My one previous visit to Morocco, six years ago, had been for pleasure and had included stays in Fes, Marrakech, Essaouira, and the Atlas Mountains. On this occasion, it was work all the way, but I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours personal time for an all-too-quick visit to Rabat’s medina. Unlike those in Fes and Marrakech, the old quarter of Rabat, laid out in its present form in the 17th century, seems to get few tourists, so it’s perfectly easy to walk around without attracting the unwanted attention of shopkeepers selling carpets, argan oil, or whatever.
My destination was the Kasbah of the Oudayas. It sits adjacent to the medina and on a hill overlooking the sea. Its oldest parts date back to the 12th century, notably its elaborately carved Great Gate and Old Mosque. The small area around the Kasbah is beautifully preserved, with streets of traditional houses and gardens, and mercifully few of the trappings aimed at tourists. Walking around without crowds and enjoying a coffee in a small cafe was a real treat.
I enjoyed my few days in Rabat. It’s a relaxing, safe, and calm city (at least compared to the frenetic atmosphere of Fes and Marrakech). My hosts were delightful and generous. It would be good to go back one day with more time and fewer work commitments.
Some reputations are well deserved. Read anything about modern-day Naples and its scruffiness and edginess will feature front and center. I spent a few days in the city recently and, even allowing for everything I had read, I was surprised how dilapidated, graffiti-strewn, and down-at-heel it is. In the old city it seems every square inch of the walls has been defaced by graffiti, even historic buildings. In a place filled with ancient churches, museums, and monuments, it feels as if not a penny has been spent to restore or maintain them.
Surfaces are one thing, and spirit is another. Naples has charm, energy, and vitality in abundance and radiates them day and night. It’s a quirky, noisy, chaotic place, one that prides itself on its reputation for flouting the rules. Food, football, and living life to the full; those are the passions and charms of Naples.
Resist the temptation to use the city as nothing more than a gateway to Pompeii and the Amalfi coast. Take a few days to explore it, and it will repay the effort. Visit the Duomo, take an evening stroll down Spaccanapoli, eat the best pizza and gelato money can buy, and watch the Neapolitans at work and play. Don’t miss Vasari’s sacristy in San’Anna dei Lombardi or the archaeological museum. Naples isn’t “tourist pretty”, but it has a unique and unforgettable energy of its own.
I rarely notice museum guards. When I do, I find myself pitying them. The job looks exhausting and boring in equal measure. Being surrounded by priceless treasures cannot be much compensation in the circumstances. Patrick Bringley’s delightful account of working for ten years at The Metropolitan Museum did little to change my outlook, at least as far as that particular job is concerned.
All the Beauty in the World tells his story. Leaving behind an enviable position at The New Yorker magazine, Bringley, devastated by the illness and death of his much loved older brother, sought (and found) refuge and consolation amid the beauties and wonders of The Met’s collections. In his decade as a guard, Bringley learned a lot about art and history, but much more about himself and the life he wanted to live. It’s no exaggeration to say art saved his life. It taught him how to look and to live. Whether one believes there is a “purpose” to art or not, surely no one who loves looking at pictures and sculptures denies their power to heal, console, educate and transform. The book is a deeply felt account of his journey, and along the way it gives us a fond and funny insider’s account of that extraordinary institution and some of the people who protect its treasures and educate its visitors. I recommend it highly.
What do Amsterdam, Venice, and Reykjavik have in common? The answer is over-tourism. And not just over-tourism, but tourism so excessive that authorities in those cities (and many others) are looking at strategies to actively discourage visitors. Based on my personal experience in recent weeks, I want to add two names to the list of over visited places: Capri and Positano.
My advice to anyone planning to visit Capri is simple. Don’t go. By all means take a boat trip around the island and look at the pretty coves and rock formations, but under no circumstances dock at the main harbor and explore the main town. Even at low season, the place is choked with tourists who, undeniably with the best intentions, have destroyed what must have been a beauty a generation or two ago.
