This town is adorned with towers and other incredible palazzi. I especially admire Palazzo Larcher Fogazzaro on via Mazzini—a noble Baroque building with a marvelous tall, polished door, and a balcony held up by two carvings of Atlas. A woman is buzzing herself in while balancing a bag of groceries. I wish I could see her apartment, the life lived inside it.
* * *
IN LATE AFTERNOON, we check into the oxblood-red Villa Madruzzo, a former grand home. There are newer rooms in another building, but we’re in the old villa. Our big, old-fashioned and comfortable room is next to William’s. He is old enough at fifteen to have his own room, but I still want him close by. We reach his favorite amenity—an indoor pool—by tunnel.
We didn’t realize when we booked, but we signed up for half-board. This breakfast-and-dinner-included custom lingers in many traditional Italian hotels. I rather like sitting down among people who have their wine bottles, half-empty from last night, on the table and already know the waitstaff. The window-lined dining room reminds me of summers when I would go with my grandmother to White Springs, Florida. The grand white hotel was always full of regulars, who came frequently to sip the sulfur waters. The water tasted like the smell of Easter eggs I found in the bushes weeks after the hunt. In the grand dining room, or so I remember it, we ate butter beans, corn, ham, biscuits, peach turnovers—all the southern delights of summer.
At Villa Madruzzo, they’re serving local German-influenced food. This tree-level dining room feels like a terrarium. The guests speak German. Trento citizens speak predominantly Italian; but north of here, German prevails. And in pockets, the ancient language Ladin, a mix of Latin and Friulian-Swiss dialects, still thrives.
William and I are up for the platter of herb dumplings poached in broth with sauerkraut, smoked pork, and potato pancakes. Very tasty, and nothing like anything I’ve ever eaten in Italy! Ed’s choice on the set menu is another hearty serving of yellow mushrooms, veal meatballs, chard, and polenta.
* * *
BRILLIANT. EXHILARATING. MUSE: Muse delle Scienze. We are overwhelmed by the hard, soaring lines of the museum of science designed by Renzo Piano. Trento has brought to stunning success a languishing industrial area just a short walk from town. The whole complex is near the Adige. The museum, residences, parks, conference centers, and more give the impression that the space is a town unto itself. Alto Adige is one of the richest areas in the whole European Union. How enlightened—they’re translating their success into artistic works.
The large and airy museum is like a giant, sharp-angled greenhouse, whose jutting, pointed shapes recall glaciers and the surrounding mountains. Pools reflect the glass panels, a watery mosaic. The initial visual impact primes us for a stupendous interior.
We start on the sixth floor, the top. The exhibits are built around a large atrium looking down all the way to the bottom floor. Here’s the magic, what mesmerizes: Suspended by thin wires at different heights all the way to the ground floor are the birds and animals of the Dolomiti. As if in a dream, the animals float in midair. The taxidermy is superb—everything looks caught right now, in motion. This is the most fabulous science and natural history museum I’ve ever seen. (Many are gloomy.) We’re interactive with all the smart exhibits—ecology, aquariums, history of the Dolomites, pendulums, extinction, avalanches, climate change, even a way to see how you’d look in the caveman era. MUSE floods the mind and senses.
We walk around the atrium as we descend, catching the creatures from different perspectives. When I was a child, my father told me that when pets died, they went to “happy hunting ground.” I imagined meadows, not questioning if my rabbit and baby ducks still would be prey to his bird dogs. In MUSE, these suspended rabbits and foxes and wolves and deer all inhabit the air of a peaceable kingdom. Here, Daddy, is happy hunting ground.
Trento, a hard place to leave.
NOTES:
The languages Ladin and Ladino are often confused. Ladino, evolved from Spanish and Hebrew, is not spoken in this area. The local language, Ladin, has different forms and evolved from Latin roots, plus Swiss and Friulian dialects.
