Cortona: Le Celle

Last weekend I went back to Cortona, accompanied this time by a map and Rich, a fellow student. We were determined to find Le Celle, the Franciscan monastery several miles from the centro. So, fortified by a cioccolata densa (an Italian hot chocolate, bittersweet and with the consistency of pudding), we set out on our hike.

Fall has settled onto the Tuscan mountains.

At the midpoint of the hike is the Cappella Bentivoglio, a tiny stucco chapel for wayfarers and pilgrims.


Around 3:30 we arrived at Le Celle. It's built into the living rock of the mountainside, something like the cliff dwellings of the Southwest.



This is the part of the day words fail to capture. The monastery is still active, and the stillness of the place is so great I had the sense of being able to hear each individual bird's song in the surrounding forest. We came down a long brick path to a tiny chapel adjacent to the cell where St. Francis lived and meditated. He may have built it himself. If the doorway and bed (a narrow wooden plank set into the wall) are any indication, I'm taller than he was.

One cell next to the chapel is set up as something of a gift shop--with a few ten-cent postcards, icons of St. Francis, books, and tau amulets made of olive wood--but in its Franciscan way it's sort of defiantly anti-tourist and anti-capitalist: it's unstaffed, and it works on the honor system.

We roamed around the grounds and paths, occasionally hearing singing from the church behind the monastery. Here I should let the images take over, in the hopes of conveying the beauty and silence of the place.





The sun was setting over the pine trees and olive terraces when we began the hike back.


We took a different way around the city wall, climbing higher than we had on our way out. More or less at the summit we encountered the cathedral of Santa Margherita, by the light of the rising moon.

Mass was in progress, so we couldn't go in. And it was getting cold. We wound back down through Cortona's steep streets to the Piazza della Republica for another cioccolata densa.

Then, since we still had an hour to kill before catching the bus back to Arezzo, and as actors and true Franciscan pilgrims neither of us had much cash, we tried to find a bar serving free primi piatti. (It's fairly common here to order a beer and then help yourself to bruschetta, small panini, cheese, sausage, or salad.) Rich remembered that the bar in the civic theater building had primi piatti the last time he was in Cortona, so we tried it. The bar appeared to be closed, but we heard a lot of voices upstairs. We went up a level and saw trays of bruschetta and bottles of wine. The voices were still upstairs; it sounded like a gallery opening. We wondered if maybe we could blend in, look at the art for a bit, and have a few bruschette.

And that was where Clown reasserted itself in the day, because we went up another level and the first thing we saw was a mannequin in full Pulcinella garb. The exhibit was about theater design, with costume sketches and scenic designs for numerous Goldoni plays, as well as some Shakespeare and twentieth-century plays--even an Italian-language production of Long Day's Journey Into Night. We came in expecting to crash the party, and it turned out we belonged there.

The bruschette were delicious.

Rehearsing Atossa

I realize "Rehearsing Atossa" sounds like the name of a really dreadful romantic comedy (starring, maybe, Anne Hathaway and D.B. Sweeney) about two actors who meet in rehearsals of this, the oldest of plays, and can't stand each other at first but gradually learn to see past each other's masks--literally and figuratively! But I can't think of a better title for the post about rehearsing the role of Atossa, so it stays.

I don't have the mask yet; it's still being finished. The person who's finishing it has apprenticed with Familie Flöz; I knew that all along, but now that I've seen how fantastic their masks are the knowledge has become quite a bit more exciting.

I'm impatient. The mask is a giant part of the character, of course, but there are also matters of physical and vocal endurance to be considered; mask work just asks more from your muscles, and there's no way to do it in performance if you haven't been doing it steadily in rehearsals. Specifically, vocal volume has to be a bit stronger, and articulation has to be even more precise, because you're losing most of the tiny unconscious bits of facial motion that might clue an audience into your meaning even if they miss a word. And what might, maskless, consist of darting your eyes sideways becomes, with the mask, a gesture that involves the whole head. So your shoulders and neck work much harder than usual, which in turn can introduce tension into your vocal apparatus if you're not careful.

So for the sake of getting used to all that, I've been rehearsing with a commedia mask of roughly the same proportions as the Atossa mask: Columbina.

