7.05.2005
avventura Genovese
So I just got back from a Magdala tour to Genoa. Since I was trying to travel light (more on this in a moment), it was impossible for me to bring my laptop. No matter, I figured, since I can always update my blog from an internet café. Well, as it turns out, that’s prohibitively expensive, especially when I’ve got friends waiting to go to the beach and I’m chained to the computer in the youth hostel. So I apologize for this extra-long blog, entry, which I’m actually writing in Word before posting. Note: this post was to be uploaded on Tuesday night, but because I fell asleep while writing it, it didn't get done until today (Thursday). It is being retroactively posted on Tuesday night.
We left for Italy at the ungodly hour of 7:45 AM from London Stansted Airport. There is some debate as to whether Stansted really can be considered a London airport, given that it’s more than an hour and a half outside of central London. It’s relatively easy to get to from Cambridge, but it’s an absolute nightmare trying to get there from Oxford. In fact, Diana and I were going to try to fly to Italy from Stansted but found that the costs involved in getting to the airport from Oxford would ultimately offset any saving we could find by using a budget airline. We flew to Paris instead for only about £10 more.
So flying out of Stansted at 7:45 means getting to the airport at 5:30. Which means leaving Oxford with a wide enough margin to make it to the airport: 2 hours. Yes, that’s right, we left Oxford at 3:30 AM. My friend Bill was coming up from Chilmark (I stayed with his family on the Queen’s Choir trip) and he stayed in my room for that tiny little slice of a night. We were kindly driven to the airport by Magdala member Paul, whose girlfriend was borrowing his car for the week. So she came for the ride and then drove the car back to Oxford. We’re flying Ryan Air, which is a budget airline out of Ireland – they are known for stupidly cheap fares in and out of rather ridiculously positioned minor airports like, oh, Stansted. Amenities are paid for – drinks are purchased, don’t even ask about a movie, and goodness help you if you even think about eating. On some of their newer planes, Ryan Air has actually eliminated the seat pocket and the windowshade, as these just raise the turnaround time for each aircraft.
Paul and Bill and I were some of the first Magdala people at the airport. As others began to stagger in slowly, I quickly became aware that there are a *lot* of people that I don’t know very well in the choir. In fact, there are a lot of people whose names I don’t even know. This is going to be quite a learning experience.
Ryan Air is pleasant enough, actually. There are two rows of exit seats over the wing, which Magdala snatched up with all speed. It’s good to be sitting in a row fully a foot wider than the others: I can cross my legs and still be comfy! Excellent. I sit, contentedly listening to my iPod on my Bose noise-reducing headphones. I mean, it’s not first class, but it has its moments too.
Immigration is suspiciously easy at Genoa. Finally, we make it to the train station. I learn, in the interim, that we are not staying in Genoa, but going directly on to Levanto. The bus ride from the airport to the train station reveals that Genoa is a phenomenally ugly city. It gets better as we get closer to the center of town, but really it looks like an industrial dump. We manage to sneak into the first class train cabin, which is beautifully air-conditioned and cushy.
Levanto is a tiny little resort town just north of Cinque Terra in Liguria. it seems to try very hard to be posh, but it is a little too small, and in recent years it’s been outshined by the towns of Cinque Terra, so it gets very little American tourism. There are a fair number of northern Europeans here: instantly recognizable by the paleness of their skin.
The church we’re singing, the Chiesa di San Andrea, in is gorgeous. Like many of the other churches of Liguria and Tuscany, it is striped in green and white marble. The interior is pleasantly cool and the icons are gorgeous. After a quick rehearsal, we all go out for some food. We have never actually eaten together as a choir: Magdalen College does not provide us with food, unfortunately. So I sat down among a few of the guys I don’t know at all. As it turns out, and I’m glad about this, I will be eating a lot of meals with these gentlemen.
The meal started out with a generous portion of antipasti, comprising marinated anchovies, various sliced cured meats, salami, caprezze salad, stuffed mussels, ground fish, octopus… Amazing. In fact, there was enough for a meal. Then the time came to order our actual main courses: I had a fried mixed seafood, which was delicious. Squid rings and tentacles, clams, mussels, shrimp, and some beautiful herring. I also managed to try some of what the others were eating. The cheese and spinach ravioli in walnut sauce were delicious, though the sauce was not at all nutty. There was a wonderful spaghetti with seafood sauce which had a spicy kick just under the incredibly clean taste of pure olive oil. And the pesto gnocchi were excellent too, though I’m usually not one for gnocchi. The wines were flowing nicely and we all had a lovely time. Over at the other table (there were two), Chris bought two bottles of €50 wine, which was a bit excessive. The meal, sadly, came to a €33 conclusion: fair, I suppose, for what we’d eaten and drunk, but much higher than I was comfortable paying. Then again, I got a free trip out to Italy and had no expenses except food.
