that, “this demonstration is against a new government law that cuts funding to education, they are strangling the university,” and went on to say that “universities are important to the health of a nation; especially a nation with a culture and history like Italy’s. Some of the oldest universities in the world are here in Italy, and now they are threatening to destroy that. We cannot allow this!”

The ‘we’ was a bit of a stretch, I concede. I also found myself being far more nationalistic with my rhetoric than the Italians who were speaking. Had I shouted, “Death to Berlusconi!” I suspect the protestors would’ve eaten it up (I also suspect I might’ve gotten an angry phone call from the US State Department). But I felt that as a foreigner, it wasn’t my place to issue sweeping denunciations of the Italian government. Please note that this kind of courtesy doesn’t stop Europeans from talking shit on my government continuously.

Approaching the tower

These guys were awesome, their signs say Adopt A Mathematician

After the Critical Mass, we headed back to the social center for a party, but the rest of the stuff in Pisa is probably worthy of a separate post.

We went to a talk given at EUI by an American sociologist named Kathryn Sikkink from the University of Minnesota. It was fairly interesting stuff, she talked about the impact of criminal trials for war crimes, crimes against humanity and human rights violations on the overall human rights situation in a country. Her work showed a positive correlation between holding such trials and improvements in human rights. It was unclear what metrics she was using as a measure of “human rights”, and I didn’t ask because it seemed like an unbearably n00bish question.

By her accounting, having individual criminal trials for human rights abuses is a relatively new phenomenon. She described three prevailing models for dealing with human rights violations over history.

1. Sovereign immunity model: Basically, the State is a sovereign immune entity and can’t be penalized legally for anything it does as official state actions.
2. State accountability model: States are collectively held accountable through sanctions, payment of reparations, official apologies. No punishment for individual actors.
3. Individual criminal accountability model: The most recent paradigm, and the one she was looking at. Individual military and government officials can be tried in criminal courts and, if convicted, serve time in prison.

According to her work, holding criminal trials has the effect of reducing human rights abuses, even in countries not holding such trials. She noted a cross-border effect, where neighboring nations showed an improvement in their own treatment of human rights when a nearby country held a high-profile human rights trial.

Ms. Sikkink posited two possible reasons for these correlations. Either a direct effect, whereby the real possibility of criminal accountability causes military or government officials to alter their behavior. For example, if a young army officer at the start of his career were to see high-ranking officers sent to jail and their careers ruined, it might lead him to be more contentious of human rights in his future career.
The second, indirect effect was by a mechanism she called a “Justice Cascade”, the term apparently draws from some other guy’s earlier work on a “Norms Cascade”. The basic idea is something like that criminal trials are high profile “theatrical” events wherein a society “acts out its norms”, and that makes people more aware that the society values human rights, or something like that. This second explanation is the sort of fuzzy speculation that makes me a bit uncomfortable with social sciences in general and sociology in particular. Then again, I can’t be too critical because I don’t really know anything about norms theory, and my impression from the talk may be a gross oversimplification.

At one point when going through some of the correlation data, Ms. Sikkink made a comment like, “I can’t answer questions about the statistics here. I have a very very bright grad student who handles the math.” Now, I’m not asking for every social scientist to be an expert statistician, but I do think that statistics should be more than magic numbers that come out of a Black Box labeled “grad student”.

The question-and-answer section also reminded me of a lot of the things I dislike about academia. More than one “question” began with some variation on “As I noted in my 2007 work…” and led into a 10 minute discussion of the questioner’s own work with a question mark tacked onto the end.

On Thursday, I decided to go to EUI to do some reading and use the wireless in the library there. EUI’s campus is absolutely gorgeous, It was once an aristocratic estate in the hills outside Florence. I think America missed out in a big way by not having 18th century European nobility build our campuses for us. If there’s one thing American colleges lack, it’s deer-hunting grounds.

