Cave Canum

At the entrance to Pompeii's House of the Tragic Poet, you will find this.

It's the original Cave Canum, and translated from Latin that means Beware of the Dog.

Here's a cleaner shot of it.

There are a number of these mosaic entryways scattered around Pompeii and most of them just show a chained dog.

They're yet one more thing that really humanizes the experience of walking around Pompeii. As an archeological site, Pompeii is enormous. Once you're on the grounds you cannot see out of it. It seems to extend in all directions for as far as you can see.

That's Vesuvius looming over the back of the Forum here.

Pompeii's definitely a ruin. Most of it has been exposed to the elements for the last 200 or so years and those years have not been kind. At the same time though, Pompeii's unique beauty comes in a large part from that state of decay. The place is a paradox. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that it was once a thriving outpost of Rome at its height. Every once in a while though, you'll turn a corner and get poked in the eye with the humanity of the people who once called Pompeii home.

The Cave Canum is one of those humanizing touches.

Two million people a year file past the Flintstones-themed campground (I'm not kidding) to get that glimpse into those ancient lives. And each of those two million people leaves a mark. Very little of Pompeii is off limits or behind velvet ropes. A visit there has you walking across real Roman floors and running your hands over real Roman architecture. It's easy to get carried away and despite the crowds, it's not difficult to get off the beaten path and have some quiet time in the ruins.

Yesterday, my great friend Nancie Mills-Pipgras (who along with Bill Buckingham, edit one of the world's premier art annuals, Mosaic Art Now) posted a notice on her Facebook page and it reminded me of another one of Pompeii's quirks.

Pompeii has a large number of stray dogs walking around the place. It's somehow fitting that they're there. Pompeii is in Naples after all. Now I don't mean that as a slam. To say Naples has a culture unto itself is an understatement of biblical proportions. Naples is a place of mind-boggling chaos played out against a back drop of nearly indescribable beauty. It's a place where 700,000 people live cheek by jowl in the shadow of a volcano that could blow at any moment. It's a place where stray dogs roam at will across what's arguably the world's most important archeological site.

I took this photo as I was walking out of the Suburban baths. This dog was sacked out in the middle of the floor and you had to step around him to get past.

A year-and-a-half ago, the Italian government declared a state of emergency for Pompeii and decided to spend some money cleaning up the place. A part of that is a new program to adopt out the stray dogs of Pompeii. Three of Italy's animal charities, the Anti-Vivisection League, the National Animal Protection Authority and the National Dog Protection League have been spaying, neutering, vaccinating and preparing the stray dogs of Pompeii for eventual adoption.

There's now a website, i Cani di Pompei that's dedicating to showcasing these dogs and searching for homes for them. The search is being extended worldwide, so if you've ever wanted to own a dog that can parla l'italiano, now's your chance.

Oh Decorno, I covet your vacation

Speaking of vacations, the Lady Elaine, who writes the terrifically funny blog Decorno is a week into a three-week trip to Italy. She's filing the occasional dispatch and her offering from this morning sums up everything I love about Italy. Elaine's currently in one of the five villages that make up The Cinque Terre where she's rented an apartment.

I leave for 6 days and you guys let Henry Louis Gates, Jr get arrested at his OWN HOUSE? Seriously, guys. WTF?

Because I am paying like 80 billion euros a minute to be on this computer, I could only skim the details, but jesus h christ.

Anyway - that makes me angry just thinking about it, so I need to move on. Let's talk about me.

I was supposed to go to Lucca today, but the woman who rents her apartment to me, Louisa, shook her head disapprovingly at me and said in mostly Italian with enough hand gestures and serious looks for me to translate exactly what she meant to say, which was approximately, "Oh, but it's molto caldo (so hot!). The Lucca people, they come here now, to the sea. Too hot in Lucca. You go in May." And like the 3 nights before, I humbly ask if I can stay again and she smiles broadly as I produce my euros and she says, "Ah, si, va bene." And that is how Louisa gets me.

Louisa is living high on the hog now. MY HOG, I may add. The day I arrived tough winds blew apart a few of her potted plants. The next day she came to my (her) white-washed apartment and showed me a new cactus she bought to replace one of the old. She was beaming. And then the next night I saw her walking with her old friend, going to dinner. To dinner! With my fat euros in her pocket. And then yesterday she warned me that today she would be gone mezzo giorno and that she was getting her throat checked. After a long mutual mime-attempt at understanding one another, we managed to act out that she has lesions on her throat and would be heading to La Spezia to have it checked out. She would be getting "exams" and doing "exclusions" (ruling things out, I think she meant). Look at her. Flush with American money, she's splurging on exploratory surgery. The nerve.

