Lahti

I went back to Finland in late August, 2025, my fourth annual visit, call it a pilgrimage, to the Sibelius Festival that is held every year in the small city of Lahti on Lake Vesijärvi, in South Eastern Finland. My first trip was because of the great composer, Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957), and his music has certainly brought me back to Finland as I get more and more involved in the great man’s work and his influence on contemporary classical music. Maybe I was always going to love Finland because I loved Sibelius, or was it the other way round, the two are now too intertwined to be unravelled. Both the composer and the country have many layers, but maybe at their heart is a still core that moves me and tells me to focus on the things in our lives that are often unspoken, but undemonstratively who we are. In Finland, I find myself questioning who I am, often silently celebrating the good things but also, searching for what I would like to become. As I am learning too who or what I’m not. Finland, increasingly, feels like my safe place.

When international politics is becoming more and more unstable, and when politics in so may countries has become bad-tempered and divisive, on news bulletins, I see Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb as the voice of reason, and when I visit the country, an apparently efficient working social democracy, Finland feels like a template for how the rest of us should be organising our lives.

Fairhair’s starter shield for two: Lingonberry-cured salmon, tarred Baltic herring, smoked duck, reindeer heart and beaver salami. Potato flatbread from Penttilä farm, sourdough bread, tarred lingonberries, game mousse and smoked perch mousse. Ash cheese from Jumo cheesery, salad with gooseberry vinaigrette, pickled cucumber, carrot chips and oat, tomato-basil salsa, herb- ­marinated beans and toasted pumpkin seeds.

You can have wine, but also, and probably better, either Harald’s strong beer, or mead.

I go once every year.

It was an inspiring time to be young, like Jean Sibelius in the fast developing world of Finnish classical music, and as it must have been for the young artists and architects like , Lars Sonck, who could run free in the brave new arts at the birth of a new nation.

The other windows were designed by the fourth of the young revolutionary artists who worked extensively on the cathedral, the Symbolist painter, Hugo Simberg (1873 – 1917), who based his designs on episodes from the Bible, such as the Holy Spirit descending as a dove at the baptism of Christ, and the Moses’ Burning Bush.

According to the Finnish artist, Jani Ruscica, his sculptural video installation Polynotknot (and they bloom) keeps changing its form, with its clips continuously and randomly shuffled into a new order. Within the imaginative fleshy shapes and masses one can discern a varying number of mouths, eyes and drawings on the skin. Subjectivities dissolve into a polyphonic rejection of linguistic expression and normative conceptions of the body, with the organically folding and piling figures remaining corporeally uncoded.’

The post Going back to Finland 2025 – Part One – From Lahti to Tampere appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I spent two weeks in the Eternal City of Rome this January. The first part is here https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-rome-part-one/ I’ve been here on numerous occasions over the years, either for work or for passing visits en route to elsewhere. I’d been to the Sistine Chapel (unforgettable, of course) to St Peter’s, also for work, and to a number of art museums and I’ve had a lot of good Roman meals, but I wanted to spend a longer time here and let it get under my skin. I think I succeeded.

I’ll begin the second part of these blogs about my Roman trip at one its most famous monuments, the Colosseum, Il Colosseo (AD 80), the largest ancient amphitheatre ever built, and a place with a bloody history familiar to us all from stories and films about the gladiators. It is an extraordinary place and, for all the gruesome stories about blood-thirsty massacres of slaves, prisoners and the early Christian martyrs, it’s also the site of mass picnics and other less sadistic entertainments. But, and it’s a big but, you can’t avoid feeling a scary, even shocked, connection to all those slaughtered victims in what was in reality a blood sport. Would we have cheered too, I wonder, if we were in those massive audiences for what were highly dramatised public executions? We don’t know the answer. I had only been past it before in taxis or buses before this, and, of course, when I finally got here, it had to do more than just rain, it deluged. You get weather in Rome during January.

It’s an amazingly well-preserved ruin and there’s more than enough here of its remains to get the feeling of dread and excitement that was felt here two thousand years ago.

It’s just a short walk from the Colosseum to the Roman Forum, Il Foro Romano, another expansive set of classical ruins, once the centre of the Roman Empire. Roman citizens those days called it simply the Forum Magnum, or the Forum.

How the mighty have fallen, I thought, looking at the remains of Ancient Roman glory. I was here on the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated, for the second time, as American president in Washington’s Roman-inspired Capitol building. Seeing the ruins in the rain with those broken statues of some of the Caesars, added to my despair at the American election, but then I thought that those broken statues should be seen as symbols for what will happen one day to the latest world tyrant. Is there hope for us all in the Fall of Rome? Yes! Nothing lasts forever, not even in the Eternal City.

I had brought my writer’s jotting book with me and, here in Rome, I wrote some Fibonacci Poems, Fibs, on the subject of Rome and would-be emperors. They were published in the February 2025 issue of The Fib Review. https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell2.html

Feeling less depressed, I couldn’t resist giving my tai-chi practice a go here at the Forum Magnum, thinking that we would have had to learn how to defend ourselves in Ancient Rome.

I visited another famous Roman landmark, known as the Spanish Steps, (La Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti), (built in 1725). The Trinità die Monti is its Italian name. These 135 steps lead to the church of It comes from the church of Trinità die Monti the top, but the steps also lead down to the Spanish embassy to the Holy See, the Palazzo Monaldeschi. So thus the Spanish Steps, familiar from books (Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald, 1933 and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone by Tennessee Williams, 1950), and movies (mostly famously, Roman Holiday directed by William Wyler, with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, 1953). It is one of the most visited parts of the city. As with the Trevi Fountain, this is a place for lovers, romantics and/or just whimsical selfies. We all have our own internal movies, so why not indulge our imagination here for a moment when we can.

I hadn’t realised was the the Spanish Steps are also right next to the house where the tubercular English Romantic poet, John Keats (1795 – 1821), came for his health but really to die, at the tragically young age of just 25.

Here, in one of the most crowded parts of Rome, the poet’s house was practically empty of visitors which was excellent for me, a dedicated Keats lover since school days.

The room where Keats died can’t help but invoke the tragedy of the young genius’ death, even though the contents of the room itself all had to be burnt because of the health regulations in Rome at the time.

As a museum, it’s a splendid reminder of how much we still have of Keats’ work but, sadly, also how much we might have had if he’d lived to a full age.  Standing in the room where he died, can turn us all into Romantics.

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

 To take into the air my quiet breath;

 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

 In such an ecstasy!

(John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale.)

One of the poet’s last letters is preserved here. It’s a brief and matter-of-fact epistle to his friend about the local doctor’s advice for the now rapidly ailing poet to go out. It was note to the English painter, Joseph Severn (1793 – 1879), who looked after Keats until his death a short time later. Looking down on the Spanish Steps from John Keats’ window, means that I will always associate the poet with this otherwise joyful place.

After Keats, yes, let’s think poetic, but also, maybe go for a refreshing and very Italian glass of Campari.

Just off the Campo Marzio, another of those grand Roman squares, is one of Rome’s many churches, the Basilica Santa Maria del Popolo (Basilica of Holy Mary of the People). It might not look that special from outside, but inside, on permanent display, are two masterpieces by the great Italian painter Caravaggio (1571 – 1610). This was one of three emergency ecclesiastical stops that I planned on my essential Caravaggio tour when I wanted to see all the Caravaggio paintings in Rome. It will surprises me that you can just walk into one of these churches and, yes, here’s another Caravaggio.

At this Basilica are two of the artist’s most dramatic paintings, The Conversion of St Paul (1601) and The Crucifixion of St Peter (1601).

At the Basilica Sant’Agostino, behind another discrete exterior, is another of his masterpieces, Madonna di Loreto (1606)

Here on one of the nave’s pillars, it is easy to miss this mural by Raphael, The Prophet Isaiah (1512). If you’re not careful in Rome, you practically trip over great Italian Renaissance or Baroque paintings everywhere you turn.

In the French church of San Luigi dei Francesi, (St Louis of the French), there are three more Caravaggios, commissioned works on theme of St Matthew, and painted between 1599 and 1602.

The centre piece, with St Matthew and an angel, is known as The Inspiration of St Matthew.

On a moody January day, it was pleasant getting to the Museum of Modern Art (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) without having to get involved in the motor traffic. Walking through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, even at this time of year, is a breath of fresh air, literally, after all those albeit beautiful Baroque churches.

Here there is a permanent collection of mostly Italian paintings and sculpture from the late 19th century until the present. The late 19th century and early 20th century works are crammed together on the walls, 19th century style, but they are mostly visible to more than just a glancing eye. It was tempting to spend more time than I had in this section, but there was more room on the gallery’s walls than I have space for in this blog.

I discovered Italian artists that I wasn’t familiar with in the gallery’s current exhibition, Il Tempo di Futurismo (The Time of Futurism) exhibition, marking the 80th anniversary of the death of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism’s founder, which ran at the gallery until the end of April this year.

I was drawn to the works by Sardinian modernist, Mario Sironi (1885 – 1961), whose reputation, like those of other Futurist artists have been clouded by their association with Mussolini’s Italian Fascist movement. Maybe now, after nearly a century, we should try to see the good things in the art of this period without always dwelling on the negative and disturbing trappings of history.

The exhibition was far from being only brutal and alarming, as in this room devoted to the sparkling light-saturated work of Piero Durazzo, or the photographic section on cinematic photographs of Luca Campigotto.

The relationship in the first half of the 20th century between man and machine, is shown in the most challenging and exciting exhibits in this show, which also includes some of the machines themselves – early aeroplanes and racing cars appealing to anyone who has ever liked making model aeroplanes or cars. Aeroplanes, for good or for ill, have a significant place in this exhibition, none less than a number paintings imagined from the pilot’s view of view from his cockpit, presumably on bombing raids. I haven’t seen anything like this before, that mix of Futurism, art deco abstraction, a touch of daring, and, I have to say, 1930s Fascist agitprop. This is a show that definitely made think and re-think about some of the artists, like the American poet, Ezra Pound, who working and even inspired under the shadow of Italian fascism.

Another quite different exhibition was showing at the same time, but across the Borghese gardens at the Galleria Borghese. It was quite a distance from 20th century The Time of Futurism to Poetry and Painting in the 17th Century. Giovan Battista Marino and the Marvellous Passion.

The ‘Marvelous Passion’ in the title was felt by the greatest Italian poet of the 17th century, Giovan Battista Marino (1569 – 1625), the author of an epic poem Adone (1623) about the love between Venus and Adonis. Marino also wrote an encyclopaedic poetry collection of 624 poems dedicated to, and paired with, an equal number of Baroque works of art, La Galeria (1619). The book is a series of reflections on the relationship between poetry and art. I feel slightly embarrassed to admit that this show was, at least on first glance, more my kind of thing than Italian Futurism. Call me old-fashioned, no, I won’t admit to that, I’ve learnt to love some of those Futurist pictures, and I’m certainly not anti-Modernist. But, I write poetry, maybe not as well as Marino, but I’ve even tried to write a few poems in the Italian language. I’m learning to speak the language and I have had a life-long fascination with Italian epic poetry, Taso, Ariosto and Boccaccio in particular. Add to that my enthusiasm for Italian art from the 14th to the 17th century, then I was always going to be drawn to this show. The exhibition includes paintings and sculptures from Titian to Tintoretto, Correggio to Carracci, from Rubens to Poussin, with Marino’s poems side-by-side. ‘Marvelous’ indeed, and, because of the subject matter, it is sexy too.

The exhibition places quotes from Marino’s work next to the art that he admired on the same subject matter. Here the story of Venus, the goddess of Love and her young lover Adonis, are shown in the sculpture by Cristoforo Stati and in the painting by Jacopo Palma next to apt quotes from Marino’s epic, La Galeria.

