Stanford Student Letters and Memoirs

9. 2. 60

Dear Folks,

Well, I hope you received and enjoyed the daily chronicles of our time in Rome. The rest of the week was a little less organized and thus harder to treat in such a fashion, but I will try to catch you up on it now.

Thursday was our last day in Rome, and we were free all day to do as we wished. Bridge Mitchell and I got going about 10:30 to wander around the town. It was raining continuously, and we were soon forced to buy an umbrella to keep the water from running down the back of our necks. We went around some of the route taken the day before on our tour of Renaissance and Baroque Rome, to set the impressions more firmly in our memories. Then we strolled on through the downtown area, and caught a bus to go out to see the area of the coming Olympic Games. We went first to a pair of stadia (one for track + field with not many seats and surrounded by huge white sculptures of athletic figures; the other a large but very plain soccer stadium) built under Mussolini. Then we walked (20 minutes away) to the central Olympic area on the north edge of Rome. There are many apartment buildings under construction for athlete housing, which will later be converted to low cost housing for Rome - a type of living facility already very prominent, and effective in eliminating slum conditions. Adjacent to these apartments are a pair of structures designed by the Italian architect Nervi, beautiful and imaginative creations. One is a small, dome shaped basketball pavilion, the other a medium sized (50,000) soccer stadium, which seems to barely touch the ground, it is so gracefully constructed. From the Olympic area we walked back to the middle of town, stopping off for a light lunch in a sort of automat, stand up cafeteria, then met the two girls purely by accident as they finished their shopping and went on back to the hotel for dinner. Thursday night we packed and went to bed early because Friday at 7:20 AM was departure time for Florence.

We arrived in Florence at 11:30, found a hotel near the railroad station, left our luggage and ate lunch in a nearby restaurant before setting out to see the town. We went first to the Cathedral, the second largest in the world (St Peters is larger). It is a sort of mixture of styles - outside it is quite decorative looking, with use of white black, red and green marbles, a fair amount of painting and sculpture over the doors, etc; inside it is basically gothic, with very bare walls (this is emphasized by the size of the structure too) broken only by some cornice work added during renaissance times (the church was built from 1296-1436). In the side transepts were some very lovely stained glass windows which, though inconsistent with the Gothic idea, added warmth to the atmosphere. Right next to the cathedral is its bell tower, a campanile built by Giotto (about 1350), done also in the striped marble style, a little gingerbread-like, but quite beautiful. Across the street is the Baptistry, a simple dome-like structure of the same appearance, whose greatest value is the 3 magnificent sculptured bronze doors of Ghiberti, showing scenes from the Bible, and called by Michelangelo "the Doors of Paradise". From the cathedral we strolled through the shopping area to Ponte Vecchio - an old bridge across the Arno which has a row of small (but expensive) jewelery shops clinging to each side of it. Very picturesque and famous spot in Florence. We walked on from here to the Pitti Palace, begun about 1440, a huge fortress like structure of large sandstone construction. Then back to the Arno, which to me is much prettier than the Tiber in Rome, and along it to the foot of Piazzale Michelangelo. From here we walked up the winding path and steps to the Piazzale itself, a lovely open plaza 380 feet above the river, with a copy of the Michelangelo statue "David" in the center and a splendid view of Florence and the Arno valley. We got there just at sundown and I ran around to each side for pictures. From here we walked down across the Arno to the church of Santa Ciorce, where the tombs of about 20 famous Italians line the walls inside: Machiavelli, Galileo, Michelangelo, DaVinci, Cillini, Al Capone (OOPS!), etc. Also a small chapel done by Giotto, but badly peeled.

Saturday was a beautiful sunny, warm day, ideal for sightseeing. We went (about 10 of us together with Herr Zimmerman, our German instructor) for about 3 hours to the Uffize Art Galleries, one of the finest in the world, particularly for Renaissance painting. They had some of the best of Boticelli, and some good Davinci, Durer, Holbein, Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, etc, etc. Hundreds of works of which we really looked at only a very few.

