An Italian Odyssey

When my journey began, and as we walked across No Man’s Land at Wagha border we did not realize how weary would become of the whole enterprise and feel both homesick and, at the same time, long for an end to our journey. We had travelled two days by train across a barren mountainscape to Iran, with smugglers as fellow travellers, and then we had been befriended by students and fellow scribes in Iran. A week later we had crossed over into Turkey, encountered a wrathful Mount Ararat. It had felt like receiving Manna from Heaven, soaking the last remaining piece of bread in the torrential downpour. Yugoslavia had been big hearted and we had re-energised ourselves in the company of our old friends in Belgrade. Our journey had now to continue:


We did not stop at Zagreb, the Croatian capital as we became aware of how seriously we lacked funds and how difficult it would be to arrive in a strange town and force hospitality from strangers. Our aim was now to get to Paris, my dream destination, where I believed I would be welcomed and looked after by my patron and honorary uncle MVK, a famous Indian journalist. Travelling from town to town, importuning for free rides and food was no longer romantic or adventurous. I had lost some 15 pounds in weight, my socks had not been changed for two weeks, so that they were practically glued to my skin. One arm was covered in what looked like infected eczema. Our clothes were stiff with dirt. Our eyes were hollowed by tiredness . We fell asleep even standing, leaning on a lamppost.

To European onlookers, we probably looked like two refugees from a region ravaged by famine and war as we dragged our luggage behind us wherever we went..

And yet the approach of Italy filled me with dense and obscure desires. It represented to me the dark and the sensuous whether in literature, landscape, poetry, painting or food. Names resonated: Michelangelo and the Sistine chapel, Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio the provocateur with his ambivalent sexuality. Botticelli’s wistful Venus rising out of a seashell, every man’s dream, Rome’s via Veneto. the wish fulfilling Fountain of Trevi – as I remembered them from a romantic comedy Roman Holiday featuring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in a cinemascope vision..... these cinema images crowded my mind for attention...

The only literature I can claim to have read other than Alberto Moravia novels was Alighieri Dante’s Inferno in an abridged translation, and then, leaping centuries, The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa about an Italian prince. Alberto Moravia’s novels were about the elite aristocracy and their sombre perversions behind closed doors. This half digested fare has a distorting effect on the perception of the country you are about to cross.

Soon we were in Italy and passing the Adriatic town of Trieste. I can recall no more than red roofed houses clinging on to the hillside and the silent bustle of feet of the shoppers crowding the streets. Then we were in Venice, with a loaf of bread and precious little money.

Venice is a city honeycombed by a hundred canals, some mere backwaters others, like the Rialto, adorned by massive sculptured bridges and dotted by vaporetti (water taxis) and gondolas and lined along the embankment with restaurants, bars and shops displaying exquisite jewellery and expensive gifts. There were sumptuous covered markets, heaving with a thousand cheeses, fresh and smoked fish and hams, a dozen variety of breads, liqueurs and wine, pastries filled with exotic fruit and nuts, vast display of fresh vegetables and fruits, and the universal smell of fresh roasted espresso coffee. Drinking dark espresso in tiny ceramic cups in a single gulp expresses the Italians’ zest for life.. You see lines of clients standing at these espresso bars facing large gleaming coffee machines spurting steam, not lingering but entering, ordering an espresso, quaffing it noisily and leaving the bar all in just a few minutes. One could effectively mime or choreograph this very Latin ritual. I could not help yearning for the heady coffee aroma from home. I remembered my coffee addict father who bought coffee beans fresh from a Coorg coffee exporter, fastidiously roasted and powdered it himself and brewed it with stop watch timing. He got us all addicted. We did not have the money to buy and taste one and be a true Venetian.

We also longed to be on one of those gondolas, stretched out against oriental damask pillows, sipping sweet liqueurs and munching on Italian delicacies to the strains of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. There would be troubadours on the banks singing medieval madrigals, and ceremoniously bowing as the gondolas with their occupants passed......

We walked up to St.Mark’s Square through narrow cobbled winding streets, past restaurants packed with the locals, mostly families. It was truly unbearable watching them swab food off their plates with chunks of bread or luscious pasta and fill their ravenous gargoyle mouths with them. It was a veritable torture from the perpetual hells of pretas, the hungry ghosts. . We sat by the quay watching the evening bacchanalia unfold in gondolas with drawn lace curtains, with some of the activity going on plainly visible. Here we ate our remaining pieces of bread soaked in a paper cup of water each, grateful for the passing comfort it gave us.

We then headed in search of a bench we could sleep on and found the magnificent railway station with a near empty waiting room full of unoccupied ornate benches opposite the Rialto bridge. There was piped music of the operatic strains of Mario Lanza singing Caruso, and it all seemed wonderfully inviting. We settled down for the night and fell asleep but not for long. Soon we were being poked by the batons of the local the Polizia, asking us for our train tickets which alone would qualify us to spend the night in the waiting room. Two young policemen, with their motorbike helmets still in place giving them an intimidating presence, kicked the wrought iron legs of the bench indicating that we were not welcome in this Spartan waiting room. It was midnight and the revelry in the cafes was still in full swing. Reluctantly we dragged our suitcases to the edge of the canal and sat on them with our feet in the water, a cooling if bracing experience. Subhash and I talked about our time so far and how weary we were and why there could no longer be any pleasures of discovery in this journey. At 5 in the morning when the first light of day broke through the iridescent glow of mist over the canals, some of the revellers we had seen earlier at their window tables in restaurants were staggering down narrow alleys, headed for home.