Next, and in pride of place, is Bernini’s wonderful Apollo and Daphne, seen from all angles because it is not just so beautiful, but well frightening too. Daphne, the beautiful naiad, a water nymph, from Roman poet Ovid’s story, is desired, maybe loved, by Apollo, but she has been cursed by a jealous Eros to loath sex. She tries to escape from Apollo advances and saved by being turned into a laurel tree by her father, Peneas, a river god. The metamorphosis, to use Ovid’s word for it, is an unforgettable mix of the shocking and the erotic, also caught in a moment when stone is turned into movement.

After so much passion on display here in these rooms at the Galleria Borghese, I moved on to another part of the gallery, the Silenus Room for a display of the gallery’s Caravaggio collection which matches the Marino exhibition perfectly. My epic walking tour of Rome’s Caravaggios continues.

After the famous Galleria Borghese, I wasn’t expecting to find another major art gallery on Rome’s busiest shopping street, the Via Corso, the Doria Pamphili Gallery which have three more Caravaggio paintings. I had to interrupt a trip around the bargain-laden clothes shops that line this bustling boulevard with every store declaring that there was 70% off everything – the ultimate January sales. sales. I didn’t buy anything here, it was time to look inside this relatively unsung palazzo.

Sure enough, the three Caravaggio paintings were here, in their own room, far from the shopping crowds outside. They are early works that already show the artist’s fascination with awkward poses, radical perspective, and ambiguous facial expressions.

Interesting as it was to see these three early Caravaggio works, geniuses are never boring, but, I have to admit that the star work here is definitely not a Caravaggio, but the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (Cardinal Pamphili) by the Spanish master Diego Velázquez. Portraitist supreme, Velázquez shows us a far from saintly pope, so sinister in fact, that I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark Roman alleyway, or even in the great cathedral church of St Peter’s.

A much brighter and bigger alley leads to the St Peter’s….well, they say all roads lead to Rome, and it was out of the question, while I am here, not to go back to the big church at the centre of Christendom. Before I go in, just one last reference to Caravaggio. I wasn’t visiting the Vatican Museum on this trip, but if I had, I could have seen one last Caravaggio that is here in Rome, one of his greatest too. It’s always good to leave something special for another day. The Entombment of Christ (1603), with its figure of the dead Christ, shares the pose and the tragic pathos of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture much admired by Caravaggio. It is one of the greatest of paintings. The Michelangelo Pietà, housed next-door, was one of my main reasons for returning to St Peter’s.

And so to St Peter’s itself. It was a clear January day with a perfect blue sky. Pope Francis wasn’t here, he had been unwell, and in a month he would begin his long stint in hospital being treated for pneumonia, I hadn’t been inside the Vatican since the time of Pope John Paul II, and I didn’t realise that very soon there was to be another new pope, Leo XIV.

The scale of it all is still overwhelming, St Peter’s Square is truly vast when seen from the cathedral steps, and the interior is impressive beyond my words. Leo XIV must have gasped when he walked out onto the balcony just a week ago from when I am writing this. There was hope and a relief for us all to see a modest and caring American becoming a world leader

For all the magnificence of the cathedral, nothing can be compete with the human-sized statue in a side chapel – one of the wonders of the world.

It had been a long walk from my apartment near The Pantheon, and I needed to sit for a while before the return journey. Looking for a seat, I found this chapel not far from the exit. I admired the altar’s painting of St Sebastian by Domenichino (1631) and sat here as people, in groups or alone, came in to kneel at the altar. I didn’t realise until later that under the altar here is the tomb of Pope John Paul II (1920 -2005), but I could see that this was obviously a pilgrim’s destination. A statue of the sainted pope sits watching from on his throne to the side. I am not a Roman Catholic, I wasn’t always impressed by Pope John Paul II’s announcements, but I could also admire his courage and charisma. Whatever I feel about catholicism, I felt something here, more than just being rested and refreshed.

Outside, the sky was red, a shepherd’s delight, an awe-inspiring sight in an awesome place.

Impressive too was the flood-lit Castel Sant’Angelo on the other side of the River Tiber, across from St Peter’s. It was originally built by the Emperor Hadrian for his own mausoleum. It is another Rotunda in a more brutal style than the Pantheon, and it has served as a forbidding symbol of Imperial and Vatican power over the centuries. The ashes of Emperor Hadrian and all his successors were all buried here until the year 217. The last urn belonged to the assassinated Emperor Caracalla, one of the most tyrannical of all Roman Emperors. He set the bar so high that none of his successors could compete whit his reputation for cruelty. After the Fall of Rome, the castle/mausoleum became a papal prison a carrying on the tradition of cruelty, you might think. Executions were carried out there in a small inner courtyard, as in the last act of Puccini’s opera, Tosca. The opera that had begun its story down the road from here at the Basilica Sant’Andrea di Valle, as I described in part one of this blog. The tragic heroine, Floria Tosca, jumps to her death from the tower after her lover Mario Cavaradossi was tortured and then executed there by firing squad. Before he is shot, he sings another, his second, famous aria from up there, ‘È lucevan le stelle’ (‘The stars were shining’). Knowing he will die, he sings that he has never loved life so much. The second tenor aria in the opera, and the second of the two greatest of some of Puccini’s greatest arias for tenor. I couldn’t help humming it on my way back to the Pantheon. Here is Jonas Kaufmann again from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

E muoio disperato!

E non ho amato mai tanto la vita,

I die in desperation

and have never loved life so much!

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/e-lucevan-le-stelle-stars-were-shining.html

It wouldn’t be fair to Rome, if I didn’t finish this blog with a record of all the fun I’ve had in Roman restaurants over these two weeks. Rome has the most extraordinary history, often bloody and tyrannical. It has a genius culture beyond compare, often in spite of the bloody history and an architectural history that has defined in some way almost every building that has been designed since. All of that makes it an unmissable city, but one of the main reasons why anyone should think of coming here is what it is like today. The food, the wine, the good humour and the sheer fizz of eating out in this city, makes it party town. I can’t wait until I am lucky enough to return.

After dinner, there will be a final leisurely stroll, known as a passeggiata, back via a floodlit Pantheon, to the apartment and bed. Arriverderci Roma!

The post Two weeks in Rome – part two. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

In January 2025, I spent two weeks on holiday in an apartment in the centre of the Centro Storico (Historic Centre) of Rome and I felt I had lived there for ever.

It was like being at home, but with many world famous landmarks just a few minutes walk away .

With a speedy internet on my trusted laptop, I was, I felt, truly at the centre of the world.

There was even a small courtyard downstairs where I could do my daily martial arts practice – White Crane style Kungfu and tai-chi. This space became my dojo, my training ground, and after just a few days, I felt grounded here.

I was living round the corner to a street that had the two thousand year old remains of an Ancient Roman building – a local resident told me had once been a Roman Baths. It appeared to be growing out of, even bursting out of, the surrounding buildings. Birds liked it too and used it as their cliff-top perch.

I’m next door to a shop too, not your average shop, but an upmarket ecclesiastical outfitters. I feel blessed every time I come home.

There was also, not only some good restaurant here but also a small café, the ideal place for a morning espresso and croissant. Perfetto.

The café was down my road but also across the street from the Pantheon, one of Rome’s most famous monuments, The Pantheon, a 2nd century Roman temple and, since AD 609, the Roman Catholic Basilica Santa Maria ad Martyres. Apart from its Corinthian pillared portico, the building is circular, in Rotunda style, one that was much copied through the Roman world and ever after.

The espresso was good too.

As with many famous Italian landmarks, people all seem to congregate in crowds outside the famous bits, and leave the adjoining streets empty. Going to Rome in January was definitely a good way to avoid the crowds.

I was not quite alone. This crow, a Pantheon resident, also takes an interest in croissants. He finds my morning routine much more interesting than the nearly two thousand year old building where he perches.

It is genuinely impressive to study the ancient brickwork and amazing to observe the concrete dome that has crowned the Rotunda through the millennia. And, as it is warm for January, to sit outside a café, people-watching.

Inside the Pantheon, in spite of the glories of the Renaissance decorations, the main attraction is the beauty of the circular space itself with its domed ceiling. The proportions are just right and I was not the only one who wanted to ignore the tombs and paintings and just to feel the space.

There are of course, a lot of tombs, most famously, the grand memorials to two kings of Italy, especially and, maybe, self-consciously impressive is this one for Vittorio Emanuele II ( reigned 1861 – 1878), the first King of a united Italy since the 6th century. He has a guard of honour and a monument fit for a king, even if it is still up-staged by the building itself.

The Guard of Honour, finely costumed, of course, are drawn from the impressively-named National Institute of the Guard of Honour to the Royal Tombs of the Pantheon. Nice work if you can get it.

Apart from the tomb of the influential Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli (1653 – 1713), the only other resting place that drew my attention was that of one of that great artistic triumvirate of Renaissance geniuses, Raphael.

The honourable gentleman of the Institute of Guards of Honour, paraded under my window the next day. And a fine, if slightly sinister, sight they made.

Very near to the Pantheon, and still just down the road from my apartment, is the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, magnificent and the only Gothic church in Rome. It was built over the foundations of a Greco-Roman temple to the goddess Minerva, consecrated in 1370. I felt the rumblings of the pagan gods under my feet. The elephant statue with its obelisk, felt pagan too. It was designed by Bernini and unveiled in 1667,

Before entering the Basilica, I visited the adjoining building, the Convent of San Domenico, a lovely tranquil place with a garden, robed Dominican monks, and decorated cloisters. When I was there they were holding an exhibition of paintings, Saint Francis of Assisi from Cimabue to Perugino. My favourite picture was the honest and down-to-earth image of St Francis, complete with his big ears, soon after his death, painted by Cimabue (1240 – 1302) on the simile wooden coffin lid used for the dead saint until his grand memorial was built at Assisi. It helped me believe that saints are human too. I was moved too to see a specimen of St Francis’ handwriting.

The gothic splendour of the basilica was a special treat for eyes in danger of getting a bit too worn down by the Baroque. I loved to see the all the colours on the arches and vaulted ceilings that we have lost on our English gothic churches. Here was another moment, as in the Pantheon, to just stand and stare.

As a frequent visitor to Finland these days, I was amazed to find this side chapel dedicated to Finland’s patron saint, St Henrik, with a modern Gothic-looking wooden statue of the saint by the Finnish sculptor, Sakari Pykälä (1992). I discovered that I in Rome for St Henrik’s feast day and couldnt’ resist going to the celebration of the mass in his honour where the hymns were all sung in Finnish

Sitting in the congregation I could see a statue of Christ holding a cross to the left of the altar. I wasn’t expecting to come across The Risen Christ by Michelangelo, no less.

There is rain in Rome in January, but that was ok, an umbrella bought in a shop next to the apartment did the trick and there was still so much to see.

and to eat. Rome, as I am sure you know is a foodie’s delight – I loved it too, as the two kilos I put on while I was there proves.

After dinner, what better, well, you have many choices here in Rome, but, just down the street from here is that most famous of fountains, the Trevi Fountain as remembered by most cineastes for the moment Anita Ekberg uses it as her private paddling pool in Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita (1960). I am also nostalgic for this most voluptuous of monuments when I listen to the underestimated composer, Ottorino Respighi’s symphonic poem, Fountains of Rome (1916).

The 18th century statues were designed by Nicola Salvi but completed by Giuseppe Pannini, it is the largest fountain in Rome and the crowds, especially the young couples, can’t resist its resist its romantic appeal. It Fellini every day here in this part of Rome.

Out of my apartment, turn left for the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain, turn right for the baroque Basilica di Sant’Andrea della Valle, St Andrew’s Basilica. It is a majestic baroque church consecrated in 1650.

The altar is surrounded by the epic painting by Mattia Preti (1613 – 1699) of Saint Andrew crucified on his x-shaped cross, under one of the most spectacular domed ceilings in the city.

I was lucky to catch a concert here celebrating the 600th anniversary of the birth of one of church music’s greatest composers, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 – 1594), or Palestrina for short. The music was supplied by one of the choirs from St Peter’s Basilica who were joined by a visiting student choir from the University of Minnesota. the match of youthful American clarity and mellow Italian experience worked wonderfully. Palestrina’s music was, after all, composed to be heard in just such an acoustic as here.