Life in the youth hostel has been grand so far. Very hot, yes, but otherwise not too bad. I had a wonderful amaretto gelato today. Brilliant stuff – I’d missed gelato. Brings back memories of my wonderful month in southern Europe after college graduation. Boy does that sentence sound snooty.
Anyway, the following day (Friday), we monopolized the church and turned it into a massive recording studio. We recorded the first of seven pieces in 33 takes. David Skinner, our conductor, doesn’t so much record individual takes for patches as much as he throws down fifteen takes of the same thing just to be sure. After we continued to get more and more nervous with his nit-picking, I decided to do something about it. I started a betting pool: how many takes will each piece require? Suddenly, we’re interested in recording again. And yes, David’s nit-picking will definitely serve us well when the recording comes out. Meanwhile, Chris seems to be winning big. Well, as big as one can if the stakes for each piece is half a euro…
We had a recording session in the morning, then a long break for lunch. Lunch was at a focacciateria filled with excellent offerings. I had a mushroom focaccia and a tomato-mozarella-basil focaccia. Like a very thick pizza. mmmm… :)
We finished up the recording session and then went out for dinner – I had a lovely spaghetti in seafood sauce. Next to me, Brady had a sea-bass, which smelled amazing. Overall, a great day.
Then I did something stupid. We went sort of wading into the Mediterranean, and although I wasn’t meaning to get wet above the waist, I wasn’t watching carefully and I was knocked on my butt by a huge wave. When I came back up, my glasses were gone. I mean, really and truly gone. Luckily, I had a pair of prescription sunglasses in the hostel. A truly unhappy ending to what had been a really lovely day.
Saturday saw the completion of our album recordings. Thankfully. Overall, I don’t think that the recording could have been better – every nuance we wanted to put in got in, and yet we had fun and were relatively relaxed. A huge concert in the church followed that evening, which was incredibly well attended. They spoke to us through translators to tell us how honored they were that we had decided to come to share our music. In fact, the reason we had picked the church was that one Giovanni Joachino Passano had come from Levanto to be the ambassador of Genoa to France, and then later the French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII. The concert (and CD) is all music that he would have heard in his travels. In fact, Passano brought back to Italy a chalice from Westminster Abbey: the chalice was on display during the concert and we each got to see it and take photos of it. After the concert, the ladies of the town choir got together to make us food: more focaccia. It was all a bit much, really, but the sight of all off those people enjoying the music was wonderful.
Of course, I did the entire concert in my sunglasses, which were complimented by our choice of concert attire: black shirt and black trousers. In celebration of this, I also shaved down to a goatee, which made me look more menacing. The overwhelming consensus is that I look ridiculous. Fun. :)
Sunday was a day off of sorts: we moved out of the hostel and got on trains to get to Genoa, but not before having some time to chill out and enjoy a leisurely breakfast on the boardwalk above the beach. We went to a few stores for fruit, fresh bread, and salami, and then made a bit of a picnic for ourselves. I had cherries, apricots, tomatoes and a beautiful salami Milanese. When we got to Genoa, we immediately set off to explore the city. A few of the dingier palazzi were actually quite nice on the inside, and the Via Garibaldi was a wonderful place to walk through. It didn’t take long for us to find parts of Genoa that were beautiful, but it does take a good amount of effort. Lunch was had at a lovely little restaurant overlooking the wharf. I had a wonderful seafood risotto, while the majority had a rather spicy tagliarini with prawns. A few of us went to the Palazzo Rosso, Palazzo Bianco, and Terme museums, which were pretty good. Unfortunately, there was a lot of schlock art in there with the good stuff. We did get to see Paganini’s violin, though, which was amazing. Dinner was at a lovely restaurant situated in a neat little piazza somewhere in Genoa’s old city center. The food was delightful (I had a nice antipasto of prosciutto e melone & smoked swordfish on arugula and then a main course of squid and eggplant stew) but the really wonderful part of the meal was that we had a live guitarist and singer just behind us playing for us and taking requests. We got him to play Autumn leaves and some Beatles music. He was just sitting there, plucking away when we arrived, and then slowly and very quietly broke into Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. We attempted a rendition of John Sheppard’s Salvator mundi Domine, but fell apart rather quickly after about 18 bars. Conductor David, myself, and a Californian named Elysha rang in July 4th with a few drinks and a toast to Christopher Columbus, whose house was down the street from the bar.