This is all part of EUI

So the campus was beautiful. I assume the library is as well, but I wouldn’t know. Stefania had told me that it should be a simple matter to sign in as a visitor at the library entrance desk. When I got there, there was nobody at the desk (in retrospect, I really should’ve just walked in), so I waited for a few minutes, and then called “Hello” into the back room. A woman came out, and I told her that I wanted to sign in as a visitor; she was like, “Well, what do you want to use the library for?” and I’m like, “Reading, using the wireless internet.” (what else does one do in a library?) and she’s all, “Well, we have serious researchers here, we can’t allow just anyone into the library.” and denied me entry.

First of all, does it really jeopardize the “serious” researchers’ ability to do their work to have less-serious people sitting in the same room with them? Second, and more importantly, I think libraries should be open to anyone who wants to use them for their intended purpose. I understand maybe you don’t want homeless people using your library as a bedroom, or teenagers hooking up in the study rooms, but anyone who’s there to read or acquire information should be able to. Free access to knowledge and all that. Stefania laughed when I told her this story later, “most of those serious researchers are just watching YouTube on their laptops.”

I probably could’ve gone all, “I’m a Thomas J. Watson visiting fellow from the United States and I have to do important research blah blah blah” but I would’ve felt like an ass getting into some kind of academic prestige pissing contest. Instead, I just left and took over a vacant classroom (that from the look of it, had once been some sort of drawing room: high ceiling, massive stone fireplace, chandelier) and did my reading there. Basically EUI is a cool, but very isolated place. It’s literally cloistered academia. No, seriously, there are actual cloisters there.

On Friday, for my birthday, I went out with the Dutch economist-who-isn’t—he has some neigh-unpronounceable Dutch name, so even his housemates usually referred to him as “The Nameless Dutchman,” “That Dutch Guy We Never See,” and so forth. Anyway, we went out with his economist friends for pizza at a restaurant that they frequent. The service was really bad. “I think they know us here and hate us,” suggested one person. Deciding the correct tip at a table full of economists was quite complicated. There was spirited debate over the correct incentive structure to use. It was finally decided to leave no tip, because to leave anything would risk them thinking they had done an acceptable job. This view was put forth most forcefully by a French misanthrope economist who chain-smoked continuously and said things like, “I don’t know why I bother with people.” There’s a reason that economics is known as “the dismal science,” and I suspect that being both French and an economist simultaneously could result in a deep sense of ennui.

After dinner we went to Bar Fiasco, the pub on the EUI campus that was having a “70s Night” theme party that turned out not to be adhered to very strictly in either dress or music. Let’s just say at one point, they played ‘My Humps’. Bar Fiasco was most notable for its incredibly cheap beer and a massive library of absolutely terrible books in several different languages. They appeared to be primarily schlock mystery novels. One person told me that “this is where people abandon books they don’t want.” There was a similar collection of VHS tapes on the same shelves, as well as a 1982 Rowing Championship trophy that had since been used as an ashtray.

The crowd was not large and composed almost entirely of Ph.D. researchers. Not a demographic known for throwing great parties. After about an hour, we beat a retreat to a bar in the city center. This was complicated by the fact that there was a strike that day, and so some of the buses weren’t running. One of the economists tried to explain it, but it didn’t make much sense to me. Apparently in Italy, there are frequently multiple unions representing people who do the same job. So, for example, bus drivers might belong to the Christian Union or the Socialist Union or any of a variety of other unions. On that Friday, some of the unions were on strike, but not others. There were some buses running, but it was impossible to tell which lines were running, and what reduced schedule they might be running on.

The bar in the city center (Max’s, maybe) was nice, and a couple people bought me drinks since it was my birthday. A cute Finnish girl flirted with me, stopping about every 10 minutes to say, “I really shouldn’t be flirting with you. I have a boyfriend, he’s Italian and he doesn’t like me to flirt with guys. What’s up with that?” I eventually met said Italian for like 2 minutes when he came to pick up his girlfriend on his scooter. For the record, he wasn’t that attractive.

