I have written several posts about the way further studies result in further ‘diasporas”. I last met my good friend, Francis Jacobs, currently Head of the European Parliament’s Dublin office, in Dublin in May, as this post records. Francis is part of the Johns Hopkins diaspora, having studied at the Bologna Center seven years before me (our paths later crossed through our mutual enthusiasm for European studies). Francis is half Italian. His mother comes from the Valtelina and Francis and his wife have a summer house in the Valchiavenna, just above Chiavenna. And that’s where we had lunch today, halfway up a remote mountainside, surrounded by chestnut trees gone wild and amid deserted terraces. Francis is erudite and polyglot and I couldn’t even begin to tell you everything we learned today about the area about us. But I’ll try to draw a link with America, in light of our recent trip and the fact that Francis himself worked on Capitol Hill for a while. A lot of people left these valleys in the late 1800s to find work in Sicily, notably picking citrus fruit for the candied fruit industry (a major, if brief-lived, export to America). When California started producing its own candied fruit, it was a logical next step for these workers to leave for California. On the hills around us were many religious shrines paid for by donations from these workers, including a small but touching 1890s shrine just near Francis’s house inscribed as a gift from the ‘Mericani di Menarola’.

For several years, as a relatively young thing in the European Commission’s Secretariat General, I followed the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. And so I got to know an Anglo-Danish official in the Parliament working for that Committee, Per Sommerschield. When Per heard about our Lario hideaway he insisted that we should go to the gallery of his artist brother, Kim, at Chiavenna. And that is precisely what we did this morning. Kim loves the mountains. He climbs the mountains – frequently alone. And he paints the mountains – well, as you can see by visiting his website here. If ever you happen to be in Chiavenna you should visit his gallery, located on the town’s main piazza (Pestalozzi). You’ll be guaranteed a warm welcome and a dose of Kim’s infectious enthusiasm about the mountains.

Believers in the Loch Ness Monster might be interested to know that the Lago di Como has its own version – the Lariosauro, which is a borrowing of a name of a real dinosaur that existed in the area – as does the Lago di Garda. (‘Lario’ is the traditional name for the Lago di Como.) In November 1946 two hunters at the northern end of the lake saw an aggressive lizard-like animal. Shot and wounded, the animal swam away, and was seen again at Varenna, further south, before disappearing altogether. There have been other sightings since – probably all hoaxes. Anyway, today I read a novel based loosely on the original episode by Giovanni Galli. It’s a sort of Don Camillo and Peppone  meet Nessie affair and, with its mixture of local history and colour with the bare bones of the original case, enjoyable enough in its own sweet way. Northern Italy remained troubled in the immediate post-war years and Galli uses the sighting as a sort of metaphor. But readers should be aware that the monster on the cover of his book has nothing to do with the eyewitness accounts – T Rex couldn’t even swim, could he?

Today, as a sort of homage to Monument Valley and Goulding’s (see this post), I watched John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach. This film, regarded by Orson Welles as a budding cinematographers’ text book, launched the career of John Wayne (until then a B-movie staple with a major slump to his name) and would forever associate John Ford with the Western movie and the Western movie with John Ford. It also indelibly associated the Western with the landscape of Monument Valley. The David Cairns article at this link provides a good summary critique of the film (though note the apparent mystery as to why Ford used Monument Valley – anybody who goes to the little museum at Goulding’s knows the answer to that). This is a cleverly geometrical film in its composition and it is easy to see why Welles loved it, from the different camera angles through the innovative lighting to a plot involving several complicated characters ‘evolved’ by the unfolding plot with its religious and mythological undertones. The distinctive geological forms of Monument Valley provide not just an arresting backdrop but an integral part of the film; Ford would surely not have left the camera’s gaze to linger so long on a simple image of a stagecoach crossing countryside if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary nature of that countryside. The Apache Indian, in the form of a renegade Geronimo (handsomely played by a real chief), is cursorily sketched as a villainous threat. There is no attempt to explain why he might have jumped the reservation or been angry with whitemen in general. And at least two of the characters, who shout consistently throughout, had clearly not yet made the transition from silent movies to the talkies. Many of this film’s iconic moments would become Western clichés, and the viewer has to usher them away in order to see the movie for what it was when it first appeared. It also stands as a monument to Ford’s belief in Wayne’s star quality – as the latter would go on to prove again and again in his illustrious career.