Monday was free until our concert at 7:30, so I spent the morning walking around Genoa sightseeing. The palazzi were open again but almost all of the museums were closed. We hit upon a marvelously inexpensive place for lunch (I had another pasta – fusilli with pancetta and peas, mmm…) and then went off on my own in search of shopping. I found it on the Via Roma, which is a wonderful street full of high-end boutique stuff. Unfortunately, neckties from Salvatore Ferragamo ended up being priced at about €120, if I understood the woman correctly. Not exactly a bargain. I also managed to trek all the way across town to the south-eastern part of Genoa, which was a long walk but worth it for the scenery. It certainly was not the picturesque old town, but even the fascist era buildings with their austere white marble and their stylized Roman arches can be beautiful. The concert was a bit ragged around the edges, really. It was difficult to sing after such long days (and nights) and we were all pretty tired of the music. But the audience was glorious and they really did seem to have a good time.
Dinner, of course, was a lavish affair. Unfortunately, we ended the concert at 9:45, and were struck with the difficulty of actually finding a restaurant at that hour. Eight of us finally found a wonderful place called the Schooner restaurant: it had wonderful food, good ambiance (Toulouse-Lautrec paintings on the walls) and great jazz. It being our last night, I suggested that I might go in for a more filling meal of two courses. What I meant was a first plate – second plate. What everyone else thought was starter – main. No bother: I had a delicious plate of marinated anchovies, three of which were covered in a basil and olive paste, the other three in garlic and fresh herb. They were incredible. To my right, John had another prosciutto e melone, while to my left, Benedict had an amazingly fresh capreze salad. Further down the table, Stephen had an artichoke flan. I have no idea what it tasted like, but he looked a little less than pleased with it. My main course was a phenomenally fresh seafood taglialini. John had fish ravioli with a seafood sauce, which was also very nice. Down the table, three people had deep fried zucchini blossoms and fish. Dinner rounded out very nicely and we were all immensely satisfied. And as the food started to kick in, so did the jazz, which moved from blues to a whole lot of soul. Wonderful.
The ride back to Oxford wasn’t so bad the next day with two minor hiccups. I had to remove my sunglasses so as not to appear suspicious while going through customs and also immigration. None of these things was particularly easy. But I made it back to Oxford and here I am now. Work starts tomorrow, so wish me luck. :)
We left for Italy at the ungodly hour of 7:45 AM from London Stansted Airport. There is some debate as to whether Stansted really can be considered a London airport, given that it’s more than an hour and a half outside of central London. It’s relatively easy to get to from Cambridge, but it’s an absolute nightmare trying to get there from Oxford. In fact, Diana and I were going to try to fly to Italy from Stansted but found that the costs involved in getting to the airport from Oxford would ultimately offset any saving we could find by using a budget airline. We flew to Paris instead for only about £10 more.
So flying out of Stansted at 7:45 means getting to the airport at 5:30. Which means leaving Oxford with a wide enough margin to make it to the airport: 2 hours. Yes, that’s right, we left Oxford at 3:30 AM. My friend Bill was coming up from Chilmark (I stayed with his family on the Queen’s Choir trip) and he stayed in my room for that tiny little slice of a night. We were kindly driven to the airport by Magdala member Paul, whose girlfriend was borrowing his car for the week. So she came for the ride and then drove the car back to Oxford. We’re flying Ryan Air, which is a budget airline out of Ireland – they are known for stupidly cheap fares in and out of rather ridiculously positioned minor airports like, oh, Stansted. Amenities are paid for – drinks are purchased, don’t even ask about a movie, and goodness help you if you even think about eating. On some of their newer planes, Ryan Air has actually eliminated the seat pocket and the windowshade, as these just raise the turnaround time for each aircraft.
Paul and Bill and I were some of the first Magdala people at the airport. As others began to stagger in slowly, I quickly became aware that there are a *lot* of people that I don’t know very well in the choir. In fact, there are a lot of people whose names I don’t even know. This is going to be quite a learning experience.
Ryan Air is pleasant enough, actually. There are two rows of exit seats over the wing, which Magdala snatched up with all speed. It’s good to be sitting in a row fully a foot wider than the others: I can cross my legs and still be comfy! Excellent. I sit, contentedly listening to my iPod on my Bose noise-reducing headphones. I mean, it’s not first class, but it has its moments too.