Bars in Florence are required to close at 2 am, but there are several institutions that get around this restriction by reconstituting themselves as “Private Social Clubs”. They are not always as mafia-connected as this sounds, however I was told that the particular one we visited is run by the Armenian mob—for this reason, the Finnish girl’s boyfriend was unable to come with us, and so the two of them left when we were leaving Max’s.

Basically, you pay €5 at the door, and they give you a little membership card that you can then use to get in on future visits. So I can report that “Brendon McCollen” (the doorman wrote my name down wrong) is now a proud cardholding member of the “Associazione di Cultura Sport E Tempo Libero di Italia” (Italian Association of Sports, Culture and Free Time?). The EUI kids I was with all seemed to think the place was terrible, and it was small, crowded (that happens when nothing else is open) and too hot. But it was underground, and I felt like it had kind of a cool, speakeasy vibe.

Eventually we left and headed back to somebody’s house. It might’ve been the French guy’s. Rather than try to walk all the way back to Le Cure (it was way past the time busses run, even on non-strike days), I slept on the couch for a few hours and then, bleary eyed, caught a 9am bus up to Le Cure. I was surprisingly un-hungover, and I’m usually extremely suceptible to hangovers. Later that afternoon, Stefania and I drove to Pisa to meet with some hackers.

Stereotypical tourist shot in front of the Duomo

Ponte Vecchio

I saw the Duomo, which is the large domed church in the center of Florence. The outside of the church is actually much more spectacular than the inside. I also saw the Ponte Vecchio (‘Old Bridge’) which was the only bridge in Florence not destroyed by retreating Germans during the Second World War. At one time, there were butchers markets and normal stores along the bridge, but then the Medicis decided it should only be jewelery stores, and so it’s been ever since. The Medicis also built a second story on the bridge so they could walk across it without having to mingle with the common folk. There are also actual houses *on* the bridge, which look like they’re constantly in danger of toppling off the side into the water.

Later, I went to see the Uffizi, which has a reputation as one of the most outstanding art museums in the world, and the Academia, another art museum most famous for housing Michaelangelo’s David. I have to say, I was not all that taken with the Uffizi. It was rather expensive to visit, since you have to either pay for a €4 reservation, or wait in a 2-hour+ line. The captions for the various exhibits offered the sparsest minimum of information, because they wanted to sell you a catalog or an audio guide.

They had a nice collection of classical statuary which I enjoyed, and also a good selection of early Renaissance works, but in between was just loads and loads of 14th-century gothic stuff. I’m sorry, but that style of art has never done anything for me. I suppose it’s pretty, but if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all: Flat, perspectiveless renderings of nearly identical figures with blank stares of beatific adoration and goldleaf halos aplenty. If the goal of art is to represent something about the human condition, these artists fail miserably. There’s basically nothing close to any recognizably human emotion in these dead-eyed paintings. Also, you have scrawny stick-figure Jesus around that time. The Uffizi’s Caravaggio collection was awesome, however.

They pretty much all look like this. (Image courtesy wikimedia commons)

I liked the Academia much better. The collection is smaller, but all the permanent exhibits are accompanied by large, informative displays that frequently featured illustrations from sketches or plaster models made for the work, showing how it evolved or changed over time, or comparisons with other similar works or prior influences. Also, David is totally amazing and really overpowering. His hands are way huge, though. Like giant gorilla paws.

I also visited the Museum of the History of Science, which was pretty sweet. The top two floors were closed for renovation, in preparation for a re-opening for Galileo Year in 2009. The exhibits that were open included some of Galileo’s original, handmade telescopes. Only a single broken lens remains from the first telescope he built: “The instrument which moved the world.” They also had very detailed explanations about how Galileo made some of his discoveries, for instance calculating the height of mountains on the moon, and figuring out some of the structure of the Jovian system. They also had a very intricate and beautifully precise brass “Joviolabe” which was similar to an astrolabe, but used by Galileo to calculate the positions of Jupiter’s four largest moons.

I passed on the Serial Killer Museum.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.