Alma Mater Studiorum

Walking through the streets of Cambridge, through the winding streets lined with great stone buildings with dizzying spires and stained glass windows, and signs like “Corpus Christi College: Closed to All Visitors,” there is obviously a sense of propriety and entitlement. Though the iron gratings and fences are covered with flyers and posters, they are all announcing lofty music concerts and high-powered lectures such as the one I am going to tonight on the Higgs Boson and the Large Hadron Collider.

On the train from King’s Cross in London, a young woman was on her cell phone, talking to someone about how one of her friends would be in Cambridge that afternoon and that she might run into her at the library. There was a pause, as the interlocutor on the other end must have responded, to which she rejoined, slightly louder, “I don’t know, I guess there are some books at Cambridge that Oxford doesn’t have." A wave of smugness filled the air that was palpable, and I heard a few self-assuring chortles from the fellow passengers.

This summer, in a series of random events, I ended up being an “hono(u)rary” player on the Oxford University Water Polo team at a tournament in Antwerp. As a thank you to the team, I took them on a tour of Antwerp. Time and time again, jabs at Cambridge would come up from the players, and then ultimately it came out that the absolute, and I mean absolute, worst insult you could ever levy upon someone from Oxford would be to mistake him or her for someone from Cambridge. The Horror, the Horror…talk of splitting hairs and atoms on a pin head...

So, with my own silent smugness, since I have never been part of Ox-Bridge outside of this honorarium, as I walk through the streets, I think to myself, well, I once taught at L’Università di Bologna, the OLDEST universities in the modern world. Its motto, in fact is Alma Mater Studiorium, which loosely translates as “the mother of all universities.” Established in 1088, it trumps Ox-Bridge by a bit over a century. A few years ago, there was a major, and highly unpopular agreement amongst European universities to be more accommodating to each other’s curricula and encourage more exchange program without losing credit hours, and as it was a conclave of all the Rectors of the major universities in Bologna, it became known as “The Bologna Accord.” So, some people only associate the words Bologna and University in a negative connotation as a result. Hardly what has happened with the names of Oxford and Cambridge.

Moreover, the physical aspects as well could not be more of a dramatic contrast. Whereas Cambridge is a clean, tidy, probably nearly crime-free (aside from intellectual theft (and since I first wrote this post, also bicycle theft)), town, Bologna around the university is gritty, grimy with lots of crime, drugs and no beautiful Backs to walk along admiring the grandiosity of the Colleges, even from their “backsides.” There are very few original Aule Grande left on Bologna’s “campus,” which is a very loose word as there is no central courtyard, or even cluster to distinguish it as a coherent University. Like much of Italy, it is chaos that somehow works.

But, unlike walking down Trumpington Street from my hotel, hitting the staggering Corpus Christi and King’s Colleges, walking down Via Zamboni, one sees an endless array of dreadlocks, tattoos, piercings, dingy and wild student cafes, spilling over with smoking Italian students (and mostly Italian students, unlike the highly international make-up that one sees here), dodging used needles and dog shit, not to mention the dogs making said shit. One of our friends was bitten by such a dog and was very ill for quite some time.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Bologna, for so many reasons and would move back there in a heartbeat, and I believe that I would rather live there again than be here. Not that I actually liked seeing people shoot up heroin next to dumpsters on a regular basis, but for the most part, I loved Bologna. Hard to explain if you have not been there. The rest of Bologna is not like that at all, but rather is a beautiful treasure with the greatest unfinished Cathedral façade in Europe and a wonderful Piazza Magiore, where all of Bologna comes together for various events and music and film and celebrating the city of Bologna.

But, the University is truly a bohemian mecca of sorts, and it is interesting to think of what it would have been like in Medieval times. I think that probably much more like what the Cambridge of today is like. Austere, but also a place where the world came to visit. L’Università di Bologna still commands great respect, and the world still does go there, but on a different scale: in ways, a more “human” one, whereas here, it feels untouchable at times, unless you are a member of the club. But, again, so as not to be hypocritical, I do admit to being able to break out my L’Università di Bologna tie, with its logo and the 1088 date on it, on special occasions, knowing that I did not just merely buy it at a gift shop to say I had “been there.” 