Every time she comes to see me, she looks out the window with me, at the tower, and the pink and yellow and pastel green buildings with the laundry fluttering underneath windows and she beams, saying to me, "It's special here," like she needs to make sure that I understand just how great it is to be here, in this town, in this house.

I do.

If you've never spent any time soaking up the wit and wisdom of Decorno, waste no more time and head over there. The woman sets the standard.

Repost: Friends, Romans, Countrymen; lend me a hand!

I notice that I'm getting a fair number of Italian readers and I'd like to extend a heartfelt benvenuto. I'd also like to ask a favor. I ran this piece in January and still haven't found any takers. If you find yourself in Rome, please consider my request. Molti grazie in anticipo!

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I bought a beautiful cashmere and silk men's pashmina in Rome last year and when I went to grab it the other morning I couldn't find it. I'm pretty sure that I left it somewhere the last time I had it on and I'm pretty sick about it.

Granted, it's just a thing so it shouldn't be a big deal. But sometimes, the loss of a thing can be a real kick to the gut. My beloved niece Sarah lived in Rome while she was in school and she gave me a great lead on a little shop that sold great scarves inexpensively.

I found the shop one day while I was walking around and it's run by an older woman and her daughter. It's a tiny storefront jammed to the rafters with nothing but scarves. The shop keepers were a delight. My Italian vocabulary increased tenfold that afternoon and between my survival Italian and their survival English we had a blast. In addition to all of that, they were selling men's pashminas for five euros a pop.

Now I love meeting new people but what I really like is meeting new people who sell one of the greatest bargains I've ever encountered. These scarves were an incredible cashmere and silk blend and I bought a bunch of them to give away as gifts. Five euros! No lie!

I saved but one for myself and now it's gone. So I'm throwing this out there: if anybody's heading to Rome let me know and I'll pay you for the trouble of buying me a replacement scarf. The store is on the Via Tomacelli, just a stone's throw from the River and the Tomb of Augustus. It's easy to miss but such a reward when you find it. Anybody?

And speaking of vacations

Check it out. The kids at Google Maps have been busy, and I mean busy, expanding their Street View function to more and more of the world. I got clued in to this latest expansion by Scintilla at Bell'Avventura who mentioned that Positano had made it onto the list of places with Street Views.

Huge swaths of Europe are included now but I homed right in on Italy. I'm amazed by this technology. Do yourself a favor and head over to Google Maps and then drop the little yellow guy anywhere you'd like to get a pedestrian's view. Once it's activated, you can pan up and down and turn a whole 360 degrees. Try it!

Here's how the Villa Terrazza looks from the road down to the Marina Picola in Sorrento. My friends and I rented a floor of that villa less than a year ago. Astounding! I cannot get over how clear these screen captures are.

Here's the view of the Villa Terrazza from the Marina Piccola itself. Wow. I feel like I'm back there.

The "Farmashop" on the left side of this screen capture was where I had to go explain to a Pharmacist that I had developed athlete's foot from traipsing around southern Italy in wet hiking boots. It was the ultimate test of my conversational Italian skills, not to mention my ability to use my iron will where my language skills fall short. Yet there it is on my laptop. It's like I'm there again. "I funghi sono in pedi!" I'm shouting that at my laptop as I write this. That's not a very grammatical Italian sentence, but it made the necessary point --I have fungus on my feet.

This is the coastal road between Sorrento and Positano. You and work your way over to the wall and look down into the abyss. What's a safety rail anyway?

It's a virtual vacation. Google Maps can take you all through Naples, most of the way down the Amalfi Coast, up to Rome, Florence, Perugia, Livorno, Bologna, Milan, Genoa, etc. If you're not in the mood for an Italian get away, You can stroll the streets of Marseille or Paris. How about Madrid or Amsterdam? London's in there now as are most of the cities in Japan. Mapping the world like this is an ambitious project and leave it up to Google to undertake it in the first place. Leave it up to Google too to make is so smart and accessible.

I'm touched and honored

My new pal Scintilla at Bell'Avventura wrote about the strega in her Positano neighborhood today. Her post is a series of stories about a curious old woman who steals vegetables from the neighborhood gardens. Missing melanzane aside, you can add the strega to a very long list of reasons I need to go back to Positano.

