Milan

I had never been to Milan, and most people who knew it had told me it was not very interesting - at least by Italian city standards - so I was very pleasantly surprised. I thought it a very nice city, lively and bustling, with great architecture and beautiful Paleo-Christian art, which is something I love - after all, it was the capital of the Roman Empire for a while, when it became Christian.

I was very lucky with the weather, it had rained hard the previous week, so everything was wet and shiny under the late autumn sun. Walking from the Central Station to the city centre I enjoyed the big avenues with the 19th and 20th century blocks, then passed the Scala theatre - that somehow disappointed, I imagined it more like the Paris Opera, and it's much smaller - and reached the famous Vittorio Emmanuelle Galleries, that are really impressive, and then the fabulous Duomo square.

The Duomo is much more beautiful than in the photographs, a white marble shiny massive church, whose neo-gothic architecture makes a huge building stand light and graceful on the big square. The huge queues disheartened me, so I headed for the small church of Santa Maria pressa San Satiro, a Renaissance jewel with the famous Bramante trompe l'oueil abse, and then walked around the city, passing the ancient San Nazzaro red brick church, that was unfortunately closed. Then to San Lorenzo Maggiore, a beautiful basilica in a very lively area - the combination of old art and architecture and modern living always enchants me - and chilled at a nice café terrace while the sun set over the Renaissance façade and the Roman columns.

I passed by the lovely Piazza dei Mercanti in the evening - there was a noisy demonstration about the coming referendum - and the Sforza castle, planning to avoid the queues to the Duomo the next day.

I couldn't avoid those queues, though. So there I stood, and read a good part of a novel while waiting, but it was worthwhile - the dimension of the Duomo is really impressive, and then there are the roofs, with great views over the city and the details of the cathedral's sculptures.

From the Duomo, I went to see the Pinacoteca di Brera, a great museum with lots of beautiful paintings - Rafael, Bellini, Caravaggio. Then more old churches, like San Simpliciano, and the amazing Luini frescos at San Maurizio, and the big old church of Santo Ambrogio, with the beautiful sculptures of the Stilicho sarcophagus.

I finished the Milan visit walking around the Navigli district at night, full of cafés, bars and young people. Only when I was leaving the city on the train to Bergamo did I notice I hadn't been to the fashion district, so renamed, and I didn't miss it the least. Maybe next time.

Italian Short Stories / Raconti Italiani, by several authors

Some very good short stories in here; I liked particularly the very sad one by Pasolini and the one by Alberto Moravia, and of course one of Calvino's Cosmicomics. Being a bilingual edition, I tried to read the original texts, some are easier than others, but even with my rudimentary Italian I was able to enjoy the musicality of the language, and felt sorry for not being more fluent. Even so, there were two - by Elio Vittorini and Moravia - that I actually could read without having to look at the English translation. It's really a beautiful language.

Les Cerfs-volants, de Romain Gary

It's always interesting how one comes upon new books. I am pretty familiar with French literature, and I had heard about Romain Gary for some time, but somehow I never happened to read any of his books. Then, a few months ago, I found him mentioned in the excellent Pumpkinflowers, by Matti Friedman, and that made me want to read him. So, when I was browsing French books at the very good bookstore Mollat in Bordeaux, I checked Gary's books and picked this one to get acquainted with the author.

It was a good choice, even being Gary's last book. It's a very well written and sweetly optimistic story, about love and coping with adversity. It left me curious about other books by the author, and isn't it lovely when books lead us to other books?

On the Move, by Oliver Sacks

I first heard of Oliver Sacks when I watched the movie Awakenings, that led me to the book, and then to several other books by him, like An Anthropologist on Mars, Uncle Tungsten, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and a few others. I enjoyed his books very much; even if I think he's somewhat too lyrical in his approach to Medicine, I like his honesty and his humanity. So, I was curious to read his autobiography, and I was not disappointed. He was an extremely dynamic, curious and interesting man, with an endless energy and zest for life and knowledge I cannot but admire. I'm not sure about his medical skills, but he really knew how to bridge those skills to a writing career, and he should be commended for that.

A weekend in Bordeaux

Bordeaux is a perfect town for a weekend visit - not too big, not too small, with enough sightseeing and liveliness to keep one enjoying oneself and ending somewhat reinvigorated, just like other French cities of similar size. Lots of History, good food, lively cafés, cosmopolitanism and multiethnicity, and the French savoir vivre.