The other Italian composer associated with this church is, of course, Giacomo Puccini 18587 – 1924), for it is here that his opera Tosca begins when the tenor, Mario Cavaradossi, is painting a portrait of Mary Magdalene in the Capella Barberini, but the features are of his mistress, Floria Tosca, a beautiful opera singer and, because he’s an Italian tenor, he falls in love with the image on his canvas and sings ‘Recondite Armonia di bellezze diverse!’ (Concealed harmony of contrasting beauties). I couldn’t but remember this and just had to play the aria again when I got back to the apartment. Look out for part two of my Roman story, https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-rome-part-two/but until then, here’s a link to Jonas Kaufmann singing the aria at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden..https://youtu.be/xw-pOOdm7bs?si=HgufGktRIxZlsLg

L’arte nel suo mistero

le diverse bellezze insiem confonde:

Ma nel ritrar costei

Il mio solo pensiero,

il mio sol pensier sei tu,

Tosca, sei tu!

Art in its mystery

two beauties together confuse

but in painting this

my only thought is of you

Tosca, of you!

The post Two weeks in Rome – part one. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Welcome to Glinka Gallery, it’s open 24/7. it has six individual galleries for fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music and it is just a few finger clicks away from you wherever you are. I want to show you around.

I have always been involved with the arts world, from my student days, through many years making arts programmes for television, as a writer and, these days also as the artistic director of a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the ‘multi-player virtual world’ called Second Life, where I have the virtual name, Wolfgang Glinka.

Wolfgang Glinka and Colin Bell are interchangeable versions of the person known as Me, and my gallery, is an extension of many of the things I have done and others that I have dreamed of doing before anyone even imagined the enormous potential of virtual reality. Virtual reality, is as its name implies just another form of reality. Here, as you can see in my welcome notice to virtual visitors to the gallery, I have been able to curate an extraordinary group of artists from most branches of the arts – fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music. Actually all of my artistic passions.

Over the eight years of Glinka Gallery’s existence, and now in in fourth rebuild, we are getting bigger and bigger, the gallery has shown regular exhibitions by a family of regular artists, including our resident artist, Lash vv, creatives in both virtual and real worlds, who find freedom and support at what has now become more than a gallery, more of a creative arts centre.

We now have an ever-growing permanent collection of some of the work by our exhibitors over the years. I think of them as my friends.

I am a writer, a novelist and poet, and I have been experimenting here at the gallery with ways of putting poetry, in particular, on the walls, along with fine art. Therefore I have built specific spaces for poetry and created a role for a resident poet (Shyla the Super Gecko) who holds regular poetry reading events here.

I also put on exhibitions of my own work, especially my Fibs, short-form Fibonacci poems which lend themselves to life on the wall as well as on the page. They have their own home in the Fibonacci Gallery.

Here is my, well, Wolfgang Glinka’s short film of his, well my Fib, Reflections, published by The Fib Review and now also viewable on Youtube.

We also have a resident dance troupe, 21 Parakeets, directed by Joseph Nussbaum, a composer and choreographer, who has sought to make contemporary dance an equal partner here with fine art and poetry. His work is inspired by the wish to show challenging but also entertaining dance shows in our own custom built dance theatre, the Aviary Theatre, built by our buildings director, Tony Marino.

Since I’ve been running the Glinka Gallery, I have been able to develop my interest in photography, often too far down the list of my priorities, in a busy writing schedule. In the last eight years I have been pushing myself to make my photography an equal form of expression with my poetry. At first, I made photography exhibitions of my work mostly shot on foreign trips, buy recently I have developed my interest in photo-art, mostly known as digital photo-editing or image manipulation. This is a completely new world for me and I was excited to find I could attract a large audience for the first of my recent shows, Ecce Homo, (Behold the Man), an examination of masculinity at a time of crisis in male identity.

My most recent show is Dead Poets in Love, Queer Writers from Shakespeare to Burroughs. Here I am trying another experiment in bringing writing and photography together. This has been, maybe my longterm ambition for most of my life. In the gallery the texts float as an ethereal presence in front of my manipulated images of the writers themselves. In the movie of the show, I decided that it was better to leave out the texts. Maybe I will take this idea further in my next projects.

If the potential of the arts in the virtual world is new to you, and if you are interested to come to Glinka Gallery and to the other arts venues in the often under-estimated virtual platform, Second Life, https://secondlife.comhere is a brief look. We hope to see you there, maybe.

The post Me and my virtual art gallery appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The city of Ravenna in Emilia-Romagna on the Adriatic side of Northern Italy, is a civilised and quietly prosperous place, if it wasn’t for its most famous treasures, we wouldn’t guess that once, over a thousand years ago, the city was the capital of the Western Roman Empire. Those treasures are the sublime works of art that decorate the churches and basilicas that were built here in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, the declining years of the Roman Empire, at a time that we tend to think of Italy as being lost to marauding hordes of barbarians. Maybe our ignorance about the so-called Dark Ages, or Late Antiquity, makes a visit to any one of these extraordinary churches such an unexpected, overwhelming and moving experience.

I was in Ravenna in June 2024 and I can only repeat the superlatives of any sentient visitor to this small city’s remarkable eight Unesco World Heritage monuments. I took my camera and, for this blog, I plan to let the pictures do most of the talking, as was the intention of the magnificent mosaics that are Ravenna’s principal glory. It might help though to add a few notes on the way.

Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum (425 – 450 AD)

The little mausoleum, you could almost call the exterior cute, may have been intended but was not used as the burial site of the Roman Princess, Galla Placidia (393/3 – 450), who is said to have planned and overseen its construction and decoration with the mosaics which have inspired many generations of visitors to Ravenna. She is reputed to have often prayed there and, at times, even cried there. Galla Placidia was the daughter of the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, half-sister to the Roman Emperor Honorius, the Queen Consort to Ataulf, king of the Visigoths, Empress Regent to her son Constantius III. It appears though that she was much more than a royal daughter, sister, wife and mother, she was a powerful figure in the years of turmoil when Italy was being invaded by Visigoths (Western Goths) and Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths). She may have been a moderating voice between rival Romans and Goths at this time, seeing the qualities of both sides and having some responsibility for the artistic achievements of this mix of cultures. She was a remarkable woman, also a pious Christian who founded or restored a number of important churches in Rome, Jerusalem and Ravenna, and she spent some time in exile in Constantinople where she was born and she may have met the leading Byzantine architects and mosaic-makers who inspired whoever designed the mosaics in her mausoleum. Now, apart from seeing her face on a few gold coins, we can only get a glimpse of her from what she inspired.

The ceiling of her Mausoleum with its glittering stars representing a gateway to Heaven made a great impact on future mosaic-makers and on writers and artists over the centuries, including Carl Jung, and, reputedly, Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night and Cole Porter’s song, Night and Day. The often-admired glitter of the mosaics is achieved with tesserae that were made with gold leaf between pieces of glass.

The abstract patterns, and those starry night skies tell an emotional story beyond words, but there are narratives here too. The semi-circular lunettes show Christ the Good Shepherd. He is in a suitably pastoral scene, offering a gentle hand to stroke one of the sheep under the chin. Stay a while he seems to be telling us, you will be safe here. Facing this scene, in another lunette, we see a male saint, he might be Saint Vincent of Saragossa, who was ordered to reveal his hiding place for his sacred books, the four gospels – they were to be burned. He had hidden them in a safe place. Maybe they are hidden here in this little chapel. In another lunette two deer, or harts, referencing Psalm 42: As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. I think we can feel the power and emotion that the founder of this place instilled here.

Basilica di Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (504 AD)

The basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuova, was built by order of Theodoric the Great (454 -526 AD), the King of the Ostrogoths who became the de facto ruler, and self-declared King of Italy between the years 493 and 526. It was intended to be the chapel for Theodoric’s palace, the remains of which are still just down the road in Ravenna on Via Roma.

The most striking thing about the decoration of the basilica are the obsessive rows of figures – saints, prophets and evangelists on the window level, and virgins and martyrs on the level above the pillars. The higher row are more individualised in the Roman style but the lower levels ones are more uniform, minor figures, perhaps, to flesh out a scene or two, as in Byzantine art. There are many examples in this building of the theological and artistic clashes between East and West at this time. As a childhood collector of toy soldiers, I still love the way these figures are all made to stand in neat lines, making a kind of order out of the chaos that existed in the early years of Christian theology when Christian rulers and thinkers will still trying to work out what exactly we should believe.

Holy virgins and martyrs are queuing up in orderly fashion on each side of the church, the virgins are in line for the Virgin Mary and her small but adult son, Jesus. The martyrs, on the other side of the aisle, are heading for grown-up Jesus and his guardian angels. In front of the virgin queue are Caspar, Melchior and Balthassar, the three wise men, or Magi. I don’t know if they were virgins, but this image is said to be the first time the three kings have been named in pictorial art.

Theodoric was an Arian Christian, at that time a branch of Christianity that was at odds with the orthodoxy of the Byzantine Emperor, Justinian I (482 – 565 AD) and the Pope who were both pretty firm in their particular theology and thought that the Arians were troublesome and wrong . Arians believed that Christ wasn’t created divine but as a human being who was created as a human baby, like the rest of us, but became god-like after his crucifixion. This was seen in Rome and in Constantinople as a serious heresy and it was one that divided the Christian church in the 6th century. In this basilica there are two contrasted images of Christ, illustrating Arian beliefs – on the left he is a young beardless man, standing on his mother’s lap, on the right he is older and bearded as the Man of Sorrows. The decorations of the church were a kind of Arian manifesto which the emperor Justinian tried to blot out after Theodoric’s death in 526 AD.

At the back of the queues there were originally figures of Theodoric and his courtiers, in a realistic depiction of Theodoric’s Ravenna palace, they are now blocked out by golden bricks on one side and by rather dainty but incongruous curtains on the other. The alterations were part of clumsy Justinian attempt to air-brush Theodoric out of history.

If this church is seen as a kind of style war between Theodoric and Justinian, then I think Theodoric won. Justinian’s alterations merely focus our attention on that he was trying to cover up. The combination of styles is, however, a lot of fun, and we can even see the odd hand or foot that the Justinian mosaicist failed to hide. It makes these wonderful rows of holy people a game of Where’s Wally.

The guessing game continues with the image of the Emperor himself with its extra large label reading Justinian. Was this one of Justinian’s alterations? Some people claim it is the image of Theodoric altered by order of the emperor. I think it is Theodoric – and Justinian is the Wally.

Archbishop’s Chapel of St Andrew (c.495 AD)

The tiny chapel, later dedicated to Saint Andrew, but originally dedicated to Christ, was built as a private oratory for the archbishops of Ravenna and is found on the first floor of the archbishop’s palace. The mosaics date from the around the time of the chapel’s construction., but some of the mosaics below the ceiling were replaced in the 16th century by paintings of Christ by Luca Longhi.

A beardless Christ, in Orthodox rather than Arian style, over the entrance door, is seen dressed as an emperor treading on a lion and a serpent, in a style known as Christ treading on the beasts. This is the first known depiction of an image that became popular in early Medieval art. It is a visual quote from the Bible: The asp and the basilisk you will trample under foot, you will tread on the lion and the dragon. The beasts being a metaphor for the devil. This heroic, unbearded, but Orthodox, Christ is a warrior-god . The devil is will stamp out might well be Theodoric’s Arianism.

Next to the chapel is the Archiepiscopal Museum with its most famous exhibit, the Archbishop’s Throne, probably made and carved in Constantinople, is panelled entirely of ivory. The Archbishop of Ravenna at this time was Maximiam, or Maximianus (499 – 556 AD). This either saintly or merely politically acute man (or both) was appointed directly by the Emperor Justinian. He was on the front line between the Popes in Rome and the Emperor in Constantinople, with secular as well as ecclesiastical responsibilities, so he needed a strong seat to sit on. This elegant piece of furniture, carved from the tusk of elephants, seems like an appropriate symbol.