The Day Time Stood Still

Without looking at my watch, I can tell you what time it is at the Bologna train station. It is twenty five minutes past ten in the morning, August 2, 1980, to be precise. Two things will strike your eye when you either approach the Bologna train station from the main entrance, or if you arrive there and are standing out in front and something just doesn’t seem right. Look for a moment, and it will start to stand out. Where there is now a MacDonald’s adjacent to the main entry hall, the architecture seems to be out of synch, from a different time, than it. Then, you may want to check you watch and to see what time it is so as to catch your train, (though ultimately, that may in itself prove to be an act of futility), but the clock reads 10:25, even though it is well into the afternoon.

Twenty-one years ago, on August 2, 1980, members of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari executed one of the most infamous civilian attacks in recent European history, known as the Strage di Bologna. They bombed the Bologna train station, killing 85 people, and literally stopping Time. The shock of the blast blew out the clock, and the city of Bologna has since decided to keep it there as a reminder, per non dimenticare, of what happened that day.

Bologna holds an interesting place in Italy, politically and socially. Theoretically, it is Communist by political stripes, though I often joked at the visible wealth there that it was “rich enough to be Communist.” Socially, it houses an extremely highly educated population and boosts the alma mater studiorium, which is more or less the mother of all universities, as L’Università di Bologna, where I was fortunate enough to be a visiting lecturer, is recognized as the oldest established western university, officially designated as such in 1988, celebrating its 900th anniversary, at which time the controversial Bologna Accord was signed, re-defining collegiate education in Europe on a grand scale.

Something else that makes Bologna special is its sense of city awareness and pride. People are really proud to be from Bologna, and they should be, it is an incredible city, very likely my favorite mid-sized city to date. It has an incredible infrastructure for civic events, and there always seemed to be something going on in Bologna that was celebrating being “bolognese.” In addition, it is a city that is highly geared to the personal and family level, and nearly every week in the summer months one can find some sort of program on the piazza maggiore, with kids running around, laughing and chasing pigeons, under the shade of the half-finished façade of the San Petronio Basilica.

The church itself has been a source of anxiety as well. Inside, on one of the tableaux paintings, there is a depiction of sinners being tormented in Hell, amongst them is no less than the prophet Mohammed. While living in Bologna, there was a controversial case in which seven Muslims were apprehended based on the suspicion that they were going to bomb the cathedral as retribution for the painting.

Any act of violence upon civilians is an act of social horror. The bombing of Bologna’s train station struck a deep, deep chord with all Italians, and was even more insidious because it was home-grown. The NAR was Italian. Similar to the Timothy McVeigh-masterminded event in Oklahoma City and the more recent tragedy in Norway at the hands of Anders Breivik, these were acts of terror from home.

Today, commemorating September 11, 2001, and the events that transpired that day, such acts are on my mind. They are still all unfathomable to me. Yet, the Bologna train station does stick out in my mind. Mainly because it was place that I have been to the most often where such an event took place. I had visited the Twin Towers years before when they were still standing, and was in complete awe of their monumental stature, but I have not been to other such sites, except for the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, where Pakistani terrorists attacked and lay siege to Mumbai, the result of 164 dead and over 300 wounded. Currently, the hotel has a police barricade around it as does the plaza in front of the Gateway to India to prevent any further attacks. Reminiscent of the November 2008 bombings, more deaths were recorded in Delhi this week at the hands of Pakistani attackers.

But, to return to Bologna, what made it different for me was that it was because I went to that station nearly every day to take a train to the Forlì campus, where my department was located. And, every time, upon approaching the station, I would see that clock stopped, and it would indeed give me pause as to how it had happened. I do remember feeling uncomfortable at times there, imaging what the scene must have been like at this station, which for me was usually a place to enjoy knowing that I was in Bologna. There would be moments, though, when I would seem to have flashes of the chaos and pandemonium, and above all the fear that must have been there on that day. It is as if sometimes I could still feel it, the horror, suspended in Time.

Sliding Doors, Lesson in Italian Physics Continued

Returning now to the issues of trains, one can readily see that you cannot talk about Italy without talking about transportation. Italians and transportation are like Laurel and Hardy, who are surprisingly popular here. I will let you work out the details for yourself about that analogy.