I was to learn later on in life that taking a holiday in Venice , Florence, and Siena is like being a time traveller temporarily inhabiting Italy's medieval times once ruled by dynasties of bankers. The Venetian bankers along with their banking brethren in Florence, Sienna and elsewhere, gave the world of banking some of its best known terminology and useful financial instruments, dominated the world of European trade for four centuries from their august palaces, and financed the bloody crusades of the middle ages

I was immersed in history, architecture that defies description and an incredible treasure of art. I recalled to Subhash the longing I had felt as a youngster in an Indian village for Renaissance Europe, its museums and its palaces and cathedrals. My resource then was an abridged Encyclopaedia of unknown provenance, as its binding and cover pages were missing; and a travelogue by the Kanarese novelist, aesthete and polymath Shivaram Karanth, Apurva Pashchima, The Incredible West.

Although these cities look and feel as if preserved in aspic, they were full of tourists. It was impossible to get into a museum or the most famous Academia picture Gallery in Italy, as the queues snaked round the corridors of this monumental structure even at nine in the morning. We had to content ourselves with a couple of picture postcards which we dutifully sent to our parents in India. Our money did not stretch to purchasing a glossy calendar of Botticelli paintings.

There were, it seemed, thousands of young Japanese girls in fashionable European clothes displaying a very European body language making up most of these line-ups. Instead we hung around a bookshop full of unattended books and browsed through a coffee table book of the 18th century Venetian paintings. Our disappointment at not being able to get into the one of the galleries was somewhat assuaged.

Venice is a city that should be lived in; not just visited for a few days. However it was time for us to move on, destination France.


We found our exit from Venice, a maze though it was of canals, and found ourselves in a massive long distance transporter headed for Milan. and Turin. This was a gigantic industrial landscape producing hundreds of thousands of Fiat motor cars sustaining the Agnelli dynasty.. There was little point in stopping over as we had no money and little likelihood of finding friendly hosts. It was getting harder and harder to get a hitch and we stood for hours waving our thumb to uncomprehending drivers headed for the Italian border. I could see in my mind’s eye two oversized dusty ragamuffins dragging two suitcases, bent against the prevailing wind and smoke, careering along the hard shoulder of the motorway, waving our thumbs. Bafflingly, no car with French number plates deigned to stop for us.

We must have waited sitting on our suitcases on the speeding edge of the motorway outside Turin for several hours into the night before a young Italian in a two door sports car who wanted to relieve himself spotted us and pulled up. He was going across only as far as Grenoble and we were welcome to share his car.


We had not prepared for the awesome drive through the Frejus tunnel under the Alps which sat majestically straddling several countries in southern Europe. The tunnel is 14 Km long and whizzing through it in a sports car is not for the faint-hearted. We clung to our seats as the G Force and invading closeness of the tunnel walls with no familiar co-ordinates grabbed our senses and our accelerating bodies.

It was the early hours of the morning, dewy and fresh as we pulled into historic Grenoble in the foothills of the great Alps glimmering in the sun. Our driver dropped us off in the middle of a handsome mediaeval square with a colonnaded city hall at one end. It made one realise that all French architecture is on a grand scale, Paris being the apotheosis of this architectural paradigm. The fountain was playing dowsing some historically significant statuary and a mass of colour of well tended flower beds dotted the square, painting a pleasing tapestry of bright colours.. We sat by the fountain, refreshed by its spray and breakfasted on a remaining loaf of bread that we had rescued from an Italian restaurant dustbin.

We were in France at last, the land of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, not forgetting the bloody revolution and the guillotine! There were several days ahead of us still before we would enter Paris, notionally the end of our journey. More surprises and shocks awaited us. How would MVK, celebrity journalist and my honorary uncle and patron react to us when we arrived on his door step, hungry, ill and dirty, carrying our dilapidated suitcases? Will we be fed and praised for our courage and sleep in comfortable beds or would we be heading for shelter under the famous Parisian bridges spanning the Seine to the strains of Juliette Greco song Sous le Ciel de Paris (Under the skies of Paris) and share our shelter with notorious gang of clochards( tramps, vagrants and alcoholics who live and sleep on the streets with territorial fights between them for a space under the shelter of the bridges)? We had several surprises in store for us in the great city of Paris..............

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Previous related Blogs of B2B-K-K (Kini-Krishnan)


The Sixties: A New Renaissance

B2B with K : My indebtedness, to Satish, Subash

B2B with K : Of crossover book and a cross-country trip

B2B with K: Kabul in the hippy, happier days

The Journey Begins

B2B with K: My take on the names you dropped...

B2B with K: Leaving London, home-bound

Name Dropping On Friends

B2B with K: Clueless in Germany, a tale of two visits

B2B: Kini hits a speed-breaker

Facing No man’s Land: End of the Journey?


End of an Era for India or A tryst with destiny?


B2B with K: Where we were the day Nehru died


The Wrath of Mount Ararat


Manna From Heaven


Hobson's Choice in Turkey


Dreaming History


A Bohemian Interlude