There is not one feature particularly outstanding (except maybe for the Cité du Vin), but there is enough of everything very good to make the ensemble a great city. I stayed in a little hotel in the centre, near the Cathédrale de Saint André and the Hôtel de Ville. The architecture of the city is mostly from the 18th century, with lots of little squares with cosy café terraces, Gothic churches built over Romanesque ones, all kinds of shops and restaurants. I particularly liked Basilique Saint Seurin, the oldest church in Bordeaux, with the Merovingian sarcophagi in the crypt.

Then strolling along the bank of the Garonne, after passing the monument to the Girondins and down the Place des Quinconces (the biggest Place in Europe), by the Pont de Pierre (that I unconsciously named the Pont de Saint Pierre until noticing my mistake reading the city map), and the stately Place de la Bourse with the famous Miroir d'Eau.

Rue Sainte Catherine s apparently the longest pedestrianized shopping street in Europe, it was so crowded I thought at first there was a demonstration - there are always demonstrations in France - but as I got nearer I saw it was only shoppers and other people strolling by. From there I went to the Saint Michel area, with another big church and a lot of ethnic shops, like North African bazaars and halal butchers, but lively and multiethnic, not at all like a ghetto -the kind of European multiethnicity I so much enjoy.

The Musée d'Aquitaine was very interesting, with a good collection; I loved the Roman exhibition with the faces in the funerary stella, that always make me wonder about the real people behind them, and the Medieval Romanesque sculptures, so beautiful and imaginative. There was also the funeral monument of Montaigne, one of the men I most admire as a writer and a personality. Also lots of information about the slave trade and a good collection of art from Africa and Oceania.

I walked along the Garonne bank tothe Cité du Vin, an excellent modern museum, very technological and very informative about everything you want to know about wine, whose visit ends with the tasting of a glass of wine - I had a Médoc quite good.

There is good food everywhere, as usual in France; the local pastry cannelé is nice, somehow between the Neapolitan baba and the Breton kuin amman, and I ate a great galette du sarrasin at a Breton restaurant. I spent the last morning in a wonderful bookstore, Mollat, buying a few books - and exercising restraint, otherwise I would be ruined and carrying too much weight on the plane.

So, it was a very nice weekend and I look forward to travelling again.

Researching the Family Tree

As a child, I used to spend long holidays at my maternal grandparents', in a small town in the country. I always loved to listen to my grandmother telling stories about her father, her childhood and several more or less distant relationships, also enjoyed looking at old photographs of my greatgrandfather, a legendary surgeon barber quasi medical authority in the village, and browsing the dusty and cobwebbed filled attic, where I found a small stash of old books signed by some distant ancestors, even a funny old recipe by that greatgrandfather's grandfather, from 1817 (trades were usually passed from father to son then, so I came from a line of surgeon barbers). Being already at that time a History nerd, I wondered who these people were, and started researching the family tree as I could - went to the cemetery to look at their graves (very few, since the cemetery had been relocated in the 1920s), and convincing the vicar to let me browse the church records, where I found a number of dates and of unknown relatives. But the books were very incomplete, I was 14, and after drawing a reasonably complete tree (or so I thought) until the early 19th century, I left it at that and forgot about if for decades.

A few weeks ago, chatting with a colleague, she told me how her sister was excited about researching their family tree, and how nowadays one can find lots of information on the internet, since the Torre do Tombo (our national archives) has scanned most of church registers and they're available online. This reawakened my curiosity about my ancestors, and so I started researching the archives online; naturally I started again on my grandmother's village, with the people I had first heard about as a child.

So I did a lot of browsing in the last few weeks, and finished the available registers online from that village church; not only I found lots of unknown relatives and some more distant ancestors, even one decorated with the Ordem da Torre e Espada, one of the highest honorific orders in Portugal, but most of all it has been extremely interesting to look at the picture of a 19th century rural village in Portugal that emerges from these records (covering mostly the second half of the 19th century). It's impressive what a small and backward place it was, and how much life changed in 100 years (fortunately!).