A description of MUSE: https://www.cultura.trentino.it/eng/Cultural-venues/All-cultural-venues/Museums-and-collections/Muse-Science-Museum-Trento
On Renzo Piano: http://www.archdaily.com/273403/happy-birthday-renzo-piano
On the way up to the Alto Adige, we bypassed Rovereto because of our blowout on the autostrada, which delayed us by three hours. We knew we would be too late arriving in Trento if we’d stopped. After visiting Trento, I feel torn. Ready to explore more of the Dolomiti north of here but also pulled to double back. There is something I want to see in Rovereto.
“Let’s go,” Ed says. “You’ll just regret it if we don’t.” Back along the Adige—castles strategically positioned for outlooks, abbeys and church spires, the pleasure of the neat rows of grapes rolling down hillsides—an easy drive.
* * *
ROVERETO’S TREE-LINED AND broad main street has no curbs. The sidewalks slope gently down. What a good idea. Though it looks like a pleasant walking town, we drive straight to the object of this quest: MART, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. This is another waving plume in the hat of this region. A stellar art collection housed in a building designed by Mario Botta. I remember well when his San Francisco Museum of Modern Art rocked the sensibilities of the Bay Area in 1994. After reading about his work since then, I am inspired to see what he accomplished in Rovereto.
* * *
COULD THIS BE the entrance, a narrow street between two palazzi? Unprepossessing, and no preparation for the surprise of stepping into a soaring atrium. The steel and Plexiglas dome resembles a spider web, with the center an open oculus like the Pantheon’s. Rain and snow can fall into the fountain below. The slot and square windows in the lower walls also remind me of the Pantheon, although with a touch of rigor that recalls slits in castles for arrow shooting, and also the rationalist buildings beloved by the fascists.
The collection features the work of modernist Italian painters and of the Futurists, those bad boys. Although the Futurists’ jarring work is better known, the other painters of the twentieth century, such as Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Julius Evola, Achille Funi, Mario Sironi, and Manilo Rho, were more individualistic. Funi’s Ragazzo con le mele (Boy with an Apple), Rho’s Woman in Red, and Campigli’s Donne sul terrazzo (Women on a Terrrace)—which recalls both fresco technique and Etruscan tomb painting—are three favorites. And Alberto Burri! I am a longtime admirer of this painter from Città di Castello, near Cortona. While serving as a medical doctor in World War Two, he was captured and sent to a POW camp in Texas, where he began making art out of found items—cardboard, wire, and cellophane. Much of his work is displayed in his hometown, though he was influential worldwide to many artists, including Robert Rauschenberg.
And how fabulous—Fortunato Depero’s Movimento d’uccello (Movement of a Bird). Reading over the famous Marinetti manifesto of 1909, I laugh at the bombast. Down with libraries, museums, feminism, and morality! The artists of the movement are under thirty and expect to be extinct by forty. The century has turned, ushering in speed, machines, velocity, all manner of movement. Art must embrace disruption and industry. War is “hygienic.” “A racing car…is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Down with Italy’s past culture, even pasta!
A Futurist favorite of mine is Gino Severini, a Cortona boy who dropped his painting of religious subjects and took up fractured motions and wild colors. We get to see his Ballerina from 1913, and Plastic Rhythm of 14 July, and Portrait of Madame MS. He’s good. A trattoria in Cortona displays a print of Severini’s dancehall painting La Danza del pan pan al Monico, Dance of the Pan Pan at the Monico. The colors, angles, and rhythms of the dancers run to the edge of the canvas—no context of a room, just collective motion. How many evenings I’ve wait
ed for my ribollita while admiring his joyous whirl and energy. In old age, Severini returned to Cortona. As his own motion slowed, the long DNA in every Italian painter’s blood must have proven too strong to resist: He took up painting the Madonna once again. A couple of times a week, I walk up the path of his mosaic stations of the cross. All Futurist motion stalled.
We linger and linger. Lively contemporary exhibitions express the museum’s architectural momentum. One is simply a doorway with music and talk seeping out. A collaboration between Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and Grazia Toderi, Words and Stars combines imagined maps, celestial maps, and real visions of the lights of Istanbul, with prose that dwells on how our minds connect with the movement of light and stars. (Long gone now, but perhaps it will travel.) There’s a drifty ambiguity: The words seem to dissolve as I try to read the handwriting of the earth—its oceans, lights, earth formations.