This evening I at last watched Nanni Moretti’s 1993 Caro Diario (my thanks to E for the loan and the patience). It won Moretti the prize for best director at the 1994 Cannes International Film Festival. I hadn’t known quite what to expect, thinking it to be an autobiographical film about a brush with cancer. Well, it is that, in part, but only in part. As the title suggests, it is a series of diary entries, written, spoken and acted primarily by Moretti. There are three sets of entries: on my vespa, islands, and doctors. In the first, which I found the most lyrical and evocative, Moretti drives his vespa around a mostly deserted Rome, accompanying the images with a series of apparently unconnected disquisitions on cinema, films and urban life. This section ends with Moretti seeking out the place near Ostia where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered (he finds a decaying and apparently forgotten concrete monument). On a few occasions I knew that Rome. It is the Rome of very early summer mornings when only the cats in the monuments seem to be alive. The next part is a journey, by ferry, through the Aeolian islands, accompanied by a Joyce-loving friend who becomes fixated on American soaps. Here, Moretti mixes farce and satire but keeps those disquisitions going. The last part is a reconstruction of Moretti’s quest to find the cause of a mysterious ailment he experienced. Depending on which branch of medecine (including Chinese and reflexology) he consults, he is given different diagnoses and treatments. Finally, after an X-ray, he is correctly diagnosed with a treatable lymphatic system tumour. Moretti describes the sequence of events but lets the experience speak for itself. If any of the treatments he had been prescribed had worked, he would probably have believed that that particular diagnosis was correct. On the other hand, when the true cause of his illness is identified, the indicative symptoms were precisely those that he had been suffering. There is an excellent passage where Moretti is told that his symptoms are psychosomatic. He finds this so obvious that he believes it, although part of him knows that it cannot be true. Yes, this film is a vehicle for Moretti himself (a distinctive element of his art) but it is also an almost Montaigne-like collection of essays and reflections about life and art.

Was that what he meant?

Today we drove (through five European countries on our way) to Italy, including through the original Switzerland, and so had the time to talk through some of our conclusions from that coast-to-coast trip. It’s a cliché, but the country is still so young (when we went to Johns Hopkins it still hadn’t celebrated its bicentenary) and there is still a strong sense that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. This time I had a stronger sense of the loss of America’s original peoples, whose latest migration across the Bering Strait landbridge probably took place only some 12,000 years ago (compare that with the 17 million years it took to carve out the Grand Canyon). We also had a better sense of the relative youth of America’s political institutions and of the evolution that is still underway. For a bit of fun, we tried to imagine what sort of President Europe might have one day. It would have to be somebody recognised throughout the member states, with some linguistic ability, and with a lot of money. A sportsman, then, like Michael Schumacher or Michel Platini or Christian Ronaldo or ‘the special one’ (José Mourinho)? And then the true meaning of ‘I’ll be back’ suddenly came to me – for Arnie still has his Austrian passport, doesn’t he? Could it just be?

One of my companion books as we travelled across the United States was Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York, by Michelle and James Nevius. I found the book on the eve of our departure from New York and it might seem strange to have been reading about a city that we had already left, but the book, which is divided up into 182 entries and is thus ideally designed for ‘dipping into’, is an excellent thematic and subject-based account of New York’s history and the people, buildings and places that have made it the city it is today, from the original Lenape Indian inhabitants through to the 9/11 attacks and their architectural aftermath. This includes instructions as to where traces of those earlier developments can still be found. The authors, both tour guides, also helpfully provide fourteen walking tours which cover much of the ground set out in their book. If you’re interested in the history of cities and you are going to New York, think of taking this book with you.

Yes, I did – watch the closing ceremony of the London Olympics, that is. I think our American cousins will have been less puzzled with this evening’s offerings than they were with the opening ceremony but, still, there were some strange, quirky things in there. Personally, I was hoping that the organisers had somehow managed to convince David Bowie (whose music was much in evidence at both ceremonies) out of his self-imposed seclusion – particularly since there are growing rumours about a re-appearance this autumn in connection with the forthcoming Bowie: Object (see here). But it was not to be. On the other hand, John Lennon was resurrected, the Spice Girls reformed for one show and there were at least three covers before ageing rockers Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend performed a few of The Who’s greatest hits. As the feel-good buzz slowly diminishes, the burning question on these lips is: where was Elton?

We all have gloomy memories of that dreadful stretch of wet, grey days throughout June and early July here in Belgium. Today, at least, was a glorious summer’s day. We travelled down to the Famennes (the region just north of the Ardennes) for lunch on a terrace and an afternoon snooze in a shady garden. Later, we sat by a large pond and watched the aerobatic skills of the raucous swallows and martins as they came down to drink. We would occasionally catch sight of a swift in the mob. Looking up my bird guide to write this entry I was surprised to discover that, whilst swallows and martins are basically part of the same family (I had thought they were in separate orders), the swift most decidedly is not and – here comes the curiosity – is most closely related to the humming bird. After an early supper I took the train back to Brussels. Summer days do not come much more idyllic than that…

Pro-Europeans on Facebook have been busy posting the number of medals Europe won at the London Olympics (although some of them now, interestingly, make a distinction between the Eurozone’s and the EU’s medals). In that context, a throwaway comment in this morning’s Observer caught my eye. In helping team US win the 4 x 100 metres sprint, Carmelita Jeter took ‘East Germany off the record books for ever.’ Intrigued, I looked up the current Olympic athletics records and discovered that the old, divided Europe has all but disappeared from the books (three records remain for the GDR, one for the old Romania). The old Soviet Union has just one outstanding record.