Over the course of a thousand words Scintilla evokes a place where myth and memory join hands and work an impossible magic. Her post took me back to a place where eggplant-stealing witches and 10th century icons coexist in relative peace. A place where the town dog takes a nap on the same beach Saracen invaders stormed a thousand years ago. For ten minutes I was standing under the Mediterranean sun and inhaling a rosemary and lemon scented breeze. Just when I thought it couldn't get any better, I came to her final paragraph and read that she'd dedicated those stories to me. My day is now perfect. Thank you! Read "Stregata" here.

Sunday morning vacanza

The piece I wrote about Positano on 25 January put me in touch with a blogger who writes a blog called Bell'Avventura. She's an Australian who married a man from Positano and who now lives in Luxembourg. She and her husband maintain his family's home in Positano and they spend as much time there as they can. Her blog discusses the unique pleasures and irritations that accompany life in an ancient hill town and I can't get enough of it.

She writes about her gardens, her home and gives me a glimpse into a life I daydream about. She writes eloquently about the wonders of the place and doesn't sugar coat its absurdities. In one of her posts, she excerpts some of these absurdities from the Positano newspaper. She relates the following which has had me grinning since yesterday.

The second article was submitted by a local and deplored the state or rather non existence of postal delivery in Nocelle, Montepertuso and the top areas of Positano. The delegated postman has gone on holiday and no one thought to replace him. The new Director when confronted said that there was nothing he could do about it as it depended on the Maiori head office to send another ! Can you believe it?

For better or for worse, things like that only seem to happen in Italy and I can read stories such as that endlessly. So if you need a break on a blustery Sunday, stroll over to Bell'Avventura and revel in the words and photographs of an interesting woman who leads an interesting life. Thank you for your blog!

Positano daydreams

So since last Sunday's run through Ravello was such a boon, here are some shots I took of Positano. Positano is another little town along the Amalfi Coast and in a region of the world filled with so many one-of-a-kind places, Positano looms large despite its small size.

I'm not the first to have fallen for this slice of heaven's charms. The names of former frequenters of Positano reads like a who's who of the greatest minds of the last few centuries. My hero John Steinbeck wrote a short story about the place in 1953 and he captures its many charms perfectly. Positano by John Steinbeck

Positano is a town of about 4000 souls who cling to the cliffs that rise out of the Mediterranean. It's a town nearly devoid of roads, everything's connected by walkways and staircases instead. When it comes to photography, I'm usually the micro guy. I like to take photos of smaller details. When I look back at my shots from Positano however, nearly all of them are panoramics and nearly all of them are shot looking up at the impossibility of the town.

Here's Positano. Every one of those homes is connected to its neighbors and the town seems to creep up the cliffs. It's mind-bending.

This is Pippo, the town dog. He's sleeping on a bench covered in beach towels and t-shirts that are for sale. If you want to buy something from this shop keeper you have to wake Pippo up and get him to move. Warning: he's pretty cranky when he first gets up.

This region of Italy is renowned for its majolica tile and flourishes of it are everywhere. This shot is a detail of a garden wall and what a cool pattern this is.

Another view looking up from the waterfront.

One of Positano's few roads is in the foreground in this shot.

This narrow passageway is more typical means of getting around Positano. The sheer verticality of this town and the amount of stair climbing involved in getting from point A to point B keep the Positanans (and their visitors) in great shape.

This is the 11th century cupola of the church of S. Maria Assunta. The exterior of that church looks the same today as it did when it was built nearly a thousand years ago.

The iron work on this balcony impressed me and its state of near-decay makes it all the more interesting.

John Steinbeck wrote "Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn't quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone."

This is what I call my money shot. Of the thousands of photos I've taken over the years, this one stands out as my hands-down favorite. This copper statue was in an antique store and I borrowed it for a second, sat it on a wall and took the shot. It was a complete seat of the pants thing and for me, it sums up the incredible town of Positano perfectly. As in this photo, the place is a perfect mixture of art, mythology and scenery. I still can't believe I was there sometimes yet at the same time, it haunts me still. John Steinbeck was right. I don't think I'll ever be satisfied until I go back again.

The Positanans have embraced the 20th century slowly and begrudgingly and I was surprised to see that they've set up a live webcam that looks down at their water front. Clicking on the link to that Positano webcam has become my new mini-vacation. Check it out.