The Arian Baptistry (early 6th century AD)

The Arian Baptistry was an Arian Christian baptismal building originally standing next to an Arian Cathedral because Arians’ believed the baptistry had to be separate from the church. It was built at the beginning of the 6th century AD, for Theodoric’s Arian Cathedral.

The Basilica Spirito Santo with its 15th century portico was the original church built here for the baptistry it was much restored and has lost its original mosaics. This complex of Arian Christian buildings would also have included a priest’s accommodation as can be seen on the wall in the picture below. The octagonal Arian Baptistry would have had mosaics on its interior walls but only the ceiling mosaics have survived.

The ceiling shows the young, unbearded and nude Christ, submerged in the River Jordan (personified as an old man). He’s being baptised by John the Baptist. The Holy Spirit, a dove, emits the baptismal water directly over Christ’s head. The encircling figures are the Apostles led in different directions by St Paul with his keys, and St Paul with his scrolls. They are indicating the rather comfortable throne where Christ will sit. There is something decidedly homely and human about this scene. The Arian human god, is, for a moment in his short life, just like you or me….his disciples are too.

The Neonian Baptistry, or the Orthodox Baptistry (late 4th century or early 5th century AD)

The Neonian or Orthodox Baptistry predates the Arian Baptistry by more than 50 years and the mosaics were added at the end of the 5th century. The subject is the same in both baptistries, but here, Christ is a mature bearded man. He too is submerged naked in the River Jordan which is similarly personified by an old river god, and the baptism is being conducted by John the Baptist in conjunction with a descending dove representing the Holy Spirit. The Apostles form a circle led as in the Arian Baptistry by St Peter and St Paul. This baptism, in comparison to the Arian one, is a much fancier affair with the Apostles in voluptuous, flowing robes. The figures are more Roman in appearance – they are three dimensional with more differentiated expressions that in the flatter Byzantine design in the Arian. These two buildings are very different under their superficial similarities. Here in the Neonian Baptistry, we are meant to be in awe at the divine happenings up there in the heavens. The Arians are more human and, consequently, more down to earth – even modern-looking. No wonder the Arians were seen by the Orthodox authorities as dangerous heretics.

Basilica di San Vitale (547 AD)

The Basilica of San Vitale was built between 526 and 547 AD and experts in Byzantine architecture and art say it is one of the masterpieces of early Byzantine architecture and art – and who am I to disagree. It was finished just as the Emperor Justinian was about to begin his partially successful re-conquest of the Western Roman Empire after a long struggle for power between rival candidates for controlling the land mass we now call Italy. It is a magnificent building decorated with the largest and most complex set of Byzantine mosaics outside of Istanbul and the largest number of murals I have ever seen anywhere.

To simplify the complex, the two main subjects of the mosaics in the two giant apses, are Old Testament sacrifices, such as Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac, and the story of Moses and the burning bush. In the second apse the subject is Christ, either, quite literally, the Lamb of God, or the unbearded but god-like young man with his guardian angels. He’s seen on high, giving a martyr’s laurel to St Vitale, a local saint, and receiving a model of the basilica from the Archbishop of Ravenna. Saints, martyrs, evangelists, angels and apostles, can be found everywhere with depictions of flora and fauna mingled with abstract patterns in an overall wash of green, yellow and gold that I found quite intoxicating. I think English Pre-Raphaelites artists must have seen these colours on their European tours.

Amidst the glorious chaos of the over-all design, two panels stand out. This church, Maximiam, the Archbishop of Ravenna seems to be implying, is part of the brave new Western Empire, reuniting under its saviour, Christ, yes, but also its superhero Emperor Justinian. On one side we see the Emperor himself, in his imperial robes, flanked guards and priests with the Archbishop himself in pride of place next to him, holding a heavily bejewelled cross like a weapon. With the equivalent of an on-screen television caption, just in case you don’t recognise him, Maximiam has broadcast only one name over this elevated company, his own, Maximianus, in large letters above his head. The matching panel on the other side of the apse, is of Justinian’s wife, the Empress Theodora, imperial, glamorous and solemn – an equal match to her Emperor, surrounded by her team. Are they on the same team, Justinian and Theodora, I wondered. I’m not sure which side would win in a battle of wits, but I think everyone should watch out for that dodgy-looking Maximianus. Justinian and Theodora are the very images of power – too strong, they must have hoped, to be hidden from view by the golden bricks and draped curtains that obliterated Theodoric from his basilica down the road.

Between the Emperor and Empress, high above the window is Christ who is sitting on a blue globe that represents the universe, his kingdom. He is the ruler of all he surveys including this magnificence, and all its associated problems. As he’s the model of a this basilica by another bishop, not Maximianus, but Ecclesius, the builder and first bishop here. What can we do but look on, look up even, in awe? Well, it’s a great show of strength and a spectacular work of art.

Basilica di Sant’Apollinare in Classe (549 AD)

The Basilica di Sant’Apollinare in Classe (6 km from Ravenna) was consecrated by Archbishop Maximian, him again, in 549 AD and is dedicated to Saint Apollinaris, or Sant’Apollinare, the patron saint of Ravenna, whose ‘relics’ are buried under an altar in the centre of the church. He was probably born in Antioch but, after much travelling as a preacher, it is claimed that he became the first Bishop of Ravenna during the reign of the Emperor Claudius (41 – 54 AD). He was regularly persecuted and tortured during his twenty-six year tenure, until he was finally martyred (beaten to death) on a road in Classe. The town was then a small religious settlement built on swampy coastal land on the coast of the Adriatic Sea is where there’s archaeological evidence of ancient Christian and pagan cemeteries Within decades of Apollinare’s death, Octavian, Caesar Augustus, became emperor, he decided to make Classis, or Classe, the major port on the Adriatic for his naval fleet, but over time after the Fall of Rome, the port fell into disuse and it eventually silted up leaving Classe as an inland settlement with its glory days behind it. The busy port for Ravenna, Porto Corsini, is now 13 km away from the city in another direction.

Like many historic buildings around Ravenna, the Basilica was built on piles in the marshy terrain, like Venice was, centuries later. Classe with its giant basilica is now a small community set amongst grassy, and marshy, fields where Rough Marsh-Mallows (malva setigera) still thrive, and where the church keeps some of the original sense of remoteness that must have characterised the period of those early Christian cemeteries. The sculptural bronze Mediterranean female buffalos by Davide Rivalta (born 1974), add to the spirit of calm. They’ve been gently grazing here in front of the basilica since 2012.

The buffalos seem uninterested in their sculptural companion, the bronze copy of a statue of Emperor Augustus Caesar who stands, imperiously, with his back to the basilica.

The sumptuously decorated basilica’s relative isolation made it vulnerable over the centuries and the former marble and mosaic covering of the walls of the nave were pillaged by 14th century Venetian raiders and then by the famous condottiere, Sigimondo Maletesta (1417 – 1468)), for the construction of his Tempio Malatestiano further down the coast in Rimini. The basilica has done a pretty good job at recovering from the loss and, in some ways, the simpler and plainer decoration gives it an elegance and beauty. The original mosaics were left in the apse and on the triumphal arch and now they stand out with especial brilliance.

Sant’Apollinare stands in a verdant , and maybe marshy, valley, praying to God for grace to be given to his faithful flock – here represented by a row of twelve bright-eyed sheep, or lambs, or maybe the twelve Apostles, now with the addition of Ravenna’s very own saint as centre of attention. Three additional lambs, amongst the trees, symbolise the three saints. Peter, James and John, who were witnesses to the Transfiguration of Jesus, returning to Heaven in his god-like form, along with the air-borne figures of Elijah and Moses. There is a shimmering gold cross on a starry sky, copied from the Galla Placidia Mausoleum. Above them all is The Hand of God protruding from the heavens. Up above the apse, we see the twelve lambs again, along with the four symbols of the Biblical Evangelists (Eagle, Winged Man, Lion and Calf), and a transfigured, very god-like Jesus, demonstrating that this whole scene is a glorification of Christ’s divine nature, and it is also a condemnation of the Arian heresy.

On the arch, under palm tress symbolising justice, there are two archangels, Michael and Gabriel, and busts of Saint Matthew and another male saint. All the forces of Heaven seem to be here to join in the acclamation of the Truth and the Word. There are also four figures of bishops, the founders of Ravenna’s main basilicas, and a 7th century panel showing the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IV granting the city’s privileges to the Archbishop’s envoy. Finally there is a panel showing Abraham, Abel and Melchizedek offering sacrifices to God. For all its anti-Arian symbolism, the apse mosaics, like those in the Galla Placidia Mausoleum, leave us, mere mortals, with a less didactic message – peaceful beauty and tranquillity in the God’s creation. The sense of spiritual calm is complimented by the basilica’s architecture, a celebration of space, and of the grassy surroundings outside, mirrored up there with Sant’Apollinare and his sheep.

The So-Called Theodoric’s Palace (c.6th or 7th century AD?)

The building, or ruins of a building on the Via Roma in Ravenna has often been called the ruined remains of Theodoric’s Palace, but 20th and 21st century archaeology has discovered that the real palace lay behind this structure and behind Theodoric’s Basilica di Sant’Apollinare, a short distance from here. The remains we see today where probably part of the guard house to the palace complex which might have been the home of the Ravenna Exarch’s, governors appointed by the Emperor Justinian to rule the Italian peninsular after the death of Theodoric in 525 AD. After this, there is evidence that the building might have become a church and later still a private dwelling. Today it is a fascinating ruin from the time of Theodore, so the rather clumsy new name The So-Called Theodoric’s Palace is good enough for now.

The mosaic of Theodoric’s Palace on the wall of Basilica di Sant’Apollinare originally also showed Theodoric and his court ‘at home’ in the palace. The Emperor Justinian wanted the Ostrogothic King expunged from the record, so golden bricks and drapes were introduced to the work, leaving just the image of the palace which was taken to be the same building that we see in the photograph, even thought it is demonstrably different. The palace, which definitely existed in Ravenna was probably a grander affair than these ruins would suggest.

Imaging the restored building as a guard house, allows us to think of the spaces that remain as entrance vestibules with narrow sentry-duty corridors at the front and soldiers’ quarters up the spiral stairs to the first floor; which is now being used to exhibit some of the mosaics excavated over recent years and which appear to be from the floors of the real palace behind.

Archaeologists continue to find clues to Theodoric’s Palace, but the ruins already visible show us roughly where his palatial grounds were and how they fitted in with his great basilica next door.

Theodoric’s Mausoleum (520 AD)

Theodoric had his own burial mausoleum built in AD 520, five years before his death, and he was buried here with much pomp and ceremony in what must have been a magnificent display of Gothic ritual. His tomb was built in what was then open countryside outside the city of Ravenna, maybe to keep it safe from his likely successors, as he appears to have wanted his last resting place to be an Arian and a traditional Ostrogothic memorial. It is unique, as the only surviving mausoleum built in the Gothic style, without any stylistic features from Roman or Byzantine art.

It is still a distance from the city centre but the modern city has grown up around it and the mausoleum is now in a pleasant urban park. I was particularly attracted to the orderly rows of trees that remind me of those virgins and martyrs in Theodoric’s church, the Basilica di Sant’Apollinare Nuovo.

The building itself has a domed roof carved from a single stone that weighs 230 tonnes – not even the apparently superhuman Theodoric could have lifted it up there on his own. It is a two story structure with the actual burial chamber at the top. When I was there it was eerily silent apart from the calls of a few crows. Downstairs, inside, the curators have created a recording of unauthentic but Gothic-sounding music – unexpected but effective.

The dead king’s body would have been placed in this porphyry tub, something that wouldn’t be out of place in a luxury hotel. Theodoric had visualised his final resting place, lying here sealed up in silence in the country that he had made his own. Directly over his head was a Gothic-style Christian cross. It was all perfectly orchestrated.

The tub is now empty, of course, because the Byzantine authorities ordered that the building should be used as an Orthodox Christian oratory and Theodoric’s remains were removed – and, I assume, lost. The tub was found in the ruins that are now called the So-Called Theodoric’s Palace.

