Dreadful news has just reached me from Florence of the sudden and untimely death of Peter Mair, Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Institute, whilst on a family holiday in his native Ireland. Peter was an assistant professor at the EUI when I was a PhD researcher there and was already making a name for himself, concentrating on parties and party systems. He went on to win the Stein Rokkan prize (with Stefano Bartolini) and published several seminal works on party systems and party system change. He became Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Leiden and editor of West European Politics, before returning to the EUI in 2005. Peter’s untimely death is a terrible loss to the EUI, where he had become a much-respected eminence grise, to political science and to the broader world of political commentary (I particularly enjoyed his occasional journalistic forays), just as he was reaching the sort of learned maturity that enabled him to make his characteristically incisive analyses both highly entertaining and seemingly effortless. (Just last November I cited his essay on the importance of the absence of an opposition in the EU in my John Fitzmaurice Memorial Lecture and I was toying with the idea of inviting him to co-edit a collection of articles on that theme.) At the personal level, Peter was a friendly and supportive man of great charm and with a mischievously quirky wit. All my sympathies go to his wife and three children. It is a grievous and tragic loss.

On our way back up from Ancona we stopped off near Salsomaggiore Terme, a spa town, to stay with academic friends and celebrate a birthday. Yesterday evening, as we gazed out over the rolling foothills of the Appenines, I could see a crenellated tower in the distance, a reminder of the Mani; indeed, the towns of Emilia Romagna and Tuscany had similar tower building and feuding traditions (Bologna and Florence once looked like hedgehogs and San Gimignano still does). This morning we toured Salsomaggiore. It has some wonderful examples of Belle Epoque architecture and the station is a fine example of period architecture (midway between the monumental classicism of Milano Centrale and the modernism of Firenze Santa Maria Novella). But the crown jewel is the original Berzieri spa building (picture), an extravangaza of coloured ceramic tiles and sculptures. Sadly, Salsomaggiore Terme would seem to be in decline. Two of the grand hotels are closed and another, the Grand Hotel, has been converted into a conference centre. We walked around its ghostly corridors and gazed on the richly decorated dining and ball room where the dance scene in Bertolucci’s Novecento was filmed. Cures in the spa’s famed saline waters are no longer subsidised by the national health service and royalty and film stars no longer grace its grand hotels. Real end of an era stuff.

Today was our last day in the Mani, this ancient and extraordinary region of the southern Peleponnese, whose fierce inhabitants were probably descended from the original Spartans but were at the least unpolluted descendants of the pagan Greeks, were only converted towards the end of the ninth century, were  never subjugated by the Turks and who played a vital role in Greek independence. All around us were reminders of a still-more ancient world: at Taenarus, on the cape, for example, the entrance to Hades, and at Gytheo the islet where Helen and Paris consummated their love on their way to Troy. My companion has been Patrick Leigh Fermor’s, Mani: Travels in the South Peleponnese (rightly renowned as a brilliant piece of travel writing, with the author’s learning worn lightly and humorously) and it has saddened me to read about a world that, since the 1950s, has disappeared as fast as a patch of damp under the fierce midday sun. Who now would warn you not to sleep in the shade of a fig tree (it brings heavy sleep) or give you a cucumber to put to your forehead (the old way of cooling down)? The ruined stone walls that we could just make out on the hillsides had been in good repair just half a century ago and where in Leigh Fermor’s time the ubiquitous donkey and mule were the only viable forms of transport (together with small boats), they now live only in a few sanctuaries. The stone towers are crumbling and roads rush people past countless sites of historic or cultural significance. The brooding stoney flanks of the Taygetus mountain range hulk distantly and invitingly. We’ll surely be back!

With grateful thanks to NC for the loan, this evening we watched Guy Green’s (British) 1960 classic, The Angry Silence, starring Richard Attenborough (and with Malcolm Arnold’s music and a cameo appearance from a very young but already smouldering Oliver Reed). The story is about an independent-minded factory worker, Tom (Attenborough), already out of the ordinary for having a beautiful Italian wife (Pier Angeli), who refuses to take part in unofficial industrial action and is at first ostracised and then persecuted by his fellow workers as a scab. Some of the script is over the top (such as the shadowy figure of a – communist? anarchist? – agitator sent from ‘London’ to encourage the unofficial action and hence damage the industry’s chances of surviving vis-à-vis foreign competition), and it created more than a little controversy because of its apparent anti-union bent. But one of the more chilling clevernesses of the plot is the way management sides with the strikers against Tom, preferring to swallow its pride and restore social peace so as to maintain its place in the competition for a big contract, and it also gives a good illustration of how, sometimes, stupidity (whether of management or of the louts among the workers) is difficult to distinguish from evil. Pier Angeli’s blistering performance throws into sharp relief what might have been if she had not suddenly died before filming of The Godfather started.

This morning we visited the spectacular site of Mystras, a city founded by the Franks in 1249 to replace medieval Sparta, and which developed into a large Byzantine township before becoming the seat of the Despots of Morea. By the 15th century it had become the last major Byzantine cultural centre before, in turn, succumbing to the Ottomans. Mystras was built on a soaringly high rocky spur and consisted of a castle at the top, a walled upper town, a walled lower town, and undefended settlements sprawling at its feet. The town’s last inhabitant left only in 1952 but most of Mystras is already in ruins. The exceptions are the church and monastery complexes and the former despots’ palace. The latter is currently being restored, whilst the former have been ‘saved’ and several are still in working condition. Truth be told, though, the restoration work came too late to save most of the precious frescoes. One of the exceptions is the Metropolis, founded in 1291. The last Byzantine emperor, Konstantinos Palaiologos, was crowned there in 1449, and a marble plaque set into the floor displaying a double-eagle marks the spot. Looking out from here over the plains of ancient Sparta, the lines of Shelley’s Ozymandias once again came to me. Oh, and one last literary link: Goethe had his Faustus (not Marlow’s) see Helen of Troy at the top of the castle ruins. (Later) And here is how Patrick Leigh Fermor (see subsequent posts) described its frescos: ‘one can see a miraculous surviving glow of the radiance that gave life to this last comet as it shot glittering and sinking across the sunset sky of Byzantium.’

