Barcelona Barcelona nestles between the mountains and the ocean, as one can see from Montjuic castle, reached by funicular and teleférique. If you can ignore the obvious (a talent I have long cultivated) you may be able to overlook the cannons, ancient and modern, designed to exert civic control--first by the 18 th -century Spanish central government and later by Franco s fascist government and appreciate remarkable views in all directions. The alternating stripes mark the Catalan, not the Spanish, flag.
Another tower reached by a tiny elevator running up the centre of the Columbus monument shows how La Rambla, the central pedestrian mall, runs along a tree-lined strip in the tourist district. La Rambla offers sidewalk cafes, bird sellers, florists, and an assortment of living statues.
Barcelona s beach remains busy, even in October, with hawkers eager for tourist dollars. Everywhere the city displays contemporary art, either formal or informal.
With your eyes attuned by so much public art you discover new delights every time you lift your gaze above street level.
And when an unusual birdsong causes you to look carefully in the trees, you may catch sight of a parrot or two. The cloister of Barcelona s cathedral maintains a flock of thirteen geese in memory of Eulàlia, the thirteen-year-old girl tortured thirteen times by the Romans before being martyred rather than renouncing her Christian faith. The main section of the sanctuary, currently under renovation, is
surrounded by twenty-eight ornate chapels. The organ boasts trompettes en chamade, projecting horizontally into the nave.
After admiring the cathedral s gargoyles, I set myself the challenge of wandering every one of the car-impassable streets around the cathedral, giving up the task after an hour.
During that time I discovered remains of the Roman wall, a terrific pastry shop, and more decorated exterior walls. But when I tried to share the labyrinth with Patti, all the streets had disappeared, replaced by others I d never seen. Gaudì
When I was growing up in the conformist Fifties we read a Golden Book called Tootle, an instructional fable about a young locomotive that liked to leave the rails and frolic in the fields. To stifle this inappropriate behaviour the railroad company employed dozens of agents bearing red flags to conceal themselves in the field. Whenever Tootle threatened to stray from the straight and narrow they would pop up and wave a red flag in the locomotive s face until he learned the true and proper path of conformity. Similarly generations of children were given colouring books and taught to colour only inside the lines. Claude Debussy s harmony teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, hearing the young man s audacious improvisations, told him, All that is very well, but you d better put it aside or you ll never win the Prix de Rome. Along the same lines, young assistant professors are instructed to conform to departmental expectations if they want to gain tenure (the tenured faculty who make such decisions serenely confident that they can detect and stamp out any subversive originality during the six years of probation). These thoughts come unbidden to mind when I see the architectural marvels of Antonio Gaudì. You can only imagine the remarks of his teachers: Yes we all like to dream once in awhile but you d best put those designs aside if you ever expect to receive a commission. The conception isn t so amazing: it s the execution! How did Gaudì ever get these apartments built? And yet his buildings created a kind of cult competition among architects on Barcelona s so-called Block of Discord, as wealthy landowners strove to outdo each other.
Gaudì also designed a self-contained upper-class park-village, complete with columned market place. When the idea flopped the city took the area over as a public park, where it delights tourists and more than a few Barcelonans.
Even if you ve accepted the somewhat bizarre notion that these buildings and this park could actually be constructed, does it seem credible that someone would say, I know: let s get Gaudì to design an entire basilica? But that s really what happened. Gaudì supervised construction of the church known as Sagrada Família until his death in 1926. The edifice remains unfinished, though completion is estimated within the next quarter century.
If you re willing to put up with a long spiral staircase you can glimpse work in progress and get a good view of the city. By renting a car in Barcelona we are able to make a brief side trip to visit the Salvador Dalí museum in Figueres. (You need to stand a fair distance away to make out the portrait of Lincoln in the lower left.)
Canigou I d brought hiking boots, determined to climb Mt. Canigou, one of the highest summits in the Pyrenees, only to discover that the trail had been closed by snow. The Tourist Office representative proposed instead a stiff forty-five minute climb to the Abbey of Saint-Martin- du-canigou, a monastery built in 1009. On the road leading to the parking lot we kept seeing signs indicating medieval way stations on the Camino Compostela, or Way of St. James, the route of pilgrims travelling to Santiago de Compostela in
Spain. In the 18 th century the last five monks left the monastery, too aged and infirm to continue. Two thirty-year programs in the 20 th century restored the buildings, with a millennium celebration in 2008. A member of the Community of the Beatitudes offers a French-only tour which I was able to translate for my monolingual companions from Colorado. Each detail of the stonework has religious significance, the dragons, for example, reminding the monks of their vow of silence.