Theodoric, the civilised warrior-king with his subversively human theology would never have been allowed to rest in peace here, but he was far too big a figure to be successfully air-brushed out of history as his legacy in Ravenna still shows us.

The post Ravenna: the mosaics – essential sites and sights to see. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The beautiful city of Ravenna, on the East Coast of Italy, in Emilia-Romagna, sits between Venice and Rimini, but is less crowded than its more famous neighbours. Once, however, it was the capital of Italy and one of the grandest cities of Europe.

That was a long time ago, in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, after the most glorious days of Ancient Rome, when the Roman Emperors had moved to Constantinople and the Goths, those people we still think of as barbarians and vandals, had invaded Italy, and Rome itself had been sacked, or as we say, after it had Fallen. The invading Goths forced the Roman emperors to leave Rome and set up a new capital at Milan, but that too became unsafe from attack, so, in the year 402, the Emperor Honorius (384 – 423) moved his court to Ravenna to the south. He transformed what had been a small swampy town built on piles on a series of small islands in a marshy lagoon, like Venice centuries later, and inland from the Adriatic Sea into one of the greatest cities and ports of Europe. It is now linked to the sea by the 18th century Candiano Canal

As a schoolboy, I thought people knew that Rome had fallen because they heard the bang, but history is never that simple. Ravenna is an example of that. I came here in a very hot June 2024, not sure what I would find, but generally, as they say, wowed by what was here. If it is nowadays a very civilised and gentle place, its position on the Adriatic Sea, facing the more civilised East, meant that between 35 and 12 BC, the town became Emperor Augustus Caesar’s principal Roman port at Classis, where he stationed the Roman Fleet.

The ancient port is now a series of ruins displayed in an open air museum, a vivid reminder of the glory and the fall of Rome.

The place is now a pleasant suburb of Ravenna, called Classe, a short train or bus journey from the city. It has one of Ravenna’s most magnificent basilicas, a few shops and a trattoria. It also has a glittering and spacious new museum which recounts the history of Ravenna with excellently designed installations.

Rome did ‘fall’ but it didn’t disappear, it remained the official capital of the land we now call Italy, even after the capital of the Roman Empire became Constantinople. The problem had been those Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and, especially Theodoric the Great (454 – 526), the King of the Ostrogoths (Western Goths), the Goths’ supreme military general, who became the de facto King of Italy after a series of invasions and skilled diplomatic treaties. He managed to become not only the conquering ruler of Italy but also its acknowledged ruler under the Roman Emperor in Constantinople. Was he a Barbarian? Well, most political leaders are barbarians, and he did his set of ‘bad’ things, but as he was also one of the most important figures in guaranteeing the continuation of Italian, and maybe European, culture after the so called Fall of Rome and before the rise of Charlemagne (748 – 814). Theodoric is important for us because he made Ravenna his capital and insured its magnificence much of which is still visible today.

If any of you are still thinking that those invading Goths were just rampaging barbarians, then you only have to visit the eight early Christian churches in Ravenna that are all on the World Heritage List. (See my next blog). The Ostrogoths were Aryan Christians, but let’s not go into the differences between them and the Orthodox Christians of Constantinople, or the Roman Catholic Christians of Rome, but, here in Ravenna, the three theological branches combined to produce, in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, some of the most magnificent surviving early Christian mosaics in the world history of art. Even if you are not interested in church history, or even any history, the sheer beauty of the art makes this place a must-see.

I will revisit these churches in the next blog because there is so much to see. I was lucky enough not only to visit all the sites, but to go to a concert held in the 2024 Ravenna Festival in one of those churches, the Basilica of San Vitale (547 AD)

The French early music group, Irini Ensemble, director Lila Hajosi, performed music by the great Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Du Fay (?1397 – 1474) and a number of his contemporary Greek Orthodox composers, to celebrate and mourn the glory and then the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It would be difficult to find a more beautiful setting for this music. Here’s a video of them singing this music, not in Ravenna, but at the Abbaye de Fontfroide, Narbonne, France.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8uaW3AvSdQ

Guillaume Du Fay’s 15th Century music felt positively modern after being immersed the 4th and 5th Centuries. I had been immersed in the Ravenna of 1400 years ago and it was easy to forget that Ravenna didn’t actually go to sleep after its extraordinary era of world dominance. If there was any danger of me forgetting the many interesting and dramatic centuries of Italian history since the death of Theodoric the Great, then this poster for a wacky art show here in the city centre, soon reminded me of some other celebrated names in the story of Ravenna.

Ravenna is proud of the poets who lived here. Dante Alighieri (c.1265 – 1321), author of Divine Comedy (Comedia Divina) which was partly written and completed in Ravenna when he’d escaped Florence, his home town, after falling out with its rulers over his opposition to the Papacy’s plans to rule all the Italian city-states. He was to live and die an exile, a political refugee, in Ravenna, where he is buried. Another poetic resident was the Englishman, Lord Byron, George Gordon Byron, (1788 – 1824), the great Romantic poet who, in the spirit of romance, came to live here (1819 – 1821) for the love of a married woman, Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli, and where he continued to write his epic poem, Don Juan, but also his Ravenna Diary. Teresa had to return to her husband but Byron wrote to her of his, or of their, love:  

“I love you, and you love me,—at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which is a great consolation in all events. But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and ocean divide us,—but they never will, unless you wish it.“

In 1822, he went to Greece where he died working in support of the Greek fight for independence and where he died of a fever in 1824.

Byron lived in a house that backed onto the Piazza San Francesco which is also the site of one of Ravenna’s great basilicas, the former Franciscan monastery, now the Basilica di San Francesco, where Dante’s funeral was held after his death from malaria in 1321.

The Basilica di San Francesco was built on the site of the original 5th Century church in 1261 when it was handed over to the Franciscans as a monastery. It suffered the fate of many Italian churches from that period by being given 18th century Baroque ornamentation. This was removed at the beginning of the 20th century in preparation for the 600th Anniversary of Dante’s death. It has restored the basilica to how it would have looked in the 13th century.

The Piazza San Francesco is also where I found the excellent Caffè Pasticceria Palumbo ://www.facebook.com/caffepalumbo/ a great place to stop and have a glass of beer and a cake, or even, of course, a coffee. The piazza is a good place to just sit in the sun or to find a spot in the shade to think about Byron and Teresa or Dante and Beatrice, or about anything you fancy. My walks round the city often led me here.

Classense Library, part of a Camaldolese monastery in central Ravenna, is an active civic and research library, one of the largest and oldest in Italy, and also the custodians of a uniquely complete collection of first editions of Dante’s works. The cloisters are also a lovely place to sit and read or to discuss university exams or just to sit and think.

Walking round the streets in Ravenna’s historic centre, there are, of course, restaurants and bars a plenty, but, one last Dante reference, I promise, you can also ‘Walk Ravenna with the Divine Comedy’, the Camminare Ravenna con la Divina Commedia – I loved this idea. At various stops along the way you can use the QR codes on your phone to stop and pause with extracts from Dante. Yes, Ravenna is a truly civilised place.

You can also stop and pause for a beer outside the Osteria Enoteca Ca’ de Vèn, or, better still, you could go inside for a fine meal based in Emiglia-Romagna culinary traditions. https://cadeven.it/

It was a very hot when I was in Ravenna, in June 2024, so it was not surprising that a drink al fresco was a popular pastime, not just for me. It was also possible to watch the football because Euro 2024 was in progress, and sadly, but philosophically, received here (well, this is Ravenna). On a humid night in the city’s main square, Piazza del Populo, Italy lost 1 – 0 to Spain.

In a street just off Piazza del Populo, is one of the best restaurants I found. Al Cairoli, in Via Cairoli, is friendly, stylish and the menu and wine list is gourmet class. It was a special experience – repeated.

https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/osteria-dei–ravennahttps://ristorantealcairoli.it/

Like the nearby Basilica di San Francesco, the 5th century Basilica di Sant’Agata Maggiore was considerably altered by an earthquake in the 17th century, with the loss of most of its mosaics. In the 18th century, there were further changes with the addition of baroque ’embellishments’, mercifully, these were removed in the late 19th century and early 20th century and further restoration was needed in the 1960s and 1980s to remedy the near destruction of part of the church during the Second World War. The result in 2024, for all the losses, is a beautiful and uncluttered church with sensitive attention given to the many original details that were discovered from the original building. An excellent example of what can be gained by such skilful restoration of much altered monuments. It is an oasis of peace.

Not far from Sant’Agata, there is another fine but traditional restaurant on a quiet side street in central Ravenna, Via Cerchio. Trattoria al Cerchio is charming and welcoming with a friendly and hard-working staff, great food and, a special and unexpected treat, framed quotes from Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron on the walls. Most of the clientele, with few exceptions, were Italian and many seemed to be regulars. It felt like the real Italian experience, even with English and Anglo-Irish writers on the wall. This place is well worth finding. I went there often and stayed longer than planned having an altogether excellent time. https://www.facebook.com/trattoriaalcerchio/?locale=it_IT

On the Via Roma, not far from where I was staying, is the Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna, MAR, where I caught an impressive exhibition of 20th and 21st century mosaics that proved, if it still needed proving, that Ravenna is still the true international capital of this art form. It was a surprise to me to learn that Ravenna’s twin city is Chichester, in my own home county of Sussex, where some fine Romano-British mosaics have been discovered. This twinning makes me doubly fond of Ravenna.

The 2024 Ravenna Festival sponsored the reorchestration of the American Minimalist composer, Philip Glass’s music for the third of his Qatsi Trilogy, Naqqoyqatsi (2002) when he worked with the American director Godfrey Reggio. Glass rearranged his score to be a closer match to his scores for the two earlier non-narrative films, Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Powaqqatsi (1988) (the names comes from the Hopi language – qatsi meaning life). The three films were screened on three consecutive nights, with Glass’ Philip Glass Ensemble playing along with the solo cellist, Erica Piccotti, the Orchestra della Toscana, the Choir of Siena Cathedral and the Children’s Choir from the Accademia del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. The veteran conductor, a long-term Philip Glass collaborator, was Michael Riesman. It was a thrilling experience to see these still adventurous and modernist feature-length films with such a large group of musicians performing live in the beautiful Teatro Dante Alighieri (opened in 1852). The three films, now wearing the same musical clothes, made their full impact when screened as a live and truly epic three day event.

The Trattoria Il Buon Gusto, just outside the old city walls on Via Cesarea, is a small, owner-run and excellent restaurant, a kind of casa da casa, home from home, with informal and personal service that is also very reasonably priced. It was also only a very short walk from where I was staying. A great place. http://trattoriadelbuongusto.com/index.asp#chisiamo ↗

The city of Ravenna is near but not on the Adriatic Coast – it’s a twenty minute bus ride away – regular buses for the beach go from the Railway station. Look for Marina di Ravenna and the journey is easy.

This was June and very sunny and hot, so I was surprised to find the beaches so uncrowded during the week – and not over-crowded at the weekends. The sand is white and soft, the sea blue and warm, so there was every reason to make the journey here even if you don’t want to try the Ravenna fashion for Beach Tennis. I went to Big Mamma beach – well it was near the bus stop – and it was civilised, friendly, with loungers and umbrellas, a friendly bagnino, and perfectly good food and drinks. The swimming was truly wonderful.

Apart from trips to the sea and a bus ride to Classe, everything was easily accessible on foot in Ravenna and walking round this lovely city was an interesting pleasure in its own right.

I was staying by one of the ancient gates in the city walls, Porta Nuova, some of which still stand. I felt at home almost straight away and even my usual habits, such as morning martial arts practice, could carry on up there on my roof terrace dojo.

I will write about the sensational mosaics in Ravenna’s Unesco World Heritage sites in the next blog – here is the link. https://wolfiewolfgang.com/ravenna-the-mosaics-essential-sites-and-sights-to-see/

I came to Ravenna for the mosaics, of course, but after the Ancient Romans, the Goths, and the others, I was excited to find so much more and to discover that Ravenna is still a cultural capital for many of the things we still value, or should still value in Europe.