It was a very sedentary place - people were born, lived all their lies and died there. I think there were no more than 3 dozen family names, in several combinations as people married each other, so they were all more or less related; there were a small percentage from nearby villages, and I found a Spaniard from Toledo - God knows how he got there. They were not very imaginative about first names either - tons of Manuel, Joaquim, António, José, João, a few Vicente, Eduardo, Diogo, Pedro. The girls were mostly Maria, also Antónia, Joana, Joaquina, Isabel, a few Gertrudes, Tomázia or Ana (there was one family, the Beirão family, that was a little more creative, with names as Alberto or Matilde). Only the abandoned children (the exposed ones, so named as in ancient Rome) got different names, probably from the saint on whose day they were found, so they were named anything, from Severino to Escolástica.

The trades were not very diverse either. Lots of shepherds, day workers (jornaleiros, the ones who worked by the day, probably in peasantry), some farmers, carpenters, stonemasons, a few landowners, shopkeepers, tailors, shoemakers, barbers, hatters (there were the chapeleiros, hatters, and the sombreireiros, maybe they made umbrellas? I'm not sure, sombreiro is derived from the Spanish word for hat), even some muleteers, and a few beggars, also found one describe as destitute (indigente) and even a hermit, from the small Saint Appolonia's chapel. It was a very class conscious world - most people were marked out as "poor", meaning they couldn't pay the fee for burial, and the most affluent ladies were marked out as Dona, unlike the ordinary women. If one died at the hospice, one was marked out as "housed" (albergada). Most people couldn't write, so the vicar signed for them over a cross.

The infant mortality was appalling: for every adult's death there were about 5 children, most of them in the first months of life. It was common for the newborns being baptized by the midwife - "as of necessity", unless they would die before they could be taken to church, my own greatgrandfaher was baptized that way. In the year of 1865, for instance, there were 17 adults' deaths, against 38 legitimate children and 20 exposed babies. (The amout of exposed babies was somewhat surprising - lots and lots in the 1860s, then less until no mention of them in the 1890s,) Sometimes the vicar would register the cause of death: "forte apoplexia" (a stroke), garrotilho (diphtheria), "súbita e inesperadamente" (sudden death), "anazarca" (probably heart failure), drowned, "falta de forças" (anemia? heart failure?).

And then there are the human, often moving, details. Like the woman who died "dashing herself down a well" (precipitando-se em um poço) - of course she didn't get her sacraments, my greatgreatgreatfather who couldn't take the "viático" (last communion) because of vomiting ("but he showed willingness to take it, so I showed him the Lord and it was as if he had taken it"), the young woman who couldn't take the sacraments because she was "stricken down by a shotgun" (fulminada por um tiro, then he body was sent to the city for autopsy - a murder?) and above all the obituary of two little girls, aged 3 years and a few months, that were "consumed by fire in a hut where the two innocents had been left unattended" (consumidas por um fogo em uma choça onde as innocentes estavam desamparadas").

So, all in all, this research has been extremely interesting, and I'm going to research more, from other villages and other sides of the family.

(The photo is from the village, Alcains, the street where my grandmother was born.)

What Belongs to You, by Garth Greenwell

I first heard of Garth Greenwell through Saleem Haddad, I read a text by him in Haddad's Facebook wall and liked it very much, so I ordered Greenwell's novel from Amazon. And I'm glad I did; it's a wonderful novel, a true masterpiece about desire and longing. Mitko comes up as a kind of Albertine: bought but unpossessed, available yet unattainable. It's extremely well written, moving and sad. I look forward for Greenwell's next book.

Other People, by Frances Partridge

By this time, reading Frances Partridge's diaries feels like returning to an old friend's life - I like her very much. This volume is not as interesting as the precedent (Hanging On), one feels somehow that her son's death didn't affect her as much as her husband's, or perhaps she was better fitted to withstand loss by that time. But anyway, it depicts very nicely the way a life loving woman coped with her solitary life, focusing on her friends' lives to keep interested in living and enjoying life, and most successfully. One cannot but admire her for that.

Malabourg, by Perrine Leblanc

A good enough novel, somewhat a dark tale with a redemption, set in French Canada (it caught my eye in the bookstores of Montreal last year). The writing is beautiful, and it's interesting to read Canadian French, very different from France French in many ways, but the story left me unmoved.