Just before we prepared to descend I noticed some little-used stairs leading further up the mountain. A sign in French declared that great views could be had if you re willing to take your life in your own hands. Why not?
Béziers If you re Pope in the 13 th century, what are you going to do with Christians who reject the cross, the sacraments, confession, and the doctrine of the Trinity? Christians who instead embrace reincarnation, vegetarianism, the priesthood of women and the incompatibility of love and power? First you reason with them, then you excommunicate them, and finally you exterminate them. The so-called Albigensian Crusade in the first half of the thirteenth century aimed to wipe out the Cathars. It all began in Béziers,
where seven thousand Catholics and Cathars took refuge in the Church of La Madeleine. The abbot leading the church s campaign didn t worry about who was a Cathar and who wasn t. His forces battered down the doors of the church and slaughtered everyone inside. Kill them all, he said, God will know his own! Then they burned down the whole city, killing between fifteen and sixty thousand. And that was just the beginning. The main campaign took around thirty years, but the very last Cathar wasn t killed until early in the fourteenth century. The Cathédrale St-Nazaire illustrates the coexistence of styles that can occur when a building is constructed, or reconstructed, over a very long period: it has a 14 th -century cloister, a 15 th -century nave, a 17 th -century organ and an 18 th -century retable that the guidebook describes as outrageous.
The guidebook mentioned views available from the top of the tower, but the verger informed me that it would be closed until the afternoon. Eventually he relented and, taking a long key out of his pocket, gave me access.
A crepêrie within sight of the cathedral furnishes our noonday meal, ending with crêpe suzette.
People in the small cities graciously offered directions, and with winding streets preventing line-of-sight to our objective, I would need to consult several passersby in order to reach our destination. Of course the real trick is finding your way back to the car at the end of the day. I knew the parking lot had the name Jean in it, so I asked two passing policemen to assist me. A nearby woman disagreed with their directions but the policeman explained, always in French, that while the route she proposed might be shorter, we were less likely to get lost his way. Collioure Do you miss the old days, when a four-lane highway would suddenly turn into two lanes and you had to creep down the main street of a small town? Do you generally find highway lanes unsportingly wide? Do you believe that automatic transmission has taken the challenge out of driving? Then come to southern France, where rental cars come with standard transmission, where roundabouts every quarter mile compel you to downshift while facing the onslaught of cars entering from all directions, where street lanes barely exceed the width of your vehicle, and even major highways suddenly turn into repaved cow paths. Collioure, the archetypical southern French beach town, occupied over the centuries by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Spanish and the French, has now become overrun by tourists. A beachside restaurant provides a delicious salade niçoise followed by some serious ice cream concoctions (one alcoholic, one not.)
And, of course, cute dogs.
In the early 1900s, painters Henri Matisse and André Derain came to Collioure to work. The town has set up a Chemin de Fauvisme, with reproductions of works by Matisse and Derain, so that you can compare the art with the original.
Carcassonne I suppose everyone has some notion of what a medieval castle town looks like, without necessarily reflecting that the Middle Ages covered quite a lot of history. Carcassonne, the second most visited city in France after Paris, was settled as early as the sixth century BC. It served as an outpost of the Roman Empire, and enjoyed its golden age in the twelfth century as a residence of the Trencavel family. More or less abandoned in the seventeenth century, it was rediscovered in the nineteenth by Viollet-le-Duc, who restored the citadel according to his own vision. (He thought there should be arrow-slits, crenelations and pointed roofs, aesthetically pleasing but historically inaccurate.) Each successive inhabitant added to the existing structure instead of replacing it, so traces of Roman walls remain, with the twelfth-century chateau a fortress within a fortress. At one point the citadel served as a refuge for the oppressed Cathars.
The basilica of St-Nazaire proudly proclaims that St. Benedict, founder of the Benedictine order, preached there in 1213. They fail to mention that he was sent by Rome with the assistance of the Inquisition to convert the Cathars, including burning all their books and, if necessary, the Cathars themselves.
Patti saw more cotons (like Maisie) in one day in Carcassonne than in an entire year in Oakville. European toilet facilities offer such a wide range of convenience that we ve devised a rating system offering one star for each of the following items: closable door; toilet seat; toilet paper; water; soap; towel. Under
this system the ladies public toilet at Carcassonne would rate a negative one. One last day in Barcelona offers beach, beer and a band.