Italian Travelogue

The reasons for leaving your home and going other places vary greatly from traveler to traveler. But for most it’s an attempt to shift or refresh one’s attitude towards their lives. Because I’ve been involved in a nearly daily reexamination of my everyday life for many years now, travel to other places has usually felt like unnecessary overkill. I have little curiosity about other places and very little urge for adventure. Almost all the trips I’ve taken outside Chicago over past twenty years have been to visit my parents or the parents of my (rarely-occurring) significant others. Whether these journeys can properly be called vacations is probably debatable, but the idea of just leaving town for the hell of it has hardly ever crossed my mind, so these family rendezvouses must serve in the absence of any alternatives. 

On this visit to Italy, I’ve spent a lot of time behind the wheel as we’ve taken day trips to various towns within an hour or two of Florence. I’ve also spent a good amount of time at the place my parents rented in Fiesole. The idea of renting an apartment in another country for an extended stay, as they have, is an interesting one because the goal is to transcend tourism and to actually live in a foreign place for a time. However, a weeklong visit like mine cannot reach that state, no matter how homey the setting.

On a daylong trip to Venice with my brother Max, we indulged in the unavoidable tourism which is the lifeblood of that city. Between repeated gelatos, we wandered all about, taking care to dodge other aimless wanderers who seemed completely oblivious to others’ presence in their path. We met my other brother Boris and his wife Blakeney and walked about some more, after a meal at a waterfront restaurant. Venice seems like a toy train-set town, an idea of an old city rather than an actual lived place. Still, any direction you look is a postcard-come-to-life and the absence of cars makes for a far less stressful experience in unfamiliar surroundings. 

On the high-speed train back to Florence, I sketched Max as he slept. This felt like one of the more normal moments of the entire trip.

Were I on a CTA train in Chicago, I’d be doing much the same thing. Is there any difference because this happened some five thousand miles away? I couldn’t say. But after nine days it’s good to be going home. Was there any value to this trek other than spending time with family? I truly can’t say. The feeling of foreignness comes naturally to me and shows itself in places I know like the back of my hand. Some people say you leave in order to appreciate your own place. Time will tell whether there has been any shift in perspective. My parents will think they could have done something differently. But they were perfect hosts and did all they could to present a place they love in its best light. It’s not their fault that travel feels like voluntary exile to me.

Now back to the routine: wake up, read, eat, paint, watch movies, write, serve drinks, bus tables, wash beer glasses, sleep. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

—Remember that brand-new sketchbook I wrote about a few weeks back? I somehow managed to lose it at the creepy suburban-style movie theater on Roosevelt before a press screening of a silly rah-rah America agitprop thriller called The Purge: Election Year.

Giorgio Morandi

I’ve been in Italy the last couple days. I’m here because my parents invited me to come spend a week with them at a place they like outside Florence. They’ve been here over a month and this is their third or fourth visit. The place they rent is in the hills and is surrounded by olive trees. The owners sell olive oil, in fact. This is called agritursimo here—kind of like AirBnB but out in the middle of a landscape that looks like the background of a Renaissance painting.

I don’t really know how to travel. The only touristy item I had on my agenda was visiting Giorgio Morandi’s house-museum in Bologna, which is about an hour and a half away from here. Half the route is through twisty little village roads. These were my initiation into driving in Italy. No one got killed and the car’s in one piece, so I count it a success.

Morandi’s place is on a nondescript side street called Via Fondazza. He lived there with his sisters for most of his seventy-four years, painting the same dusty bottles, saucers, cups, and seashells, and views of neighboring yellowish stucco houses with terra cotta shingles. The room he painted in is preserved now behind glass like a diorama display in an old-fashioned natural history museum. The only thing missing is a mannequin of the man himself, frozen in action. It has a monastic cell feel to it, this little room. What’s visible are the remnants of a life lived with blinders. The man only really did one thing for over fifty years. I don’t know if such a thing is possible these days—to shut out all the noise and devote yourself to a singular activity until you die. But the idea of it is very seductive. Perhaps, at least in part, because I know I couldn’t do it. 

Before I left Chicago, I painted another dog, reviewed a show of illustrations from the pioneering satirical magazine Puck, and added to my growing collection of capsule film reviews.

Sketchbook Switchover

The sketchbook goes everywhere with me. Sometimes it’s a hiding place, a way to assuage social anxiety, other times just a way to pass hours I don’t know what to do with. Because I’ve never kept a diary, it’s the closest thing to a record of my days. Unlike many artists, I’ve never used a sketchbook to work up ideas for more finished work, or for any ideas at all for that matter. What I draw in there is what I see of where I’ve been. More often than not it’s faces of singers, readers, and sitters on public transportation which make me take the book out. I hardly ever know these people but drawing them establishes a tenuous connection (whether they know it or not). 

The last couple of sketches in the book I just finished were of the singer/songwriter Will Oldham and the electronic combo Bitchin’ Bajas. I don’t know any of them personally and likely never will, but for the 15 or 20 minutes when I was making marks as they played, I was engaged more actively with their music and for that, no matter what I end up with, these drawings matter.

I have a stack of about 15 finished sketchbook teetering on my studio book case. I don’t look at them that often but when I do there’s an occasional drawing which doesn’t seem so bad and, as a whole, each book does remind me of specific blocks of time. Remembering with pictures isn’t the same as remembering with words. It feels sturdier to me, less prone to sugarcoating or other revision after the fact. But that’s probably because drawing has been how I’ve talked with the world for over 30 years and I just trust it more. 

In the meantime, I started a new book. The first sketch is of a glass, wine bottle, and water carafe at Rootstock on Saturday night. Nothing profound here, but when I look at it later I’ll remember the porkbelly salad, mushroom tagliatelle, and two very different glasses of wine I had that night, the people I talked to and eavesdropped on, and it’ll happen without a single word jotted down anywhere.