After the morning in Uffize and a good lunch (spagetti, roast beef, potatoes, salad, fruit, bread, wine - 65c) we spent the afternoon out of doors window shopping, walking back up to Piazzale Michelangelo for a look at the city by sunlight, then over to the huge Boboli Gardens behind Pitti Palace. We spent about 1 1/2 hours here, sitting on the lawn to rest our feet and gaze out over the gardens to the city beyond, the walking along tree covered paths, through open areas where boys played soccer or families walked and let their little children play, overlooked from the shadows by sculptured figures watching silently, past ponds with fountains in their center and swans swimming around. It was a beautiful, peaceful place to spend the afternoon. From here we went back across the Arno to get to St Lorenz church just at dusk, where we heard the organ play and watched the light fade as the 6pm mass was about to begin at one of the small side altars.

Both night in Florence we four met (Bridger and Mary Jeanette Erdman, Mary Ann Campbell and I) for a leisurely supper of pizza and red wine, enough to make us good and sleepy. Then straight back to the hotel and early to bed.

Sunday morning we were up at 5:30 to pack and catch a train for Milan. The ride there was pretty bad because the train had come from Sicily and by the time it reached Florence it was filled to overflowing. So we sat on our suitcases or stood, first on one foot, then the other, for most of the 4 hour trip. We had sat first in a 1st class compartment, but of course were kicked out when the conductor arrived after 1/2 hour to check tickets. From then on it was in the aisles with us. On arrival we checked our baggage at the station and set out to do as much as possible in the 3 hours we planned between trains. Mary Ann and I went immediately to the address given me by Marcia Fisher, since I had written that we would be coming to Italy that week. We were immediately received at welcomed to a real American breakfast - grapefruit juice, bacon and eggs, oranges, sweet rolls, coffee, which was delicious and doubly appreciated after so many mornings of cold rolls and coffee. We ate and talked for about an hour or more, then were driven back to the station, by way of the Milan cathedral and La Scala opera house, in time to reclaim our baggage and get a comfortable compartment.

We had decided while in Florence to spend our last night in Lugano, Switzerland instead of Milan, so this was our destination on the afternoon train. This way departure the following morning was at 8:07 instead of 6:30, and besides Lugano is indescribably more beautiful than Milan, which is mainly an industrial city. We arrived at 3:30 pm and after a 45 minute walk (suitcases and all) to the youth hostel only to find it closed for the winter, we returned by bus to a small hotel right across from the train station. The lady was very nice, gave us the rooms for $1.25 each and told us of an inexpensive restaurant a few blocks away. We had a marvelous and filling dinner for only 25c, and afterwards walked through the lightly falling snow (very uncommon for Lugano they said) down to the lake shore. The town is situated on several hills at one side of Lake Lugano, in the gorgeous southern Swiss lake country which Hemmingway uses for his "Farewell to Arms" (a scene from this occurs at Stresa and Locano, a few kilometers from Lugano, on another lake). We could look across the lake at the lights of homes on the hill opposite, which were also reflected in the water below. It was a beautiful thing to see, and the setting would be equally lovely on a summer's day, as it was on a quiet winter's night. We were in bed that night by 8:30 for almost 10 hours sleep (the girls found hot water bottles in their beds, as a courtesy of the family who runs the hotel). The next day was again beautiful and a perfect one to be traveling through the magnificent Swiss Alps - Bellinzona, Arth Goldau, Zurich, Scheffhauser, etc. back to Stuttgart. The mountains rise suddenly from valley floors, without foothills. They were quite beautiful and proud in their fresh coats of snow, more sheer and rugged than the Sierras are. We'll see them more closely on a coming trip to the Lucerne area (Mary Ann and I, on a 4 day weekend Feb 26-29, I think). We got back on the good old Burg just in time for a good dinner and a good night's sleep.