Immigration is suspiciously easy at Genoa. Finally, we make it to the train station. I learn, in the interim, that we are not staying in Genoa, but going directly on to Levanto. The bus ride from the airport to the train station reveals that Genoa is a phenomenally ugly city. It gets better as we get closer to the center of town, but really it looks like an industrial dump. We manage to sneak into the first class train cabin, which is beautifully air-conditioned and cushy.
Levanto is a tiny little resort town just north of Cinque Terra in Liguria. it seems to try very hard to be posh, but it is a little too small, and in recent years it’s been outshined by the towns of Cinque Terra, so it gets very little American tourism. There are a fair number of northern Europeans here: instantly recognizable by the paleness of their skin.
The church we’re singing, the Chiesa di San Andrea, in is gorgeous. Like many of the other churches of Liguria and Tuscany, it is striped in green and white marble. The interior is pleasantly cool and the icons are gorgeous. After a quick rehearsal, we all go out for some food. We have never actually eaten together as a choir: Magdalen College does not provide us with food, unfortunately. So I sat down among a few of the guys I don’t know at all. As it turns out, and I’m glad about this, I will be eating a lot of meals with these gentlemen.
The meal started out with a generous portion of antipasti, comprising marinated anchovies, various sliced cured meats, salami, caprezze salad, stuffed mussels, ground fish, octopus… Amazing. In fact, there was enough for a meal. Then the time came to order our actual main courses: I had a fried mixed seafood, which was delicious. Squid rings and tentacles, clams, mussels, shrimp, and some beautiful herring. I also managed to try some of what the others were eating. The cheese and spinach ravioli in walnut sauce were delicious, though the sauce was not at all nutty. There was a wonderful spaghetti with seafood sauce which had a spicy kick just under the incredibly clean taste of pure olive oil. And the pesto gnocchi were excellent too, though I’m usually not one for gnocchi. The wines were flowing nicely and we all had a lovely time. Over at the other table (there were two), Chris bought two bottles of €50 wine, which was a bit excessive. The meal, sadly, came to a €33 conclusion: fair, I suppose, for what we’d eaten and drunk, but much higher than I was comfortable paying. Then again, I got a free trip out to Italy and had no expenses except food.
Life in the youth hostel has been grand so far. Very hot, yes, but otherwise not too bad. I had a wonderful amaretto gelato today. Brilliant stuff – I’d missed gelato. Brings back memories of my wonderful month in southern Europe after college graduation. Boy does that sentence sound snooty.
Anyway, the following day (Friday), we monopolized the church and turned it into a massive recording studio. We recorded the first of seven pieces in 33 takes. David Skinner, our conductor, doesn’t so much record individual takes for patches as much as he throws down fifteen takes of the same thing just to be sure. After we continued to get more and more nervous with his nit-picking, I decided to do something about it. I started a betting pool: how many takes will each piece require? Suddenly, we’re interested in recording again. And yes, David’s nit-picking will definitely serve us well when the recording comes out. Meanwhile, Chris seems to be winning big. Well, as big as one can if the stakes for each piece is half a euro…
We had a recording session in the morning, then a long break for lunch. Lunch was at a focacciateria filled with excellent offerings. I had a mushroom focaccia and a tomato-mozarella-basil focaccia. Like a very thick pizza. mmmm… :)
We finished up the recording session and then went out for dinner – I had a lovely spaghetti in seafood sauce. Next to me, Brady had a sea-bass, which smelled amazing. Overall, a great day.
Then I did something stupid. We went sort of wading into the Mediterranean, and although I wasn’t meaning to get wet above the waist, I wasn’t watching carefully and I was knocked on my butt by a huge wave. When I came back up, my glasses were gone. I mean, really and truly gone. Luckily, I had a pair of prescription sunglasses in the hostel. A truly unhappy ending to what had been a really lovely day.
Saturday saw the completion of our album recordings. Thankfully. Overall, I don’t think that the recording could have been better – every nuance we wanted to put in got in, and yet we had fun and were relatively relaxed. A huge concert in the church followed that evening, which was incredibly well attended. They spoke to us through translators to tell us how honored they were that we had decided to come to share our music. In fact, the reason we had picked the church was that one Giovanni Joachino Passano had come from Levanto to be the ambassador of Genoa to France, and then later the French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII. The concert (and CD) is all music that he would have heard in his travels. In fact, Passano brought back to Italy a chalice from Westminster Abbey: the chalice was on display during the concert and we each got to see it and take photos of it. After the concert, the ladies of the town choir got together to make us food: more focaccia. It was all a bit much, really, but the sight of all off those people enjoying the music was wonderful.
