The Negozio Olivetti

The strangest five euros I spent this past summer were at the Negozio Olivetti, which is just off the Piazza San Marco in Venice and a place that would be very easy to brush right past. It is near one of the passages on the far end of the square, closer to the Museo Correr than the Basilica, just beneath the arched arcade that lines the square. The little museum is a faithfully recreated typewriter shop, and in its way a statement of how Italy's fame for commerce and innovation evolved into a flair for design and the curation of lovely things. 

The place caught my eye on a blisteringly hot afternoon when I almost by accident found myself in the tourist Bermuda Triangle between the Basilica and the Rialto. I don't know what precisely I thought I was doing, but when saw all those typewriters in the window I stopped in my tracks. I've been obsessed with the machines since I bought my first one at a second-hand electronics and gadget shop in Jersey City in 1999. My somewhat decrepit, rebuilt Royal electric was a great start, so fun to draft out things with its noisy ease. Through the years I picked up more typewriters, often as gifts from people who knew my weird fascination. My current favorite is an Olympia SM9 from the early or mid-1960s, a great triumph of West German industrial craftsmanship that is as reliable as it is heavy (it is lovingly described by some as only "semi-portable"). I love when it rests next to my MacBook on the desk, like the twin poles of function and design, content and form.

But I've always longed for, maybe lusted for, an Olivetti, especially a Lettera, preferably with some cool candy-colored casing. Those guys are sleek and portable, and their very "thwack" seems both more sharp while mysteriously effortless and nonchalant — sort of like the way Italian dudes can pull off wearing a scarf and jeans.

So on that summer day I had to know why there were all those vintage machines lined up in the window. I walked inside, which was mercifully air conditioned, into what looked like a showroom, or possibly a museum. Turns out it was both. I asked the lovely young lady reading a very serious, thick book behind a desk what this place was, and she explained in her heavily inflected English that it was basically both: a museum about a shop.

Back in 1957, the Olivetti company commissioned a Venetian architect named Carlo Scarpa to design what they hoped would be a "business card" for the company. The place was ostensibly supposed to sell typewriters, but also the brand. Already Venice was awash in tourists, and the company was ready to spend to make sure that some of those international jet-setters would get an eyeful of Italian typographical excellence.

And boy did they! The space was small and narrow and dark, but Scarpa completely reshaped it and loaded it with brilliant design elements. The most important feature is a central staircase right in the middle of the two-story space, with stone slabs that form a sort of zig-zag pattern that looks a bit like the Black Flag logo, and similarly gave me a sense of movement, of pistons pumping or the arms of a typewriter rhythmically fwapping the paper. The slabs are Aurisina marble, from near Trieste, which honored local building traditions, and the shelves are of rosewood with teak flooring, which almost feels Asian in its clarity. Simple steel rods hold the wood up, very modest and very functional. The light is diffuse and insistent, and the sound of clacking keys is played on the soundsystem, which is a touch of overkill if you ask me. The various typewriters — and calculators, cash registers, etc. — are displayed with the dignity they deserve. But it's a shame you can't touch anything. It's also a shame the whole thing takes minutes to get through, which makes the admission fee feel a bit steep (also, the reason I don't have any photos from the inside is that I refused to pay extra for the photo ticket).

The company closed the shop in 1997, but in recent years a government agency called the Fondo Ambiente Italiano got involved to restore it to what it was like in its glory days. The FAI lists as its mission to "serve as the mouthpiece for the interests and expectations of the public, actively supervising and intervening on their behalf across the country to defend Italy's landscape and cultural heritage."

Venice is the sort of place that demands the kind of melancholy and nostalgia that made me imagine whether in a hundred years or so we'll have in America a similar group that will painstakingly recreate the first Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The Garbage Patch's pavilion at the Venice Biennale

A work by Maria Cristina Finnuci at the Ca' Foscari reminds us of the problem of stray plastic in the ecosystem. 

The Berkshires to Istria, and back (2/2)

Rovinj, Croatia. Dawn, July 27.

I knew I was in for an interesting journey home from the start. I had bought the round-trip ferry ticket because it was cheaper, which meant I had to get to the dock very early — a lot of day-trippers get these tickets, so you have to present for boarding at 6 a.m. That makes for a sad night's sleep, but it's always rewarding to remind yourself what dawn looks like. That morning had a spectacular Mediterranean sunrise, with blues and pinks and golds like some Tiepolo absurdity.

I took a cab to the pier, and once there got into an argument with the driver. There was a dispute over the charge — 90 kunas (that's around $15) for a three minute ride, instead of the 60 kunas the meter read. This is apparently the official "shakedown tourists leaving town" rate, because it had been quoted to us the previous day when we called a different cab company. We had hung up on them.