She's not at all like the other commedia masks I've worked with (I tend to be a Dottore, but I also played around a bit with the Capitano and Arlecchino). With the exception of the Strega (witch), female masks traditionally aren't grotesque. It was only in the later years of commedia that actresses wore masks at all--for the purely practical reason that if you were performing in the street, you got more attention when you had pretty women on your stage.

This Columbina wasn't molded to my face, of course, and she doesn't fit perfectly. Columbina is also something of a soubrette, so she's not the most accurate match for Atossa. But for a week's rehearsals she'll do. I've used the mask for two rehearsals now, and there's just no comparison between working barefaced and working with the actual physical mask reminding your body and voice of what to do.

Even though we did several weeks of rigorous commedia mask work, this feels different, as though mask technique is finally settling in and becoming something I can use without a constant, nervous awareness of what I'm doing. I suppose that's because, as Simon Callow says, it's only the lessons of true performance that really stick. I feel as though I learned a lot from the Flöz show too. Anyway, it's good to have a production in which to use all these new ideas.

Oh! Theater!

Last night we had a class excursion to the Familie Flöz show Teatro Delusio. Flöz uses full-head masks and no dialogue; the result is sort of a combination of clown, dance, mime, puppetry, and drama, and it's entirely moving. It's a story of backstage drama at a haunted theater, and (I think) the way disappointed hopes and dreams can haunt a place even more.

From the Flöz site, here are a couple of the show's masks. The one on the left is an unsavory choreographer. The one on the right was one of my favorites--a stagehand, and the low-status clown in the clown-y sequences:


The subtleties the performers achieve with these faces--which, after all, can't move on their own--are incredible. Part of it is good mask construction; the masks catch the light beautifully, and there are times you'd swear a character is shedding a tear or sweating. But most of it is just good performance, actors who allow the mask to inhabit the body fully, using economy and clarity and scale of gesture to present a being that is heartbreakingly alive.

The show is an impressive feat of stagecraft as well, because there are only three performers, who in the course of the evening create a cast of twenty-seven. That demands not just flawless quick changes but also amazingly precise body/mask work.

This is the first show I've seen since leaving Chicago. Of course we're immersed in theater here, we're surrounded by posters of different productions and the classic prints of the commedia characters, and everyone has seen and worked on hundreds of plays and is planning or writing or rehearsing hundreds more--but it's still a breath of pure oxygen to encounter an actual show. Oh, right: that's what we're all doing here.

Much as I love this training, I am impatient now to use it.

Rome: Ruins

It is perhaps impossible to walk through Italy without thinking about the life cycle of empires. You see the relics of the Etruscans, the pagan Romans, the Christian Romans, the medievals, the Renaissance merchant-aristocrat families, and so on; and as you tour these places you hear the sounds of another empire--American pop music. My tours have, additionally, been accompanied by news of imminent global financial collapse, shocks throughout the empire that is currently dominant.

If there's one thing to learn from Rome, it is that the memorial and the private residence crumble equally--that you can't really choose what future generations find out about you. Maybe it's stated most fittingly by the inscription that accompanies the skeletons in the Capuchins' crypt:

QUELLO CHE VOI SIETE NOI ERAVAMO,
QUELLO CHE NOI SIAMO VOI SARETE.
(What you are we were, what we are you will be.)

Ironically enough, while I was inside the Colosseum, a foot race was taking place around its perimeter. I was surprised to learn that part of its considerable surface damage was due to later generations, who treated the building as a marble quarry and apparently thought nothing of carting off pieces of it. We don't have control over that sort of thing either, I guess.




Then, Constantine's Arch, the ruins of the Forum, the Palatine Hill, the Capitoline Hill, the temple of the Vestal Virgins, the temple of Apollo, and so forth. It can be difficult here to know what you're looking at; in some cases I couldn't tell then; in some cases I've forgotten.




I do know this was once the Temple of Saturn.


And this was Augustus's house (14 BR, COL VW, MUST SEE!).


In the evening, when I came back for the nighttime view of the Campidoglio, the arch of Septimus Severus was just visible against the darkness, with the broken columns and walls behind it like ghosts.