Sunday flights of fancy

As I was combing around the Internet yesterday, I came upon a blog called Fifi Flowers Design Decor. Fifi Flowers is the product of California-based artist and designer Fifi, and her site's filled with her paintings and photos of her work. It's a whimsical romp through the mind of a true free spirit.

Anyhow, one of Fifi's readers sent her some photos of a recent trip to the Amalfi Coast and Capri and it got me pining for a return to that part of the world. It's cold in Florida today. Trust me, when you move to a tropical climate, 60 degrees might as well be 20 below. Ugh! I can't stand cold snaps. Mercifully, they only happen a couple of times a year.

So today's a day that's perfect for daydreaming and fantasizing about warmer times. To help set the mood, here are a couple of shots from my trip to the Amalfi Coast in May of '08. All of these were taken by me in the charming-beyond-words town of Ravello. Some day, I'll post some shots of Positano, the town where I left my heart. But in the meantime, here's Ravello.

This is the view from a balcony in the Villa Ruffalo. That's the town of Maiori in the distance.

This is the restaurant balcony of the Villa Ruffalo.

Looking down at the terraced farms that cover this part of the world.

This is the front entrance to the Villa Cimbrone in Ravello.

The gardens of the Villa Cimbrone.

Me inspecting a statue of a young Apollo. Inspecting for artistic merit, of course.

A bust of one my heroes, Augustus Caesar.

One of myriad passages and entryways that cover this small hill town.

My friends and I stumbled upon a couple of young ballerinas from the High School in Ravello. It's a curious thing to think about people actually living and raising families in a place so enchanted as this.

Stay warm today gang. Send me some photos of trips to warmer places and I'll publish them in some kind of a warm up for the collective unconscious.

A faux re-education, or What I learned on my summer vacation

I had a conversation about faux painting with a client the other day. She wanted me to refer her to a painter who could paint some columns in her entry way so that they looked like they were made from marble.

Now a year ago I would have done everything in my power to dissuade her from this faux marble idea. There was a time when I couldn't separate the idea of faux painting with its most obvious and bad expressions. All too often, people take a page from HGTV and attempt to faux paint (poorly) things that have no business being faux painted. Stuff like this:

I mean really, what are the odds of a contemporary house having walls made from entire slabs of identical marble? The first test these kinds of techniques have to pass is a logical one. Ask yourself, does this application make sense? In the case above, the answer is a resounding no.

But in the hands of a professional artist, a faux marble or trompe l'oeil effect can be cool as well as a compliment to the structure of a room. That said, well-done work of this kind is the exception rather than the rule. Unless you have a fine arts background, do not attempt this on your own or you'll end up with something that looks like this:

Man! That burns my eyes.

The idea of faux marble and trompe l'oeil painting got its start in Ancient Rome believe it or not. I had to see it first hand to believe it and here are some photos of what I saw. Some friends and I were treated to a walk through the excavation of the Villa San Marco in Castellmare di Stabia a couple of months ago. The Villa San Marco was a 28,000 square foot (that's not a typo!) Roman villa on the shores of the Bay of Naples. The Villa San Marco was the home of wealthy Roman family and it was buried by ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. The villa is an amazement and to walk through it today is to get a real feel for the people who lived in it.

The Roman empire had a leisure class, probably the first such leisure class in human history. This leisure class had enough time and enough money to develop the idea of decorative art for their homes. It makes my heart beat faster to think about people two thousand years ago living lives that had an awful lot in common with mine. Now, I don't live in 28,000 square feet of house but I do like a nice paint job. Besides, so much of our cultural stuff --from birthday parties to wedding rings, from exchanging presents in late December to the Superbowl --we got from them.

This is a detail of a trompe l'oeil fresco on a wall in a bedroom in the Villa San Marco. It wasn't until I saw this with my own eyes that I realized that the Romans had mastered perspective. Perspective disappeared from western art for over a thousand years after the collapse of Rome.

Here's a detail from a similar fresco.

This is another fresco from the same room. Now bear in mind that this fresco is around 2000 years old and survived the explosion of a nearby volcano. My mind reels when I think about how this must have looked when it was new.

I thought my head was going to explode when I stood in front of this wall. My photo doesn't begin to do it justice. The room itself was small, probably twelve feet wide by ten feet deep. But even after all those years, this fresco made the walls disappear. If you ever find yourself anywhere near Naples in southern Italy, you owe it to yourself to track down a guide who will get you into the Villa San Marco.