This evening we watched the 2007 sequel to the 2002 Twenty-Eight Days Later. Though, for obvious reasons, it had to come second, Twenty-Eight Weeks Later was, we all agreed, much better than the first film. It wasn’t difficult to work out why. Twenty-Eight Days was about exodus and delivery, with the characters dying off until just one couple and one child are left (and even then the scriptwriter, Alex Garland, had scripted an alternative ending where the male lead, Jim (played by Cillian Murphy), would also have been killed off for an all-doom-and-gloom ending. The sequel, on the other hand, has strong characters facing difficult moral and existential choices: should a husband stay with his doomed wife or save his own skin?: should a doctor fight to keep a mutant with apparent immunity to the infection alive?; should an American (NATO) general give orders to fire on a crowd, knowing that there are infected people among it? And some of the characters are strong positive moral forces: children who refuse to give up on their parents; an American soldier who refuses to shoot on that crowd; a helicopter pilot who ignores orders and remains loyal to his friend. These satisfyingly balance the moral weakling of the story, Don (played by Robert Carling), who abandons his wife and several friends before becoming an infected zombie who single-handedly re-infects a new starter colony in the Isle of Dogs before receiving his satisfyingly double-barrelled come-uppance from his own daughter. All round good entertainment, in other words.

This evening, as the setting sun’s fierce heat diminished to more reasonable temperatures, we toured the so-called Shadowed Coast of the Inner Mani region, driving south from Aeropolis to the southern tip of Cape Tainaro and back. All around are the traces of a once dense population eking a frugal living out of the poor land: crumbling rock walls and terraces, all now deserted, and the ubiquitous Mani tower houses, some now restored as guest houses or as hunting lodges for the autumn quail hunting season. Nowhere was more atmospherically illustrative of the region’s past gory glory and current decay than the dramatic hilltop village of Vatheia. The tower houses that give it its distinctive silhouette (belonging to four feuding clans) are mostly ruins and much of the original village is overgrown with fig trees, cactuses and briars. There are two or three resistors – families who have stayed and repaired and restored, but the ruins of Vatheia badly need some sort of stabilisation programme if they are not to crumble rapidly away. The cape beyond it is broodingly wild, a castle, a tiny cove, looking out over the Mediterranean at its deepest.

We watched the 2002 film, Twenty-Eight Days Later this evening. The film, reportedly a considerable critical and commercial success, gives a bleak depiction of a post-cataclysmic society. It is, to my mind, chiefly memorable for its scenes of a deserted London and a deserted M1 motorway. Otherwise, I found it thoroughly derivative. In literary terms, the pace was set in the 1950s with three excellent novels; John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (the opening hospital scene of Twenty-Eight Days Later is coolly lifted straight from this), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (the ‘infected’ of Twenty-Eight Days are lifted from Matheson’s vampire hordes), and in cinematographic terms, the pace was set by the 1971 Omega Man (re-shot in 2007 as I Am Legend – arguably, this film’s scenes of an empty New York imitated Twenty-Eight Days’ scenes of an empty London). Cast and locations aside, Twenty-Eight Days Later can lay little claim to originality but, I suppose, everybody knew that. ‘Sean of the Dead was better,’ chorused the sprogs and it suddenly became clear that that 2004 film was, at least in part, a spoof of Twenty-Eight Days.

We’re in the southern Peloponnese in a region known as the Mani. In the fifteenth century a number of refugee Byzantine families formed a local aristocracy, known as the Nyklians, who came to engage in a form of structural feuding. Only Nyklians had the right to construct stone towers, which came to dominate every village (I can see the stumps of several such tower houses from the terrace where I am seated).Good agricultural land was scarce. Ritualised blood feuds between Nyklian clans could last for months and years, with truces called for harvests. The clans would attack each other from their respective towers and the feuding would only end when one side was either entirely wiped out or totally subjugated. Having recently visited Ajaccio, I found this reminiscent of the Corsican vendetta tradition, and then I discovered that there is not only a Corsican connection to the Mani but also a Napoleonic one (in 1675 seven hundred Oitylots – from a town in the Mani region, including 430 from the Stephanopoulos clan, fled the Turks and ended up in Corsica, founding the villages of Paomia and Cargèse, and giving rise to stories that Napoleon himself was part-Mani in origin). Collectively, the fierce, ruthless Mani clans were never subjugated and it was their united action on 17 March 1821 that launched the Greek Independence uprising.

N° 2 sprog was understandably disappointed about Sparta. There’s little to see of the ancient city state. Its communities were, quite deliberately, vaingloriously, unfortified and there were no great works of architecture. What civic edifices there were were heavily built over by the Romans. The masonry from the Roman city was, in turn, pilfered to build nearby Mystras. The modern city, decreed into existence by a nostalgic King Otto in 1834, is a not particularly glamorous affair, a jumble of mostly undistinguished buildings. On the outskirts, empty showrooms and half-built developments tell the tale of the current economic crisis. It is strange to wander through such idealised literary and historical signifiers – Arcadia, Laconia, Sparta. As a tourist attraction, modern Sparta was always going to be outshone by nearby Mystras but it is nevertheless somehow well, Spartan, of Sparta (if that’s not too laconic a term) not to make more out of its historical connection to the ancient world’s most renowned warrior society.