Rome: Churches

Any day in which you wake up to the words "President Obama," do two hours of voice work, do an hour of yoga and another hour of acrobatics, pick olives in the late afternoon sun, and then go for a long run through the back roads of Tuscan wine country, you have to start wondering if you're leading a charmed life.

When you started off the week in Rome, you have to conclude, yes, it's definitely charmed.

In the continuing series of installments, here are a few pictures from the churches and cathedrals I visited.

Santa Maria Maggiore was just a minute or two from my B&B. Unfortunately it wasn't open for visits.

Next on the tour was San Pietro in Vincoli, on an out-of-the-way piazza just a block or two from the Colosseum.

It's a pretty quiet, unassuming place--for a Roman church--and I think most people just go there for Michelangelo's Moses, which is to the right of the altar.

But it also has several graves and memorials adorned with what look suspiciously like real skeletons.

I thought this was really spooky, until I saw the crypt of the Capuchin monks, which is decorated with over 4,000 skeletons lovingly taken apart and turned into, say, rosettes of vertebrae, or arches of shoulder blades, or domino-rows of pelvises. Now this is just somewhat spooky.

Later, having found the Pantheon closed, I stepped into Sant'Andrea delle Valle. It was twilight, and most tourists were elsewhere.


And finally, the next day, St. Peter's, where the late-morning sun fell onto the smoke from the censers:

It's difficult to appreciate the scale of St. Peter's from a photo, but take a look at how it dwarfs the people attending mass:

But oddly enough, for me the dominant impression was not so much the glory of God as the glory of man. The amassed wealth is clearly displayed for human eyes, not divine ones. The genius of Michelangelo shines through--you can almost sense him pacing, solving problems of proportion and weight and balance. He borrowed the dome's proportions from the Pantheon's dome, which seems almost subversive--a pagan design crowning one of the high seats of Christianity.

The whole thing is a stunning example of what people can achieve. It is, finally, quite a humanist cathedral.

Rome: The Pantheon

Irony of ironies, the Pantheon was actually closed on All Saints' Day. This may be the cry of the wounded Unitarian, but even if you are the Catholic Church, and even if you are in Rome, and even if you have converted an ancient pagan building into a cathedral, I still call it foul play to close the temple of all gods for the holiday of one religion. Especially when that holiday is not on the official list of closures posted on the door.

However, on Sunday morning, the Pantheon was open, there was no line, and my wrath was somewhat appeased.

Nothing prepares you for the sudden presence of the building, the way you just round a corner and it's right there, with no grand anticipatory staircase, no giant surrounding field.



Inside, the decorations are fairly understated (for Italy). But it's the proportions that move you anyway.

I can't escape the sense that this building is part of the natural order of things. Some of this is because of the way the light from the ocellus moves across the interior, the disc of light traveling in something akin to an orbit, across structural lines that seem to trace the paths of other orbits. Some of it is because, well, the building does mimic the shape of the planet. Some of it is the elegance of proportion (and I suppose in this the building essentially borrows the elegance of the universe, to use Brian Greene's phrase).

In any case, yes, a building like this more or less has to be universal. To declare otherwise is to miss the point.

Roman Holiday

Spent the weekend in Rome, as a birthday present to myself. Because of All Saints' Day the Vatican Museum was closed, so this turned into a tour of archeology and architecture, and I'll have to go back for the art. I still managed to see a lot: St. Peter's (above, during Latin Mass with the choir and homily, no less); the Pantheon; San Pietro in Vincoli, with Michaelangelo's Moses; Sant'Andrea delle Valle; the Colosseum; the Forum, the Palatine Hill, the Capitoline Hill, and that whole series of ruins; Trajan's Column (surrounded by heavy construction at present, unfortunately); the Campidoglio at night; the Spanish Steps; the Trevi Fountain; the Keats house; the Palazzo Barberini and the National Gallery of Antique Art; the crypt of the Capuchin monks; and of course the Piazza Venezia and quite a lot of Bernini fountains and all the other landmarks one passes so often that even in two days they almost become commonplace.

I took about 400 photos, so I have a lot of sorting and catching up to do. I think this one's going to have to happen in installments.