Positano, that most picturesque town, is well on its way to sharing the same fate as Capri. The streets climbing up from the port and small beach are lined with mostly average restaurants and uninteresting shops selling expensive tat to tourists. Just by being there, I felt I was hastening the demise of a place of stunning natural beauty.
Sorrento, Atrani, and, most of all, Ravello are a delight, but even those towns have to be visited early in the morning (and preferably at low season) before the hordes arrive. After a few days on the Amalfi coast, I was glad to leave and saddened by its gradual and inevitable desecration, to which I had unwittingly contributed.
In need of some vacation reading, I dropped by a local bookstore in Sorrento with a couple of shelves of English-language novels and found Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game. That seemed like a perfect choice because the film and TV adaptions of The Talented Mr. Ripley had been shot, at least in part, along the beautiful Amalfi coast. And so it proved. Ripley’s Game is a tightly plotted and psychologically convincing novel, written by a master of the genre when she was at the height of her powers. Highsmith’s preoccupation is a simple and important one. If the circumstances are propitious, can a conventional, respectable person be convinced to commit an evil act? What does it take to tip a good man into murder?
I have read more plausible stories, but I enjoyed every page of my first Ripley novel and am now looking forward to the others.
Graham Swift has for me been the most consistently satisfying storyteller from that generation of British writers that began to publish in the early 1980s. Some of his peers have been more prolific (Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie), and others have won greater acclaim (Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes), but Swift is the one whose books I look forward to most and have been the most dependably rewarding.
Twelve Post-War Tales is, I think, only his third collection of short stories in a writing career that began in 1980. Many of the stories feature, directly or indirectly, a moment or incident of great crisis for the world. A retired doctor volunteers his time to help out at his local hospital during the COVID pandemic. The attacks of September 11th upend the plans of a family due to return to America after a diplomatic posting to London comes to an end. Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the burning of Crystal Palace, and the Blitz; incidents of global or national importance become the lens through which a small, individual life is examined for signs of impact and trauma.
The writing here is masterful, as anyone who knows Swift would expect, and there’s something arresting and truthful in every story. Having said that, it’s an uneven collection, and one or two of the tales miss the intended marks. A small quibble. This is a wonderful book by a master of the short story art.
The Safekeep is a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden. It is set in the early 1960s in a quiet provincial corner of the Netherlands. Isabel lives alone in the family home following the death of her mother, but the house isn’t Isabel’s. It’s owned by one of her two brothers, and Isabel lives every day with uncertainty. She loves the house, cares for it, but has no rights. Where will she go if Louis decides to sell it? Into this small world bursts Eva, one of Louis’s girlfriends. Eva is lively, talkative, and perhaps a little silly. Everything Isabel is not. The impact is predictable until it isn’t. No plot spoilers here. Suffice to say, Isabel’s life becomes anything but safe, quiet, and conservative.
The Safekeep is an ambitious and affecting novel, and an impressive achievement for a young author.
It must have been hard work administering an empire. The punishing heat of India drove the colonial masters to look for cooler places for temporary respite, and they found them in the north of the country in places like Simla, Darjeeling, Manali and Mussoorie. Few of those subjugated by the sahibs and memsahibs had the luxury of escape, but for the ruling class the hill stations were places of recuperation and recovery. Mussoorie was one of the first hill stations and was settled by the British in the 1820s. Today, there is plenty of evidence remaining of those days. Remnants of estates and houses can be seen from the roads, as well as churches built to serve the British community.
Interestingly, the term is still used quite extensively in India, and still designates those towns where people go to seek respite from the intense heat and the frenetic nature of Indian city life. When I was in Mussoorie recently, I didn’t see a single other Western visitor. Indian travelers, however, were there in large numbers, escaping a period of intense heat that had seen temperatures in New Delhi exceed 40 degrees centigrade.