Botta’s interior is so white. The airiness, the sculptural openings in walls, the monumental stairways, the turns—all take you on a journey. The excitement of the art communicated by its house. Imagine, in this small town. How did this miracle happen?
The Hotel Rovereto is something of a time warp with its plain furnishings and bleak light at the window. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I feel like the solitary figure in Edward Hopper’s Hotel Room. Fortunately, the restaurant serves good local food. As we attack a big fish in salt crust, we ponder the wonders we have seen.
NOTE:
Orhan Pamuk’s novel of a doomed romance, The Museum of Innocence, inspired him to create an eponymous museum in Istanbul. Not to be missed! Personal, intriguing, imaginative, the museum is an Ottoman house transformed into a cabinet of curiosities. Pamuk’s project is obsessive: All objects named in the narrative of his book are displayed.
As we drive from Rovereto to Merano, William suggests a detour. He’s spotted Lago di Tovel on the map and already knows he wants to see mountain lakes. We’re on a precipitous road. I’m unable to read because of endless switchbacks. We climb and dip and climb and finally the forest parts and we arrive.
The green, green water, fringed with conifers and hardwood trees, is backed by the jagged gray peaks of the Brenta Dolomites, some with white rock slopes that I first think are covered with snow. We start to walk the lake path, past a beach where a few people are sunning on towels. In the shade, family picnics are in progress. Swimming isn’t allowed. How frustrating to lie in the sun, unable to splash into this clear water to cool off. Planning only to go a little way, we keep walking, drawn by the shifting scenery and the water changing color as depths and shadows play. Soon we’re a third of the way around. Go back or continue?
We go on. An easy walk. Only a few others on the trail. Most turn back. Why does this place seem different? I’ve walked with pleasure around many lakes, but here, something else is happening—an exhilaration. Contact high. Is it the clarity of the air sharply defining where water meets trees, trees meet mountains, and the mountains, sky? I take off my sunglasses, thinking the lenses distort color. But, no. The scene is vibrant and super-real. Sunlight glints off the facets of the peaks, turning the stone angles pink and gray and violet. The air deeply fresh and the lake translucent, like a painting on a mirror. I sense how I would feel in the water, water clear as air, frigid, purifying water. Even imagining a plunge is renewing.
Halfway around, we come upon another beach where a few pale forms are stretched out on their towels. Others have ventured into the forbidden water. I take off my shoes and step in up to my ankles. Quick thrums of pain shoot up my legs. Forget swimming. The path turns craggy and uphill for a hundred yards or so, then smooths out onto a wider path covered with pine needles. Quiet. A crow caw splits the air. As afternoon lengthens the shadows, the water turns from emerald to inky blue, even turquoise where the sun hits. William stops to photograph a waterfall and stream rushing through ferns. We’ve walked only two hours, two memorable hours.
* * *
WHEN WE REACH Merano, it’s late in the day. We’re at Villa Adria, a pretty Belle Époque hotel that feels like someone’s lovely summer house. We’re greeted as though we’re being welcomed back, although it’s our first time here. Piero, who must have worked here forever, shows us the reading room, cozy with books, antiques, and Oriental rug. French doors open to a flowery terrace. William is enchanted by the 1914 wooden elevator, like a fanciful birdcage with upholstered benches. Our rooms look out over villas with terraces and gardens. Obviously, we’re in a microclimate; this looks like Florida.
William is introduced to the austere style of making up the bed with an individual duvet. “I like a top sheet,” he says. “This thing is heavy.” Merano is full of “cure hotels” (medical), now rethought as spas (sybaritic). Villa Adria is a place where most guests check in for a week of relaxation and treatments, and some active trips organized by the hotel. Biking, hiking, golf, and excursions are listed for the following day. When I reserved, I was charmed by the website. Creative, original people and individuals, I read, are the most welcome. We hoped we qualified. Staff photos include all the housemaids and waiters. I like the attitude.