The post Ravenna – Italy’s forgotten capital, a beautiful city of mosaics and poets. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I’ve been catching up with the blogs on my website, sadly neglected for over a year, but now back in action. In fact, I’ve neglected it for longer than that, considering I hadn’t posted anything about my foreign travels since 2015, when I went on two trips, to Italy https://wolfiewolfgang.com/it-was-all-mistake-my-three-inspiring/ and to Portugal https://wolfiewolfgang.com/my-time-in-lisbon-portugal-was-pure/

During my travels, I usually take my camera and, when armed with that, I am unstoppable. Looking through my photographs recently, I was worried that soon it would be too late to remember the details and, reluctantly, I would have to abandon ideas of writing about my experiences abroad.

So, to make it up with all those photographs lying dormant and ignored in my crazily crowded computer files, I decided a few weeks ago to do a blog-marathon and write these 17 blogs about my European travels over the the last 7 years – 7 years of real change in all our lives, here in the UK, and around the world.

Four failed UK prime ministers – plus another one soon.

There was Covid and Trump

Putin

Netanyahu

The world definitely changed and some of those changes were made only too apparent on my various journeys around Europe. I’m hoping that although things have got so bad, they can’t get much worse before, who knows, the bad guys are forced out, and the rest of the world will be pressured by the rest of humanity to make a real change for the better.

With apologies to all you disenfranchised UK citizens, and on a totally selfish note, there was at least some good news for me since 2017. I got my Irish citizenship and retained my EU passport.

If you want to look up my latest set of travel blogs, the links are below:

Amalfi Coast, Italy (2017): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/on-the-amalfi-coast/

Naples and Sorrento, Italy (2017) : https://wolfiewolfgang.com/category/travel/page/2/

Puglia: Polignano a mare, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-puglia-polignano-a-mare/

Puglia: Lecce, Bari and Trani, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/some-other-towns-my-journey-through-puglia-in-southern-italy/

Puglia: Alberobello to Matera, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/on-the-road-from-polignano-to-matera-via-alberobello/

Milan, Italy (2019): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/milan-city-of-fashion-music-and-art-even-in-the-rain/

Naples, Italy (2020): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/back-in-naples-weeks-before-covid-soon-we-were-all-told-to-stay-home/

Pompeii, Italy (2020): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/in-2020-i-went-to-pompeii-and-then-to-troy/

Tropea, Calabria, Italy (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/tropea-taking-it-easy-in-calabria/

Lahti, Finland (2022):https://wolfiewolfgang.com/flying-to-lahti-in-finland-for-sibelius/

Helsinki, Finland (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/a-week-in-helsinki/

Ainola, Finland (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/a-week-in-helsinki/

Tallinn, Estonia (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/day-trip-to-tallinn-in-estonia/

Leipzig, Germany (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/an-easter-meeting-in-leipzig-with-js-bach-300-years-on/

Berlin, Germany (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/im-a-berliner-now/

Sysmä, Finland: (2023) https://wolfiewolfgang.com/away-from-it-all-at-the-centre-of-all-things-in-rural-finland/

Lahti, Finland, (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/back-to-lahti-in-september-2023/

The post I’ve caught up with blogging about the last seven years of my European adventures. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

It is early September in 2023, I am sitting in a rocking chair in a cottage, a converted 19th century log house, in a little village called Virtaa, 7.7 kilometres from a small town called Sysmä. The cottage is in the grounds of an old manor house, Virtaan Kartano, owned by Juhani and Tiina Stjernvall. It is a working farm for Juhani and Tiina, but for me, left to my own devices, just here to find peace in the magnificent vastness of the Finnish countryside, it was an oasis – one haunted by the voice of Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957), whose music, at the annual Sibelius Festival in Lahti, first brought me to this hypnotic country. I spent a week here, before doing south to Lahti for the annual Sibelius Festival and, during most of that time, a piece of Sibelius’ music kept up its persistent call.

Tapiola (1926) is a one movement tone poem for orchestra, loosely about Tapio, the spirit of the forest as found in Finland’s epic creation poem, Kalevala. Sibelius wasn’t usually cooperative about the ‘meaning’ of his work, but his publisher asked him to explain the legend behind Tapiola, and then converted the composer’s reluctant reply into a poem:

Wide-spread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,
Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;
Within them dwells the Forest’s mighty God,
And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.

If there is a mighty god in Sibelius’s tone poem, it is an ambiguous one, it probably is more brooding dream than god, but, believe me, if you go walking in Finland’s forests, you will feel the presence of Tapio. I did.

Virtaan Kartano, the farm, is in a typical Finnish landscape of forest and lakes, with the River Tainionvirta leading to Lake Päijänne. This was the first week in September and, therefore, the beginning of the end of the summer season, maybe a few weeks earlier there would have been more people around. The god Tapio may have scared them away, making the place a silent haven – just for me. I doubt it, but that is how if felt. I was under his spell, and could only have left my rocking chair for another chair outside on the porch to sit there all day looking and not looking at the fields and the trees beyond them, and wondering what forces really hide in these forests.

I did move back inside later to have a sauna, the Finnish way, eat some food from Sysmä’s supermarket – like a farmers’ market in terms of quality. A glass of wine and then I’d read some of the Kalevala on my Kindle – then it was back to watching and listening on the next day, and so on.

Juhani, drove past a couple of times on his tractor, and our conversations flowed in an impressively economic Finnish use of friendly monosyllables. Mostly he was occupied in another part of the forest,.

The splendid cockerel and his harem of hens, were a constant clucking murmur, heard like a day-time lullaby from across the yard…

…and of course, there was always an alarm call in the morning.

There were eggs too – warm from the hens, a present from them, via Juhani, for the breakfast table.

From the Sysmä supermarket there was reindeer cheese. It was delicious on hot toast. I didn’t see any reindeer, but knew they were out there somewhere, probably further North, and I send them my thanks.

In case you are wondering, and I didn’t know this, female reindeer, like the males, have antlers, but they keep them through the winter, unlike the males. Don’t ask about Father Christmas’ Rudolph, he is probably a she.

Virtaan Kartano is a wonderful place and, if you want to find out more, here is the link: https://www.virtaankartano.fi/en

There was no problem finding somewhere for my morning martial arts practice here. This must be one of the most tranquil dojos I have ever had for my Chinese-style White Crane Kung-fu. The style I try to learn has moves inspired by the movements of the white cranes still common in China.

I was in the middle of the tai-chi move called the golden cockerel stands on one leg, when an extraordinary sound came from behind me. It wasn’t a Chinese white crane, but a group of Common Cranes, the first I had seen in the wild.

I had never heard their calls before, and I had no idea they could be so loud. I know they can be found in other countries too, but those Finnish cranes were thrilling when they came flying over the forest calling out like instruments in a Sibelius symphony before landing in the field behind me.

This is the land of forests and lakes, a tenth of Finland’s land area is covered by water, and 73.9%, or 66%, but definitely a lot more than half of the land is forested. It really is one of the biggest rural spaces in Europe.

The river here, River Tainionvirta, is rich in salmon, and the furthest river south in Finland for salmon fishing. It was also a bathing spot for the inhabitants of my log cabin.

It wasn’t hot in there, but I’m sure it get a lot colder when the snows arrive. I suspect you can’t have the full experience of Finland without going in for some wild swimming, even better if there is a sauna nearby. It was my first time swimming in a Finnish river, to the fish seemed as interested in watching me as I was watching them. When I say fish, I mean big fish. Honestly. As big as this.

The main activity for me in this inspiring place was just to go walking, breathing in the clean air, listening for crane calls, and watching the occasional jumping fish. I took a lot of photographs and was pleased I had packed my old Canon EOS. For much of each day, I was the typical one man and his camera. Here are some of my shots. They are not exaggerating when they say Finland is the land of forests and lakes.

After a week in this spiritually uplifting place, I could genuinely salute the sun in gratitude every morning before starting my tai-chi, feeling that I had grounded myself here in Finland, set down some roots, literally under my feet, but also, if I dare say this, I felt that I had put down roots into my soul here too. It might have been Tapio, the Finnish god of the forests, he was there in the low-lying sun, it might have been Sibelius, he was always playing in my head, but I think coming here, I was simply opened up to spirit of the Nordic world that opens for us if we imbue its spirit in silence.

Here is Sibelius’ tone poem, played by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, a worthy addition to the cannon of his seven completed symphonies, and a major consolation for the absence of his destroyed eighth symphony. The opening phrase that encircles the whole piece, one way or another, haunted me during my wanderings through the Finnish countryside – and it still does. It is possibly describing what you might find in the forest if you are bold enough to go there. I felt I was getting a glimpse out there of the ‘silence’ of the natural world in the sense that Sibelius meant in his long search to empty classical music down, or, more properly, up, to its profound and ideal of union with that silence. In this music there is beauty, but also fear, and a sense of the inexplicable intercommunication between us as individuals and the great mysteries of the other. It is almost enough to frighten us so much that we daren’t walk into that forest. I’m glad that I did.

The post Away from it all at the centre of all things in rural Finland. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after Germany’s reunification and the city was still like a building construction site. Then it was possible to travel from the former Western Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate to the former East and see the immediate change from glitz to drab. This was all in the process of change. Twenty-five years ago, I was working on the English language dub of a film with my German colleague and friend from EuroArts, Bernd Hellthaler and the Hungarian film director, István Szabó. I was staying in a small hotel on the well-known and poetically-named street Unter den Linden (under the linden trees) that runs straight, East to West, through the centre of Berlin. I had the opportunity at that time to discuss, with these two intelligent, liberal-minded, and much more informed people than me, what was going to happen in Germany after the great change. Their mood was of cautious optimism. In 2023, I was interested to see how Berlin must have changed in those twenty-five years.

This time, I was happy to get an unexpected message from Bernd soon after my arrival in Berlin, and, as well as being pleased to see that he is still the same charming guy, and a key figure in music broadcasting, even though he has now retired, he is also still very much the pragmatist who answers political questions with his characteristic shrug. We had a convivial and still largely optimistic meeting with coffee and kuchen, but these days conversations about East and West are dominated by talk of Russia and Ukraine, but not without an opportunity grabbed to rib me about the UK’s unpopular decision over Brexit. I was happy this time to be able to wave my new Irish passport showing that I’m still very much in the EU.

I was staying here in ‘quirky,’ ‘arty,’ ‘gritty,’ ‘edgy,’ or just plain ‘trendy, Kreuzberg, a student quarter, south of the city centre, Mitte, in a ‘trendy’ and ‘arty’ apartment, next to a very cool bar on one side and a hipster restaurant on the other, with more down the street on both sides and Babylon Kino, an arthouse cinema at one end, in a district that has almost wall-to-wall graffiti.

Very soon, this bar became a kind of home – a place to go if you wanted to go out somewhere interesting but couldn’t be bothered to go far. Next-door was often far enough for me, especially when it was as pretty as this place.

It became the rendez-vous of choice when meeting up with family and friends, who also happened to be in Berlin, before moving on a few yards up the street for dinner. Max & Moritz was a really classy but informal ‘German’ restaurant, serving authentic, no really, German food.

And then, when it was time for bed, I only needed to stagger a few steps and I was there,

With the blinds open, I used to wake up in the morning to a leafy inner-courtyard view and, if I was lucky, a sighting or two of the local red squirrels, who might have been watching me.

Every morning, rain or no rain, I headed to the end of the street to a small square called Oranienplatz, an open space in this area of dense housing.

Oranienplatz supplied me with a gritty, in the literal sense, square for my martial arts practice…and so, yet again, I had found an ideal Kung-fu and tai-chi dojo. My audience, most mornings, was a trio of elderly Turkish women. One of them, on my last day, did a funny and unexpected imitation of my upper crane block.