It is a place of extraordinary natural beauty. The Garhwal foothills of the Himalayas reach 7,000 feet here. I found myself entirely captivated by them, spending hours looking at them from different angles, in different lights, and at different times of the day. It’s a wonderful place for walking and hiking, and the relatively benign climate encourages those things. There is also culture here. The area is important in the history of Tibetans because the Dalai Llama settled for a year here in 1959 before moving the Tibetan government in exile more permanently to Dharamshala. A thriving monastery survives near Mussoorie with several thousand Tibetans living nearby.
Mussoorie, and the adjacent town of Landour, are unmissable for those who love mountains and, of course, those looking for a break from the intensity of India’s fascinating, but occasionally exhausting, cities.
Mussoorie is only 200 miles or so from New Delhi, so why does the trip take seven hours by car? The answer will become clear….
On the first part of the journey, a modern and efficient highway takes you, without interruption, from the urban sprawl of New Delhi to the urban sprawl of Ghaziabad. This is the capital city’s commuter belt and it now extends almost as far as Meerut. Anyone falling asleep for an hour after leaving Delhi will miss nothing, but it starts to get a lot more interesting at that point. The next stretch, moving north through Saharanpur and Biharigarh, sees India’s countryside assert itself. This is a place where fields of sugar cane stretch for miles, but it’s certainly not some rural idyll. Scores of brick making factories, their huge chimneys spewing filthy smoke into the sky, make sure of that. Hundreds of dhabas line both sides of the highway, catering for the hungry hordes heading in both directions. Progress slows at this point because India’s highways have a habit of stopping abruptly, giving way to smaller and slower roads. Often, and somewhat frustratingly, a new and as yet unopened stretch of highway, appears on the horizon, promising a speedier trip for future travelers but not today’s. An accident can close the highway entirely, as it did for me, forcing a long and fascinating detour through small villages.
A few miles south of Dehradun things really slow down, sometimes to little more than walking pace as the winding, sometimes treacherous road narrows and makes the climb to Uttarakhand’s capital. Looking to the left, travelers see an elevated, empty, and yes, unopened, highway stretching into the distance. Once in Dehradun, it’s wise to sit back, relax, and enjoy the sights and sounds of the busy city. There’s no alternative. The journey north from here cuts directly across the city and that itself takes a minimum of an hour.
The traveler’s expectation of what constitutes progress is well and truly re-educated by this point, and that’s just as well because what follows next requires patience and a strong stomach. From Dehradun, it’s probably only twenty miles to Mussoorie, but the ride can take anything up to two hours. These are steep mountain roads with hairpin bends, clogged with buses, cars, trucks, and the motorcycles and Vespa-style scooters that Indians love. I came to see the mountains, so I could hardly complain. Needless to say, the views are beautiful. Choose your cliche. Stunningly, breathtakingly, heart stoppingly wonderful.
Mussoorie sits high on the mountain, at approximately 7,500 feet. By the time one gets there, every foot and mile has been felt. But such is the magic and beauty of this place, stepping out of the car after seven uninterrupted hours, everything that came before, every slow mile and every traffic jam, is forgotten.
It seemed right to visit Gandhi Smriti. I had been before, but at times when the world had been less volatile, less dangerous, and less polarized. Now, when the voices of conflict and separateness are drowning out messages of peace and unity, it felt like an appropriate time to connect with the Mahatma’s message of non-violence in the place in which he died in 1948. There were almost no other visitors. 104 degrees, the hottest time of the day, and Delhi’s tourists and residents alike were wisely staying out of the sun.
Old Birla House, as it used to be known, is where Gandhi spent the last 144 days of his life and where, on 30th January 1948, he was shot to death by Nathuram Godse. It has been turned into a simple, slightly old fashioned, but powerful memorial to someone venerated in Indian society and around the world. At its heart is the austere living quarters that Gandhi occupied in his final months and the path, marked by cut-outs of his footprints, to the place he was assassinated as he walked to his daily prayer site. Elsewhere in the house is a museum where his life and achievements are summarized. I learned something new on this visit, that one of my favorite photographers, the great Henri Cartier Bresson, was one of the last people to meet Gandhi before the assassination, just a few minutes before the shots were fired.
Miscellaneous Musings 