Piero brings us prosecco on the terrace and the reflection off the putty-colored building casts a sunny glow over everyone. La vita è bella. The dinner hour is earlier up in this area than in Tuscany. When we stroll into the yellow dining room at eight, our table is the only vacant one. The staff is welcoming and the buffet (not my preferred way to dine) lavish. The waiter has the good recommendation of a citrusy Ploner Sauvignon. “Do you all think hotels have moods?” I ask.
William gives a slight eye-roll but gamely answers, “Possibly. What’s the mood here?”
“I think…optimistic.”
Ed says, “Effervescent. The mood of someone about to sing an aria.”
“I’m going to get some more pasta.” William is smiling. Who knows what goes on in the head of someone fifteen traveling with grandparents? But I can imagine.
* * *
THE LUCKIEST TOWNS are those built along a river and if the river is the picturesque Passer, double luck. Were the surrounding mountains placed there simply to enhance the setting of this elegant town? Nineteenth-century Merano was where the Habsburg empress Elisabeth, affectionately called Sissi, came for her health, bringing in her wake family and an Austrian court entourage. Other nobles followed, enjoying the mild winter and participating in baths, drinking the waters, and promenading in gardens with fountains and pavilions. An outdoor treatment was “the terrain cure,” which simply meant walking on slightly rising paths. No major exertion required, wrote a Professor M. J. Örtel of Munich, but a proven remedy for the heart, circulation, and muscles.
The genteel aura of an aristocratic spa town remains. The white and pale yellow neoclassical and Liberty (Art Nouveau) buildings, long paths along the river, and curated shopping streets would lure Sissi today. She might be taken aback by the egalitarian Merano thermal baths project. Designed by notable architect Matteo Thun, the complex right in town offers twenty-five different pools, plus saunas—one with a snow room to cool in—and massages and other treatments with local products such as hay, wool, and fruits. Besides various hot and cold pools, there’s a salt pool, one for non-swimmers, another for children. Hotel Terme Merano stays open all year. I fancy sitting in a steaming pool surrounded by snowbanks.
I’m stunned at Thun’s vision. A vast glass box, maybe fifteen meters high, placed like a cloche over pools that abut each other, with lounging platforms in between. You’re in a paradisaical terrarium. I love bold architecture that isn’t just for flash but embraces function in surprising ways. Thun’s ancient colleague would be the architect of the baths of Caracalla in Rome.
I didn’t expect to be stunned by this region’s contemporary architecture. Renzo Piano’s MUSE in Trento, Mario Botta’s MART in Rovereto, now Matteo Thun. We will definitely come back to the Thun terme for a few days of escape. But now, we
want to see the rest of Merano.
“Okay, Franny,” Ed says, “do towns have moods—and if so, what’s the tenor of Merano?” We’re walking down the Corso Libertà, lined with upscale shops and trees, including the southern magnolia grandiflora with dinner-plate blooms. The parking area is crammed with bicycles.
“Light-hearted. I can imagine everyone listening to lyric opera and song cycles. Everyone’s house is filled with flowers and bowls of fruit on the table. And hearty. Everyone skis and toboggans in winter. Hot chocolate and little fried pastries.”
William points out shiny community bicycle pumps along the sidewalk. He sends off a photo to his parents, both dedicated cyclists, who are up and out early, and gets an immediate reply: Sign of a superior civilization.
I did say upscale. The supernal market, Pur, has wheeled wicker shopping carts, an espresso bar, jewel-box produce, artisan flours, local cheeses. Even the milk must come from the nicest cows. Ed starts a conversation, first with the barista, then with someone else over the merits of linden honey. William collects a few snacks for the car trip—fresh apple juice, chocolate, German pretzels, baby radishes like rubies. I’m lingering over a table of handcrafted wooden cutting boards and spoons. “But you’re Italian,” I overhear.
See You in the Piazza Page 6