There were a lot of people already milling about the good ship SS San Gwann, when a group of Venezia Lines officials appeared and set up a makeshift ticket counter. Then proceeded to inform us each that the boat was broken and couldn't sail, so we could take a refund or go on a chartered bus. The daytrippers left, but I figured I would get through it alright. But it wasn't easy. What would have been a three-hour trip turned into a six-hour one, thanks to traffic between Trieste and Venice. Even worse the air conditioner unit above me began leaking — not dripping really, leaking — on my head for the last hour of the trip. I made a makeshift tent out of the curtain and did my best to hide.

In Venice, I found my hotel very quickly — again without a map — and had a few days in the Serene Republic. I'll write more about that later. I continued on on Monday. There is a strange feeling the morning of a heavy day of travel, when you shower and put on your socks and realize the next time you are going to go through these motions it will be at your own home, on the other side of the planet, in about two days.

I had a few hours to kill before having to head to the airport, so I left my bags and hiked around the city. I stopped for lunch of cicchetti at a little place on Campo San Margherita, but I was so distracted by flipping through La Gazzetta dello Sport that I dropped a huge dollop of olive oil on my right knee. I thought despondently about how long I was going to have to look at that stain in the coming hours.

Marco Polo Airport is a remarkably undistinguished airport, not what you might expect from a place like Venice. Its best feature is the little food court on the north end of the departures area, which has a striking view over the lagoon toward the city, which looks remarkably large and close from there. I spent awhile there having a Peroni, watching a Carnival cruise ship maneuver away through the lagoon toward the sea like some kind of moving apartment block. Very strange.

I had to spend the night in Istanbul, which was a surprisingly easy. I wandered around a bit, hit the duty-free for some lokum, drank an Efes and watched things swirling around. I was in Istanbul for a few days a year ago, and I would have loved to get into the city for awhile. But it was the middle of the night, so I had to settle for the strange tableau of the globalized world you see at an international airport. In the dead of night in Istanbul there are a lot of flights to the former Soviet Union, to central Asia and the Gulf states. Lots of women in hijabs, tough-looking CIS dudes in track suits or polyester casualwear, guys that look they are going from one place to another and will never make it back. The thing about the people you observe in an airport is that you really can't match what they are going through the way you can in a place with the usual amount of gravity. You feel like you are in the background of what might be someone's very interesting movie.

Happily for my effort to not completely destroy my sleep schedule for a month, the airport is pretty spacious, and I didn't have trouble finding a pair of seats on which to stretch out. I'd brought along an eyeshade to block out the pervasive dull light, and was tired enough that I could tune out the occasional Turkish announcements over the PA system. Had to leave bright and early in the morning. Flying to America seems to now involve another layer of security theater, so we had to get our passports checked again at the gate, which was time-consuming and pointless. Then the long flight back.

Once again, the menace of getting the times to line up failed me. I had a few hours to get from JFK to Port Authority Bus Terminal, and a big suitcase, so I decided to hang out in the arrivals hall because at least there was coffee and a place to sit. Good choice. Port Authority seems to have been somewhat cleaned up since the last time I really saw it — they seem to have gotten the homeless problem under control. But it is still a profoundly dispiriting place, with its dark tiles, an absence of sunlight, and a general sense of dropping a few scales down the socioeconomic ladder. I would like to get into the minds of those designers who made this place, and see what it was like the first day it opened. Did it seem like a bracing peek into a bold and efficient future, or was it always a grim warning of an impending dystopia of ugly buildings and social freefall? And did they deliberately create this disorientating sensation around the place, is it some kind of brutalist prank? How come it looks so enormous when you see it from the outside, yet the inside feels like a rat tunnel? Is it supposed to be a vision of some alternate reality, a place that should have never happened? A cautionary, counterfactual lesson about where America's postwar obsessions with automotives and fossil fuels would lead?

And what is most striking is how inefficiently it handles the basic task of providing information to ensure travelers get to the right place. How can a place that purportedly handles nearly a quarter million people a day not have any timetables or information boards anywhere? To find my gate I had to wait in line at the ticket window to ask, because nothing else at all seemed trustworthy.

Anyway, my hatred of long-distance bus travel is deep. It reminds me of those desperate, poor days in college when I would have to stand for hours to get home for Thanksgiving (pleased to see that no less a lover of travel and the open road than Jack Kerouac was on my side about bus travel).

And the fact that there is just no need for it. There are functioning railroad tracks running all the way from Manhattan to the old Williamstown train station three blocks from my house. That this is how generations of people travelled from here to there. Instead, I was stuck on a belching, rattling emissions-spewing contraption, winding around the old state roads of far western Connecticut and Massachusetts. There were three of us left on the bus by the time we reached town.

I wasn't done yet though! I still had to walk from the Williams Inn across the center of town to my house, dragging the suitcase bravely along behind me. I was at the end of my street, across from my driveway, when the right wheel finally gave up and popped out. And that was that.

So I've spent two blog posts complaining about the details of modern travel. But I haven't offered a word about what I did in between. I haven't written about watching my daughter learn to snorkel in the Adriatic, the pleasantness of having a glass of Favorit beer watching the sun set into the sea, the taste of a big plate of spaghetti al nero di seppia, standing beneath Titian's Assumption at the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, sitting on the ledge of a canal at an enoteca in Cannaregio, with a glass of wine, watching people walk by.