Of course, I did the entire concert in my sunglasses, which were complimented by our choice of concert attire: black shirt and black trousers. In celebration of this, I also shaved down to a goatee, which made me look more menacing. The overwhelming consensus is that I look ridiculous. Fun. :)
Sunday was a day off of sorts: we moved out of the hostel and got on trains to get to Genoa, but not before having some time to chill out and enjoy a leisurely breakfast on the boardwalk above the beach. We went to a few stores for fruit, fresh bread, and salami, and then made a bit of a picnic for ourselves. I had cherries, apricots, tomatoes and a beautiful salami Milanese. When we got to Genoa, we immediately set off to explore the city. A few of the dingier palazzi were actually quite nice on the inside, and the Via Garibaldi was a wonderful place to walk through. It didn’t take long for us to find parts of Genoa that were beautiful, but it does take a good amount of effort. Lunch was had at a lovely little restaurant overlooking the wharf. I had a wonderful seafood risotto, while the majority had a rather spicy tagliarini with prawns. A few of us went to the Palazzo Rosso, Palazzo Bianco, and Terme museums, which were pretty good. Unfortunately, there was a lot of schlock art in there with the good stuff. We did get to see Paganini’s violin, though, which was amazing. Dinner was at a lovely restaurant situated in a neat little piazza somewhere in Genoa’s old city center. The food was delightful (I had a nice antipasto of prosciutto e melone & smoked swordfish on arugula and then a main course of squid and eggplant stew) but the really wonderful part of the meal was that we had a live guitarist and singer just behind us playing for us and taking requests. We got him to play Autumn leaves and some Beatles music. He was just sitting there, plucking away when we arrived, and then slowly and very quietly broke into Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. We attempted a rendition of John Sheppard’s Salvator mundi Domine, but fell apart rather quickly after about 18 bars. Conductor David, myself, and a Californian named Elysha rang in July 4th with a few drinks and a toast to Christopher Columbus, whose house was down the street from the bar.
Monday was free until our concert at 7:30, so I spent the morning walking around Genoa sightseeing. The palazzi were open again but almost all of the museums were closed. We hit upon a marvelously inexpensive place for lunch (I had another pasta – fusilli with pancetta and peas, mmm…) and then went off on my own in search of shopping. I found it on the Via Roma, which is a wonderful street full of high-end boutique stuff. Unfortunately, neckties from Salvatore Ferragamo ended up being priced at about €120, if I understood the woman correctly. Not exactly a bargain. I also managed to trek all the way across town to the south-eastern part of Genoa, which was a long walk but worth it for the scenery. It certainly was not the picturesque old town, but even the fascist era buildings with their austere white marble and their stylized Roman arches can be beautiful. The concert was a bit ragged around the edges, really. It was difficult to sing after such long days (and nights) and we were all pretty tired of the music. But the audience was glorious and they really did seem to have a good time.
Dinner, of course, was a lavish affair. Unfortunately, we ended the concert at 9:45, and were struck with the difficulty of actually finding a restaurant at that hour. Eight of us finally found a wonderful place called the Schooner restaurant: it had wonderful food, good ambiance (Toulouse-Lautrec paintings on the walls) and great jazz. It being our last night, I suggested that I might go in for a more filling meal of two courses. What I meant was a first plate – second plate. What everyone else thought was starter – main. No bother: I had a delicious plate of marinated anchovies, three of which were covered in a basil and olive paste, the other three in garlic and fresh herb. They were incredible. To my right, John had another prosciutto e melone, while to my left, Benedict had an amazingly fresh capreze salad. Further down the table, Stephen had an artichoke flan. I have no idea what it tasted like, but he looked a little less than pleased with it. My main course was a phenomenally fresh seafood taglialini. John had fish ravioli with a seafood sauce, which was also very nice. Down the table, three people had deep fried zucchini blossoms and fish. Dinner rounded out very nicely and we were all immensely satisfied. And as the food started to kick in, so did the jazz, which moved from blues to a whole lot of soul. Wonderful.
The ride back to Oxford wasn’t so bad the next day with two minor hiccups. I had to remove my sunglasses so as not to appear suspicious while going through customs and also immigration. None of these things was particularly easy. But I made it back to Oxford and here I am now. Work starts tomorrow, so wish me luck. :)