Just inside the main entry and in the peristyle courtyard of the Villa San Marco the the shrine to the household gods of the family who owned the villa. It's made from cast concrete and I was amazed that so much of its original paint job had survived the years.

When I looked closer though I realized that the whole thing had been faux painted. The marble that this faux marble is imitating is all over Italy on ancient as well as in contemporary structures.

Here's an even tighter close up. Un-be-liev-a-ble.

So seeing those Roman paint effects was really something. I learned that the faux marble I'd always mocked had a real history and I started warming up to the idea of it. Ditto trompe l'oeil painting. So I decided to get over my biases and just accept it as another decorative art. So long as it's done well that is. Done well by a master like what I saw at the Villa San Marco.

Well about a week later I was in Rome and I was walking down the Corso d'Italia at 7:30 on a rainy Sunday morning. As I now know, rainy Sunday mornings are about the only time when Rome's streets are quiet. I heard a church bell and decided to go to mass. I mean, when in Rome, right? So I ducked into the first church I came to, the San Carlo di Corso. It's also one of the largest churches in Rome. It was built in the early 1600s and it is massive. The entire interior seemed to have been made from marble and granite with a whole lot of gilt for good measure.

So about 20 Italian senior citizens, me and a handful of pilgrims from the world over sat through mass and despite the fact that it was in Italian, I surprised myself with how well I could participate in it. Even after all these years, a mass is a mass regardless of the language it's said in. So I followed along between major bouts of distraction by the incredible building I was sitting in that is. Then, after mass, I couldn't restrain myself any longer and I walked over to the side of the church to get a good look at the stone work.

Wouldn't you know it, every inch of marble and granite on those 400-year-old walls was faux painted.

Ikea can wait

I had a conversation with one of my potential kitchen clients this week and she asked me why she shouldn't just go buy a set of kitchen cabinetry from Ikea for $5000 rather than what I was proposing for more than five times that amount. "What's the difference" she wanted to know. What's the difference indeed.

Good cabinetry is expensive, I'm not going to kid anybody. But cheap cabinetry is expensive too. It's expensive in that it needs to be replaced more often than the good stuff. A well-designed set of good kitchen cabinets should last you a life time. A set from Ikea will last you five years.

If you have a rental or a vacation home, cheap stuff's great. If we're talking about your primary home, be careful before you run down to the big blue and yellow box. The next time you're looking at a kitchen cabinetry display, open the drawers. Swing the doors, kick the tires. Talk to someone who understands what makes good cabinetry good and have him or her explain the difference to you. Keep in mind that everybody has an opinion and learn to tell the difference between a sales pitch and a genuine exchange of information.

Sometimes, all you can afford is the cheap stuff and that's OK. Buy the cheap stuff and make it look as great as you can. Just don't kid yourself.

Here's me standing in an Ikea kitchen in Italy. I'm happy not because of the cheesy cabinetry that's surrounding me. Rather I'm in a fantastic mood because of what I can see through that window.

Here's the view that had me grinning. Listen, if when you look out your kitchen window you can see the Sorrentine Peninsula as it drops into the Bay of Naples like this, ignore everything I just wrote about buying good stuff. You life doesn't need to be enhanced any further than it already is. But if you're like most people, read something other than price tags before you make a major purchase.

Herculean Herculaneum

I was pretty amazed by the level of preservation in Pompeii, despite its having been picked over so thoroughly in the last couple hundred years. Herculaneum on the other hand, has more of its architecture intact and entire homes filled with original mosaics and frescoes. I was blown away by Herculaneum. So much so that I want to start a movement in the decorative arts. I was going to call it Pompeiian Revival, but Herculaneum Revival is making more sense to me after having been there.

Pompeii pomp

I spent a day combing through the ancient ruins of Pompeii a week ago and came away humbled and moved to say the least. The classical Romans had surprisingly contemporary tastes and sensibilities. Either that or everything, and I mean everything, really is retro.

More great floors

OK kids, let me trot out some more vacation photos. I noticed a lot of really interesting majolica patterns in some really old buildings that still looked as great as they must have when they were installed. These are patterns that are still available for the most part, only these babies are the originals --the oldest one here is about 700 years old. Bet you can't guess which one it is. Any of these patterns would look terrific in a house today, despite the bright colors and wild patterns that a lot of people object to for being "too trendy." Pattern and color are your friends and these patterns from an old, old villa in Ravello make that statement pretty eloquently.