I try always to remind myself of some of my summers in high school. I worked mornings and evenings, and would sometimes spend afternoons sitting in the backyard. Usually I'd read, sometimes I'd read travel books about Italy and France that I'd taken from the public library. I'd sometimes see a speck of silver from an airliner impossibly high up, and wonder if I'd ever be on one.

So, yes, I'd happily do it over again.

The Berkshires to Istria, and back (1/2)

Terminal San Basilio

If you travel with any degree of awareness, you realize how inconceivable many of the things we take for granted would have been not a generation ago. You can buy a ticket to pretty much get anywhere you want on earth, at a shockingly low price if you think about it. Then you are zipped around in the stratosphere over oceans that once took weeks to cross, and think so little of it you fall asleep. 

For my grandparents, Venice was a place where rich people sometimes saw, but was nothing more than a thing in books, movies and legends. Istria was completely off the map, a neglected, poor, sickly forgotten part of the socialist bloc.

I say all this as a preamble because what follows will look a lot like complaining, and I don't want to leave the impression that I don't appreciate being able to get around. I sure do.

Yet there are trade-offs. This was the first year of the four that I've gone to Croatia that I went from the U.S. and not from Russia and Croatia (I wrote about last year's trip here). And now I realize how vanishingly rare it is to see another American when I'm there. Getting there and back was something of an odyssey, especially coming from Williamstown. The first leg was a five-hour bus ride on Peter Pan from the center of town to Port Authority, then a night in New York. I was trying to do things in an affordable manner, which meant that none of the times lined up neatly, meaning a lot of dead time.

This year, I ended up with tickets on Turkish Airlines, which had by far the cheapest fares over the Atlantic this summer. It was a pretty grim year for ticket prices to Europe, and it took weeks of searching to find the right price. I'd heard on travel websites that Turkish was luring more North American business, trying to turn Istanbul into a hub, so that explains our brief burst of luck.

I first left the country in 1999, and have done so quite a few times since, and each time seems to usher in a new era of discomfort and nuisance. On the plus side, Turkish Airlines leaves JFK earlier than most other European flights, so you avoid the late afternoon / evening crush that makes getting through security an ordeal. But the planes keep getting more and more absurd. I realized this time with alarm that the exact distance from the back of your seat to the one in front of you is the same as the distance from my tailbone to my knee. So, for anyone an inch taller than me, you're talking about physical impossibilities. As it is, this distance is too small for what we remember as a standard tray table — now you have these bisected mini-ones, which are perfectly useless if the guy in front of you has his seat back. The one thing that has gotten better are the new entertainment systems newer planes have rigged up for each individual seat. These are pretty cool, and if you are lucky create a kind of cocoon experience that can make a long trip bearable.

I landed in Istanbul, and had a few hours in Ataturk International Airport, where I had coffee and read Jan Morris' The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage once again. Then a short flight up to Venice. Air travel is so cognitively disruptive if you graft it into a historical context. In Venice's best days, its wealth and fame and riches relied heavily on managing the treacherous trade from one city to the other. The republic was the direct product and inheritor of Byzantium's Roman heritage, its overseas empire was born by conquering the city in the Fourth Crusade, and after the Turkish Conquest, this was the epicenter of all sorts of existential terror. That's a lot of history flowing back and forth over that distance from point to point, and in 2013 I jumped from one to the other almost as an afterthought, in a two and a half hour flight over the once-formidable Balkan interior.

The one part of this whole voyage that made me nervous was finding my way from the airport in Venice to the ferry terminal. I know that the great fun of Venice is allowing yourself to wander and get lost amid the campi and the ponti. But getting from Point A to Point B with a big suitcase and a time limit made me nervous. I studied the route on the map ahead of time, and made my way along with lots of self-doubt from Piazzale Roma down Fondamenta Cazziola to Fondamenta Cereri Dorsoduro to Fondamenta Rossa to Fondamenta Briati to Fondamenta San Sebastiano to San Basilio. And I made it with time to have a sandwich and check my email.

The ferry trip was a product of the necessity of timing. The usual way to get over to Istria would be to take the train to Trieste, then catch a bus down the coast. But my flight arrived so late that I would miss the connections, meaning that I'd have to spend a night. It was cheaper to spring for the ferry. I secretly really wanted to do this, because it sounds so romantic and proper — one really should arrive and leave Venice by the sea. The reality of the modern voyage was not so charming. The ship was more like an airliner than I thought. The windows were filthy, so you couldn't really see out, and the air conditioner was blasting far more than necessary. But it gives you a sense of the scale, that it is three hours of motoring over the open sea before you reach what was the heartland of the Venetian overseas empire.

My wife was waiting at the pier, with the owner of the flat we rented who had driven to give me a ride. That was very welcome.