The Story of the Stone - The Golden Days, by Cao Xueqin

I don't remember where I read about The Story of the Stone, maybe it was in the Times Literary Supplement or in the New York review of Books, but it roused my curiosity so I ordered the first volume. I enjoyed it very much - it starts as a picaresque novel, and it grew on me, depicting a lost world of beauty and privilege, about a civilisation - the Chinese - I know very little about. It's a surprisingly modern novel, considering it was written in the 18th century. After some time, the narrative gets a little tiresome, with the silly pointless intrigues and pettiness of the characters' lives, curiously so reminiscent of the Ancien Régime, that was their contemporary across the world in Europe. But the characters are extremely lively and convincing, and they really come to life. So I think I will read the next volumes in the saga.

SPQR, by Mary Beard

This is a very good History book. The first part especially, until the end of the Republic, is just brilliant - the way the author reconstructs Roman history according to Roman sources is really interesting and up to the point, it's the best I've read so far. The second part is clearly inferior and it disappointed me somehow, but even so the depiction of the Roman way of life was extremely interesting and engaging. All in all, it's an excellent book.

The danger in the absurd

I have written less and less about Jews and Muslims because dislike to fuel the hatred; it's such a charged subject and I have several friends that are already over incensed about it. But I can't resist writing my 2 bits about the news of the recent UNESCO resolution draft about the Temple Mount, that strikes me as particularly absurd and as a sign of what is saddening and frightening in our Western civilisation. The absurd starts with its very existence - why on earth would it be necessary to define a historical place in this way, as if it's not sufficiently known to all the parties interested. But there it is nevertheless. I can understand that some Muslim countries advance such proposition, as a political maneuver part of their usual strategy of playing victim and reinforcing the anti-semitic propaganda they use to demonize Jews as a scapegoat for their own failures, as xenophobia and minority groups discrimination has been used for centuries by many kinds of governments everywhere. I can also understand that immoral and corrupt governments like Russia's or China's support it, as a means to appease their own sizeable Muslim minorities while in a way undermining Western-styled democracies and thinking, so killing two rabbits with the same stone. But that Western democratic countries can support it or abstain to vote (as so many did, mostly abstaining), supporting in that way such a ridiculous and despicable rewriting of History for political reasons, is infuriating. It is the kind f misguided "political correctness" stemming from a ridiculous sense of colonial gilt allied to a coward ad counter-productive policy of appeasement that, by denying our Western values of honesty and democracy is corroding the very base of our civilisation. That is the real problem, not the refugees or the minorities. The Western problem is not standing for and upholding the values on which our civilisation - the most successful until now even if not perfect - allowing in that way intolerance and obscurantism to get a foothold and set in. That's how great civilisations fail, from within, and not because of the barbarians, who just take advantage of their weaknesses and tiredness and, in the end, become a kind of solution, as the famous poem by Cavafy so rightly expresses. This UNESCO pitiful vote is a sad sign of decadence, as is the Trump phenomenon in the US, the Brexit vote or the tolerance by the EU f its members' Hungary and Poland policies. In this case, it's mostly symbolic, but symbols are meaningful.

This is London, by Ben Judah

I liked this book very much, I think it's an excellent reportage about the immigrants in London today. It starts in the Victoria Coach Station and ends at a Muslim cemetery, and it gives portraits of several of the different immigrants that compose the 55% majority of non-white British inhabitants of London at the present time. It focuses mostly on the poor people, the "invisible" ones, and I would have liked to see something more about the Muslims that are so often referred but have much less space than the Africans or the East Europeans. The writing is sometimes a little tiresome, but all in all it's a great book.

You Are Not So Smart, by David McRaney

This is a very interesting book, about human psychology, how our mind constructs our memories and judgements based on our emotional background and experience. I was aware of most of it, so it didn't change my conceptions about memory and decision-making, but I enjoyed it very much. It's an easy and engaging reading, funny and very informative.

Hanging On, Diaries 1960-1963, by Frances Partridge

I was not expecting much of this volume of Frances Partridge's diaries, convinced they would get less interesting as they became farther from the golden age of Bloomsbury - since Frances Partridge's claim to fame is mostly as a witness and friend of the Bloomsbury set. I was pleasantly surprised - this volume deals with the loss and mourning of her husband and her happy marital life, and for the first time Frances Partridge becomes the main character, now it's her personality, herself that matters, interesting in her own right. The book depicts the way she coped with her loss and how she endured the mourning period and was able to build herself a new life, not as happy as the one she had lived before, but satisfactory and fulfilling enough, which I think it was quite an achievement. From her diaries, Frances Partridge doesn't strikes us as a particularly intelligent person, nor especially witty or creative; her main quality is warmth, a keen aptitude to enjoy life and friendships, a kindness that must have made her dear to the people who knew her, which it seems to me a wonderful gift in itself.