If Kreuzberg is ‘edgy,’ it only seemed like that a couple of times at the entrance to the Kottbusser Tor metro station, when it was probably wise not to pay too much attention to the furtive huddles of young men rolling small polythene bags into silver foil. If we are talking about crime in Kreuzberg, the statistics tell us that serious crime is minimal here, with at worst, some drug peddling and drunken behaviour. I was careful, but not fearful in this vibrant part of the city.

Kottbusser Tor station was the quickest way to get into the city centre, so I went there a lot, excited, the first time, to be on my way to Berlin Alexanderplatz, the location of one of my favourite books. Alfred Döblin’s montage-style 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. It is the story of Franz, an ex-con who is drawn back to crime in the working class districts around the famous Berlin square, in the closing days of the Weimar Republic and the beginnings of the rise of Nazism.

The novel was made into a masterly and, yes, unforgettable tv series in 1980 (now remastered) by film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Here is a short trailer for the remastered videos, sorry, but I could only find the version with French subtitles. It is still one of my very favourite TV series – all these years later.

When my train got into Alexanderplatz station, I knew that it would be a totally different experience to the novel, the series, and even the historical Alexanderplatz, which was destroyed by bombing in World War 2.

The station is beautiful – colourful, bright and clean…

…and up on street level, it has gained in shopping mall convenience what it has lost of its, yes, ‘edgy’ reputation. And, I forgot to tell you, it rained a lot during most of my stay. Apparently, it really can rain in Berlin.

Nothing, though, can rob me of my inner image of Alexanderplatz, even if, I have to admit, I am more that a little bit disappointed by its rebuild.

These days Alexanderplatz mostly exists indoors, like here in the giant Galeria Kaufhof – but if nothing else, it makes a welcome refuge from the rain.

I was a brave and often rather a damp sight-seer around Berlin city centre, but that didn’t stop me appreciating the mammoth changes that have happened since I was last here twenty-five years ago. I had often wondered how the city would handle its reconstruction, or maybe I should say series of reconstructions, since the long tale of the war and its consequences took its toll on what was once a handsome city with a long history of welcoming people from other countries and cultures.

I was intrigued to see what the new architects had been doing to replace the shattered centre of Berlin – there are some wonderful new buildings by innovative architects, but not maybe, in the very middle of town, the so-called Island of Museums, where they have gone for rebuilding replicas of the originals. It was a marathon job, of course, and one to admire, but, I couldn’t help feeling that the soul of those buildings has been lost in the replications. It is not really for me to say, but I would have liked to have seen a new cathedral built here instead of the monumental duplicate that they built in its place.

I love a lot of the new buildings and admire the way Berlin, and Germany in general, has become a modern culture not afraid to recognise its past, even the most distressing aspects of it. The well-known British comedy series, Fawlty Towers, had a running gag where the Brits are repeatedly told ‘don’t mention the war’. I never felt that I had to pretend when I was in Berlin. I was especially impressed by the number of open spaces, bomb sites, that instead of being simply built over to make a white-washed new city centre, a few prime sites, where the Wehrmacht had its centre, have been left either untouched or dedicated to a grieving and dignified form of remembrance as in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermodeten Juden Europas), designed by Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold (2005) where 4.7 acres of valuable real estate in the centre of Berlin has been covered in a maze of 2,711 concrete slabs with an underground Ort der Information (Place of Information) that holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims.

Not far from there is a small inner city carpark which is the unmarked site of Hitler’s bunker, and not much further away, one of the last Nazi era constructions, once the largest office building in Europe, built in 1936, as the headquarters of the Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, then the House of Ministries during the Democratic Republic and now, bizarrely, it is the headquarters of the German Finance Ministry.

Running along the side of the indestructible building, are some of the remains of the Berlin Wall, now a memorial too, for all those who died trying to cross it into West Germany during the DDR, or GDR (German Democratic Republic). The derelict land in front of the wall, still a kind of No-Man’s Land, it is, I was told, the site of the Gestapo and SS Headquarters. It seems that the land, like the Biblical Potter’s Field is just too contaminated to have any use other than one for mourning the dead.

Thinking about the Berlin Wall and the days of East Germany, the DDR, I visited the DDR Museum, a brilliantly designed and curated record of what ordinary life would have been like during that era. Sure, the repression and autocracy is there, some dreams too, but it is also a museum to a world which was temptingly so much less materialistic than ours is today.

Life for that mystical tribe known as ‘ordinary people’ had its ambitions restricted, certainly, but looking round the museum, I couldn’t help feeling that those who didn’t become victims of the Stasi, were freed from the negative effects of too many choices – what kind of deodorant, washing powder, or kitchen units? Does it really matter? I thought. Maybe they had something there.

Then, of course, there was the dead hand and chilly smile of autocratic bureaucracy, and my mild envy for those people disappeared like a short-lived daydream.

A strong desire for the new in 1968 is unsurprising. In those years, the new often meant building on bomb sites. Berlin had been given, not as a gift, a rubble-covered tabula rasa for building on. The Neue Nationalgalerie building was one of those masterpieces, designed by the famous Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a vast ground floor exhibition space with a lower floor for the permanent collection (Picasso, Munch, Mondriaan and Calder among others). It was closed for six years in 2015 because the design led to many technical problems, especially cracking glass and condensation. The British architect, David Chipperfield, undertook the major renovation and the gallery was opened again in 2021.

The main new exhibition here on my visit was the series Birkenau (2014) by the German artist Gerhard Richter. The works are based on four photographs taken in the concentration camp that Richter has gradually transposed with charcoal and oil paint until they became abstracts with the original drawings invisible. They are positioned in front of four matching mirrors that add to their own level of transposition. Other parts of the exhibition show over-painted photographs in Richter’s long exploration of how to represent the Holocaust in art.

Another brave new 1960’s building in Berlin is the Philharmonie, opened in 1963, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Beethovens 9th Symphony, the Choral – a hot ticket, I should imagine. The old Philharmonie building was destroyed by British bombs in World War 2, but there can be few complains about its wonderful replacement. The Berlin Philharmonic were away on tour when I was in Berlin, but I managed to get tickets for a concert at the Philharmonie with Berlin’s other world-class orchestra, the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin (the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra), with their principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski. They were playing Shostakovich’s excitingly modern Symphony No. 4 in a performance that is still playing in my head over a year later.

Before the symphony, there was the German premiere of a new work by the Russian composer Elena Firsova. Her Piano Concerto for the pianist Yefim Bronfman, is, she says ‘very personal and reflected my meditations about the mystery and meaning of Death.’ She quotes a phrase from Beethoven’s late String Quartet op. 135, over which Beethoven had written: ‘Muss es sein?’ (Does it have to be?). Born in St Petersburg and a student in Moscow, Elena Firsova now lives in London, but before she left Russia, she, like Shostakovich, was condemned by the authorities for her modernist tendencies. The Congress of the Composers’ Union in 1979 attacked her and two other composers of her generation: ‘Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov (her late husband) and Sofia Gubaidulina compose pointless and noisy mud…..they should be denied the right to represent Soviet music abroad.’

We were not denied the chance to hear this thought-provoking new work with its very human struggle for meaning in life and, also, maybe death. I don’t think Stalin would have liked it, but Beethoven, and I think, Shostakovich would have approved.

Unsurprisingly she is dismayed by the war against Ukraine; it ‘fills me with deep shame, I count myself lucky I left Russia thirty years ago and was last there seventeen years ago.’

Here is a video taken at that performance of the Firsova Piano Concerto in Berlin on 18 April 2023

Shostakovich’s fourth symphony was composed in 1935/6 and has had a dramatic history as it is the last work that Shostakovich wrote unfettered by the rules imposed on creative artists during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union. Pravda, the official newspaper was instructed by Stalin to write a critique which was a barely veiled personal attack on Shostakovich, who was at that time the brilliant enfant terrible among Soviet composers. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsenisk, which shared a lot of musical material with the fourth symphony, was called ‘muddle instead of music.’ Rehearsals had started for the premiere when it was announced that Shostakovich had withdrawn the work – probably to save the orchestra from Stalin’s wrath – and the symphony wasn’t premiered until 1961, long after Stalin’s death. Something died in Shostakovich after this….the fiery and dangerously challenging part of his creative genius was at least partially paralysed if not killed outright. He certainly never wrote anything like this symphony again.

At the Philharmonie last April it was definitely music instead of muddle – we heard the voice of a radical young man shouting out loud for his freedom from oppression. Berlin felt like the right place to hear him, having walked round the remains of Hitler’s Reich and the last remains of Berlin’s Soviet wall.

I looked to see if there was a recording of that performance but couldn’t find anything, so here is a short except of it played by the Berlin Philharmonic, in the same hall, conducted by Simon Rattle.

The Old National Gallery (Alte Nationalgalerie) sits in a prime spot on Berlin’s Museum Island and I could have spent my whole holiday here. It was founded to exhibit the works of major German artists, but later it was expanded to include many major 19th century French and Dutch artists….worth a visit in itself. You can see Cezanne, Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Daumier, Fantin-Latour, Jongkind, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Rodin, Signat and Van Gogh. I shall ignore them, love them as I do, for the purposes of this blog, because a lot the German artists were new to me and I want to share them. I have long admired Friedrich, Böcklin, Klinger and Beckmann, but the others mentioned here, and many more, changed my perspective about German art in the 19th century, so dominated, for me at least, by the great French schools of Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, Realism, Impressionism and Expressionism.

And then I came to the pictures of King Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712 – 1786), painted with a propagandist brush by Adolph Menzel in his days as a history painter. Frederick was the sensitive and artistic son of an autocratic father, Frederick William I, the ‘Soldier King.’ Frederick, the unlikely heir, was first admired, or sneered at, for his interest in music and philosophy who, later in life, became interested in armies and soldiers and consequently, war. He modernised Prussian bureaucracy, reformed the justice system, and favoured the freedom of the press. Here in Menzel’s picture, he is seen as Old Fritz (der Alter Fritz), friend of the poor, who is going to be way-laid by a poor couple about to present him with a petition.

He was all of those things, but we would be getting him wrong if we really beleive he was a man of the people, an honest Joe. He was, for all his liberal ideas, a firm believer in Enlightened Absolutism and, whatever else he thought he was, he was certain that he was the number one guy in the country – the first servant of the state.

Is was tough being the lord of all you survey, so, I suppose it was understandable that sensitive and artistic Frederick, needed a beautiful summer palace to escape to when he needed some rest and refreshment. I had a long-held wish to see the place, romantically named Sanssouci (without worry) his version of Dun Roamin’, a kind of mini-Versailles, where, like Northern France, some of the gilt feels a bit washed out by the rain.

He was, as far as I know, happy here. He made the place just as he liked it….a bit camp, gilded and glittering, but also small in terms of other palaces, private too and, in his inner sanctum, simple and unpretentious.

The glitz was mostly reserved for the main reception rooms like this, his music room, where JS Bach’s son C P E Bach, played for him on the harpsichord and also accompanied the musical king’s flute. It was at Frederick’s other palace, the one at Potsdam, (bombed and destroyed during World War 2), that he persuaded CPE Bach to bring his father, Johann Sebastian along to play for him. The result, now famous, was that JS improvised multiple fugues on a tune composed by Frederick and later elaborated them further into what became A Musical Offering ( Das Musikalische Opfer, BWV 1079), one of the composers late and greatest masterpieces.

I suspect Frederick the Great was happiest though, later in his reign, to be alone in his study, reading, writing and practising his flute, and, from time-to-time, gazing out of the window at his favourite statue, placed there perfectly framed by his window.

It was here, in his armchair, in his seventies, crippled by asthma and gout, that he died in 1786, leaving instructions to be buried at Sanssouci next to his beloved greyhounds.

Unlikely but apt, somehow, I thought when I came across this framed screen-print of the old king, by Andy Warhol (1968). Weary, paranoid, camped up, and slightly ridiculous, the old man seems weighed down by monarchy and the impossibilities of finding happiness as an enlightened absolutist, or even here, sans souci – without worry. I’m sorry about all those wars, about the Partition of Poland, and for Frederick’s cruel treatment by his father, who had Frederick’s closest, and much loved, male friend beheaded in front of him after they’d tried to run away together. But, if for nothing else, I’m happy that Frederick invited Johann Sebastian Bach – the main reason for my trip to Germany – to come to Potsdam and to write one last masterpiece.

