Some highlights from Italy not as yet mentioned: (for purposes of personal nostalgia, if lists are your abhorrence then peruse no further!)


Bologna:

The Dr Dixie Jazz band performing their 30 year long staples in a bricked-in cellar.

The red tower with its panoramas of a ceramic city, then the 'if these walls could talk' moment of archway discourse.

Rome:
Dinners with Jack's great aunt, her view of the Vatican and her apartment a capsule of old Sydney in the midst of the Roman artistic community.

My 21st birthday revisited. Biting into a bitter, stolen orange in an Edenic garden atop Rome only to peer through a keyhole portal to a vengeful St Peters. A tour of the city, its churches, the Pantheon.


Watching gypsy kids while the night away in Carnevale dance and circus performance.

Art upon art reaching its zenith in the Vatican.

A prolonged encounter with an American tour group on a pilgrimage to thank the pope for their home's only partial destruction in hurrican Katrina. Congratulated for my mastery of English despite all handicaps presented by being an Australian.

Our abandoned yet disconcertingly noisy hostel. Two days in Rome on the house, so to speak.

Venice:

The Church de Franti and its superb Titian.

Peggy's house followed by a Bach concert in the domed Basilica on the grand canal.

Our last, glowing sunny day in Venice - no asiatic cholera to be spoken of. The Palazzo Ducale with its memories of entrapped Doges, splendid water views, Tintorettos, Carpaccios and Boschs - marvellous.

Padua:

The 15 dazzling minutes we had booked with Giotto.

Chancing upon a Mantegna fresco cycle, Donatello's rejoinder to THAT mammoth equestrian statue in Rome and De Chirico.

Learning to draw in charcoal and the glow of red wine.
Ravenna:
Padding the deserted streets alone, tracking down gorgeous roman mosaics, such remarkable composites of classical representation and christian iconography.


The train back through the alps.