And so the narration of this woman's life journey, sprinkled here and there with some Bloomsbury anecdotes, and also stories about the post-Bloomsbury British literary and cultural set, makes for a very interesting and uplifting reading.

Guapa, by Saleem Haddad

I heard about this book in an article about modern Middle eastern fiction, and it seemed interesting. I was not disappointed, it's an excellent book. Very well written, moving and strong, a story about a young gay man coming of age in the Middle East, and the best depiction I've read so far of the feelings aroused in young local people by the Arab spring, a promise turned sour.

It reminded me very much of The City and the Pillar, by Gore Vidal, and it pained me a lot to think that 70 years later the situation for gay men has not changed in some parts of the world - actually, maybe it has gotten worse. Saleem Haddad is a very good writer, and I'm looking forward to his next book.

The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch

I like to read books about life and death experiences, and this one seemed interesting. It is interesting, and somewhat uplifting - a celebration of life by a man who is doomed to die in a short time, of pancreatic cancer, and that leaves this collection of life lessons to his kids. I couldn't but empathize with the author's words - he lived fully a good life, he seemed like a really nice man and most of his advice is sound and sensible.

Yet, I couldn't help but think: "how American he is!". All the positive thinking, the sharing of his dire situation, the help groups he and his wife belonged to, it's really such a different reality from ours. It always impressed me how in the American culture people like to have everything so neatly organised and labelled - if you have cancer, you go to cancer supporting groups, if you find your son is gay, you join a gay men's mother's group, and so on. Also the use of therapy and counselling for all kinds of problems, in the optimistic belief that for every problem there are professionals who know better and that can help you deal with it. Of course there's nothing wrong about that, and if it's helpful, I guess people should go for that. But it's so different from my own individualistic approach to life and its problems, I never believed there to be neat labels and formulas to deal with problems and suffering.

Anyway, the book is a nice read and uplifting. And I heard about the alice.org project, that seems very interesting, I think I would like to explore it, maybe it will be a way for me to learn something about computer language!

Dynasty, by Tom Holland

I always loved the history of the Roman Empire in general, and the Cesar dynasty in particular. I've read it so many times, since I, Claudius to Suetonius, Tacitus, Cassius Dio and even Colleen McCullough, and I never get enough. So, I was curious when I read a positive review of Dynasty in the Times Literary Supplement, and I ordered it right away.

I thought it would be a history book, but it's more like a fictionalized history; the author bases his narrative on the known sources but surmises a lot, namely regarding the personalities of the main characters, and often the events themselves. Even so, it's an extremely interesting and enjoyable book. The author clearly loves its subject, and he comes at it with gusto and passion, and the whole book reads almost like a page turning thriller. What I found most interesting was the way the author weaves the story of the Cesar dynasty in the Roman history and Roman mores, the depiction of the transition from the Republic to the Empire, so the part from Augustus to Tiberius is the most well achieved, in my opinion.

All in all, a very good book about the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz

I like dystopian novels, I think they're a clever way to depict present problems in a way that makes us think: what if it was lie this? The Queue is a very good dystopian novel, in the tradition of 1984, Brave New World or The Handmaid's Tale; it's clever and thought provoking. The kafkaesque absurdity of the totalitarian rule of a faceless dictatorship is extremely well described, as the struggle to keep leading normal lives under extreme circumstances, which is something I always find fascinating. The grim situation in Middle Eastern countries is indeed impressive, and one cannot but wonder how the sane people there can cope with sheer everyday insanity.

Everything to Lose - Diaries 1945-1960, by Frances Partridge

This volume of Frances Partridge's Diaries is far less interesting than the one before, mostly because Bloomsbury, without Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry and Maynard Keynes, became less and less interesting. Even so, I always liked to know "what happens next" in any story, so I'm curious to know what happened to the minor Bloomsbury characters, including Ralph Partridge etc. Besides, Frances herself had a keen and observant mind, her narrative is interesting in itself, as are many of her reflections and small portraits. So I don't think it was a waste of time to read it, and maybe I will still check the next volume.