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Even people who don’t think they like classical music know and even like at least some of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750). Those who love classical music are mostly in consensus that he was probably the greatest of all the classical composers. I certainly feel that he stands tall not just in the world of music, but in the world of human creativity too. I believe that we are all a bit dwarfed by Bach and his like. – dwarfed but inspired, moved, uplifted and even healed. He is definitely a giant. Last year, in April 2023, I spent two weeks over Easter in Germany – the first half of the trip was spent in Leipzig – an impressive, beautiful and highly cultured city, formerly in East Germany, and now a thriving part united Germany.

Leipzig, for all music-lovers, is known as the city of music and of composers, like Mahler, Schumann and Mendelssohn, but most of all, it’s a city known as the spiritual home of Johann Sebastian Bach and 2023/4 is a significant anniversary year because over 300 years ago, in June 1723, 38-year-old Bach was appointed musical director of the St Thomas Choir, meaning that he would head up music in the two Lutheran churches of the thriving trading hub of Leipzig – Thomaskirche, St Thomas Church, and Nikolaikirche, St Nicholas Church. The St Thomas choir, which was founded in 1212, which sang in both churches, was internationally renowned as one of the finest ensembles of the day – as it still is in 2024.

My Easter holiday in 2023 was dedicated to celebrating the great man here in his home town where the majority of his masterworks were written. Leipzig is mounting a two-year festival, Bach 300, to mark the anniversary with a series of Bach concerts and events.

Bach’s monumental statue stands outside St Thomas Church, it is the familiar figure of the be-wigged grandee in his elegant 18th century finery – as in his most well-known portrait….

… Bach, maybe of all composers, is a man for all eras, not just 18th century, so I like to think of him as in the bust I saw in Leipzig’s Bach Museum – the man without a wig, with no fancy clothes, an everyman and a superman.

He is not just superman, but he is also immortal, or his music is, so it was a minor shock, a moment of disbelief, to find his grave stone set into the floor of St Thomas Church. I don’t accept that he is dead, or that he will ever die.

The big ticket at this Easter festival was a performance of Bach’s St John Passion (1724) played in one of the two churches that he mostly wrote for, with their particular acoustics and architecture already familiar to him. It was originally intended to be premiered here at St Thomas Church, but Leipzig council asked for a last minute change to St Nicholas Church. The St John Passion was first performed down the road at St Nicholas Church, after some adjustments made by Bach, on Good Friday on the 7 April 1724, three hundred years ago. He revised the work the following year for performance at St Thomas Church, his first intention must have been to do the work here where I heard it last April. You can watch a video of that performance if you scroll down to the bottom of this page. If you can’t listen to the whole two hours worth of music, dip in and out of it. It was an inspired event, with the choir, vocal soloists, along with the organ and the Gewandhaus Orchestra performing from the organ loft at the West end of the church, as it would have done in Bach’s day. The soloists were internationally-aclaimed Bach singers, Julian Prégardien (tenor, the evangelist) Tomáš Král (bass, Christus) Anna Prohaska (soprano soloist) Andreas Scholl (alto soloist) Raphael Wittmer (tenor soloist) Tobias Berndt (bass soloist) with the Thomanerchor Leipzig, and the Gewandhausorchester conducted by Andreas Reize.

I was sitting in the gallery with a good view of the performers, an excellent position for sound which, I am told is much nearer to Bach’s acoustics since the removal of some of the 19th century resoration work. Behind me, up there was a stained-glass window dedicated to the composer, with his portrait at the centre.

The audience downstairs that night, were, as you’d expect, facing the altar at the East end of the church, so they had their backs to the performers….less distracting I guess, but I don’t think it would catch on in modern concert halls.

Bach lived across the square from St Thomas’ Church with his wife and large family of children along with servants and live-in students. It was a busy household right in the middle of this vortex of musical activity. A concentration of musical creativity that would, quite literally, change the course of musical history.

Down the street, a five minute walk, turn left and go straight on, another couple of minutes, and you can’t miss it – St Nicholas Church – Bach’s other church. The great man would have done this walk almost on a daily basis and I had a constant feeling when I walked round Leipzig, that I really was walking in Bach’s footsteps.

St Nicholas Church now looks different inside from Bach’s day because the fancy neo-classical decor in added in the late 18th century. It is still a fine building with a superb acoustic and it cannot be denied that this is still an essential part of Bach-world.

St Nicholas Church’s choir was renamed BachChor Leipzig in 2006, and it now has responsibility for all of the church’s services and concerts in St Nicholas Church, under the direction of its director, Markus Kaufmann. Over the Easter weekend in 2023, apart from hearing the St John Passion up the street at St Thomas’, I heard the BachChor Leipzig perform Bach’s Easter Oratorio here in St Nicholas and, on Good Friday, one of the best singing of the week, in a setting of Via Crucis, the Stations of the Cross – I couldn’t find information on the composer (maybe a reader of this can tell me) but it was unaccompanied choral singing at its very best. Bach would, I hope, be proud of the choirs continuing the great choral music tradition in these two churches.

There was more Bach at Leipzig’s splendid modern concert hall the Gewandhaus, home for the Gewandhaus Orchestra (directed for some time by Mendelssohn, no less), one of the most celebrated orchestras in the world and one I was happy to hear live in the St John Passion. On this night there was a very different style of performance here. Bach and the Dutch composer Dieterich Buxtehude, were performed on a smaller scale by the chamber choir, Collegium Vocale Leipzig and Die Merseburger Hofmusik, an early music ensemble who perform on original instruments, directed by the conductor and organist, Michael Schönheit.

The concert consisted of Buxtehude’s great cycle of seven vocal cantatas for solo voices and instrumental ensemble, known as Membra Jesu nostri (1680), a series of aria and chorus settings of meditations on parts of Christ’s crucified body (the feet, the knees, the hands, the sides, the breast, the heart, and the face). The idea might seem strange to us now, but the music is sublime. Buxtehude was perhaps Bach’s greatest predecessor as the master of music in Germany. The young Bach made a 400 km walk to hear Buxtehude play the organ in 1705 – and, apparently, he never regretted the journey. We can tell by listening to Buxtehude, just how much Bach learnt from him.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Bach – his chorale cantata for chorus and orchestra, Christ lag in Todes Banden, (1707) (Christ lay in death’s bonds) based on a hymn by Martin Luther. It was one of his earliest church cantatas, but also one that he performed years later, in 1725, St Thomas Church. In between these two works, Michael Schönheit played a number of Bach’s organ pieces on both the small portative organ and the giant Gewandhaus organ, with thrilling effect.

So, my visit to Leipzig was Bach-dominated, but he wasn’t the only composer with a very visible presence in this most cultured of cities.

The Schumanns, Robert and Clara, husband and wife, had an apartment in a house here in Clara’s home town. They were both composers, Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856) is known for his Piano Concerto, his solo piano music and his song cycles, but Clara Schumann (Wieck) (1819 – 1896) was better known in her lifetime as one of the leading classical pianists of the 19th century. Their’s is one of the best-known love stories in classical music, and it is difficult not to hear their love in their compositions. I didn’t visit the Schumann museum but I did get a strange thrill walking part their house every day and imagining the domestic lives of that great couple.

Another Leipzig composer who had an important influence on its musical life, was Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847), a musical prodigy, one of the most talented composers of his generation, he was, from a young age, recognised as a composer, a pianist, organist and conductor. He had one of the most comfortable upbringings of all famous composers, but he often struggled with the conflict of the bourgeois life, his musical facility, and his creative genius. His best works, the Italian Symphony, the Octet, his last String Quartet and his music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are up there in the echelon of 19th century masterpieces, but a lot of his lesser works are characterised by his inherent conservatism which had an all too dampening effect on a number of composers who followed his example.

Felix Mendelssohn and his more recently appreciated composer sister Fanny Mendelssohn, came from the rich Leipzig banking family who ran the Mendelssohn & Co. bank, one of the major German banks in the 19th and early 20th centuries. the brilliant siblings were the grandchildren of the renowned philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786). Felix Mendelssohn lived in an apartment in Leipzig after taking the job as director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835 until his death in 1847.

I couldn’t get tickets for the Leipzig Opera, which was sad. Mendelssohn conducted here and Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911) was once the opera director, but I was in Leipzig for Bach, so I didn’t try as hard as I might’ve to see their zany new production of Bach contemporary Handel’s musically thrilling opera, Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724). Another time, I hope. Here’s their trailer to show you the kind of work they are doing here at Leipzig opera.

I did get to visit the magnificent glass box that is Leipzig’s Museum of Fine Arts (Museum der bildenden Künste), with its collection of works from the late Middle Ages, especially Old German and early Netherlandish medieval paintings and German art of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particularly good collection of works by Max Klinger (1857 – 1920), including his controversial ‘topless’ Beethoven. There is also a collection of paintings, not well-known outside of Germany, perhaps, of artists from the GDR (German Democratic Republic) period. These were certainly new to me, giving new insight into every day life, even dull life, in Leipzig in the days of the Soviet Union.

It is too easy to forget that Leipzig hasn’t always been such a relaxed and comfortable place to visit. It is also maybe too easy to dwell on the bad things too and to only see bomb craters where exciting modern architecture stands today. It is also still possible to see some of the old pre-mid 20th century buildings in an enjoyable mix with the new. I found it tempting to imagine living here. I know that’s a common holiday sin, but I liked Leipzig a lot, with that mix or the old and the new, high culture and popular culture, treated with a sophisticated respect for the aesthetics of beauty and design..

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), another intellectual colossus, was a university student in Leipzig from 1765 to 1768. HIs masterwork, Faust (1772 – 1831), has a lively drunken scene in Auerbach’s Cellar, when Mephistopheles, the Devil, goes on his wild ride on a barrel, which possibly reflects the young Goethe’s at least occasionally riotous student life. Auerbach’s Cellar, somewhat restored, is still there and still selling food and drinks.

Mendelssohn is here too in statue form – in his own right as a great composer, but also, placed near to St Thomas Church, he is honoured as the man who revived the reputation of J.S.Bach in the 19th century, with his own conducting of Bach’s St Matthew here in 1829. Goethe was there at that Leipzig performance and said that hearing Bach revived was ‘like the distant roar of the sea.’

I was staying in a hotel across the road from the railway station, a walk away from the Bach churches and the museums, but also from the many restaurants and cafés that are an essential part of the Leipzig experience.

I not only found places for some of my favourites – coffee and croissants, German sausages, wonderful (the best) German rolls (brötchen) and Weißbier (white beer) – but I also found a space for my morning martial arts practice by these magnolia trees, across the road from the station, near to the hotel, and also to a busy procession of morning commuters. If I can do all 66 tai-chi moves undisturbed, then I feel I am at home. An elderly German woman, who had been watching me intently, even came up to me after I had finished and told me how much she’d enjoyed the show, having tried her own tai-chi style for over twenty years. She looked very fit from it too.

I also found time, inspired by this artistic city, to try my hand at photo-editing – it made me feel, almost, like I was an artist too.

Another Bach statue stands round the corner from the more well-known one by St Thomas Church, Mendelssohn helped raise the funds for its erection and it is a modest affair, easily missed, but it is believed that this is the truest likeness of the composer, and therefore a fitting way to say aufwiedersehen. Below is the recording of the St John Passion that I attended in St Thomas Church. It is well worth a watch.

Johann Sebastian Bach – Johannes Passion, BWV 245 (Gewandhausorchester with Andreas Reize, 6 Apr. 2023 Leipzig, Thomaskirche) Julian Prégardien (T) Tomáš Král (B) Anna Prohaska (S) Andreas Scholl (A) Raphael Wittmer (T) Tobias Berndt (B) Thomanerchor Leipzig

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