The general law of antimatter, however, is something that amazes me each time. As I take the train to Forlì, which is fifty minutes from Bologna, I spend quite a bit of time at the train station. The train that I take to Forlì comes from Milano and the one I come back on is from Ancona. Both of these cities are major stops as is Bologna. So, while the smaller towns like Forlì and Faenza (I love that name, but finding a restaurant there is another story…) do not exhibit the full effect of this law as when then trains stop at Bologna. I usually take the Intercity or Interregional and they are more or less hourly.

But, it would be too easy to start with the train. First, you have to get to the train. Bologna has a dozen or so tracks in the main platform area. However, as a trivia question, there are two tracks that you will never have a train on. You will have to visit to know the answer. Anyways, on each of these tracks are trains coming from and going to major Italian cities as Bologna is at the center of the northern Italian train network. In fact, the train line that I ride is built along one of the oldest and straightest Roman roads in the world, the Via Romagna which bisects the Province of Emilia-Romagna. Bologna is in Emilia, Forlì in Romagna. Now you know.

So, in general, trains are supposed to run on the same track on a daily basis. That happens in fantasy lands like Switzerland, Germany, and Austria where you can set your watch by the train. As I never wear a watch and am often late (though those two are not connected in my case), I too can set my watch by the trains in Italy. Pretty much on a daily basis you can see a German, Austrian, or Swiss person being wheeled out on a stretcher from heart failure from the realization that he or she is going to be late for the first time in his or her fifty some-odd years on this planet.

The Italians, however, are different. It is okay to be fashionably late to the train station because the train won’t be there. For the first few weeks, I would be running to the station from the bus to get to the platform on time. Several times I got there when the train was supposed to leave, but I only found a guy sweeping the still-burning cigarettes off the binario onto the train tracks for the pigeons to smoke. Yes, even the pigeons smoke here. Damn, I had missed the train! This happened as I said a few times before I realized that the Italians had not even shown up for the train yet, much less the train. I had just missed the train from the previous hour, not this one. It is confusing if you start to think about the implications of that…

So, after ten minutes or so the Italians begin to arrive for this train. I have obviously learned better. If I want to take the 9:40 train, then I go at 10:20. However, if I want to leave when the 9:40 train would leave, I need to be there at 9:00 to catch the 8:40 train at 9:30 after a quick coffee. It’s kind of like a slide rule.

OK, so once you make adjustments for when you should be at the train station, the next step is finding the train. Sounds simple enough. They are large, make a lot of noise, usually pretty easy to spot in a crowd. However, remember that we are in Italy, and you can become invisible. So can the trains.

Normally if I take the 9:40, and I will let you do the math to figure out when I actually go to the station, that train is supposed to leave on Binario 4. So, you go to the main hall where there is the Arrivi and Partenze scrolling signs which indicate the trains and their binari. By the way, if there is one thing that I love about train stations, it is the scrolling signs. If you have never experienced one of these, then you are truly missing out. I have stood watching those for hours. Meanwhile I was pickpocketed and had my shoes stolen, but it is fascinating. You watch them spellbound and suddenly, rows and rows of numbers, letters, and symbols go racing by. It’s like Vegas, but you don’t have to pay. You stand there, everyone looking up as if Martians are landing (and meanwhile the pickpockets are have a field day) and everyone is waiting for their train to show up. The first time I was waiting for my train and it came up after lots of clicking and scrolling I yelled “Jackpot!!” and grabbed the guy next to me and hugged him. He was a pickpocket and took my train ticket.

The daily ritual then is for hundreds of people standing in the hall, looking up at the schedule and when the train and binario number comes up, it is chaos. Suddenly, the train that has been twenty minutes late rolls into existence on the board. However, it sometimes ends up be Ancoroma or Milanapoli so you’re not sure if it is Ancona, Roma, Milano, or Napoli. You roll the dice, it’s Ancona, binario 4. But when you get to binario 4, on the mini-scroll bar, it reads Venizia 8:56. But, it has not come, and you need the 9:40 train to Ancona. You go back to the main hall, and now, next to Romancona, the number for the binario is blank. All other trains have numbers, except yours. People are casually waltzing to respected binari, saying goodbye, talking on phones saying that they were about to leave, but not you. Standing there, after the train was supposed to leave, even on the calibrated analog system that you spent four sleepless nights perfecting, there is a blank.

Logically, a train that is coming from somewhere else must consequently arrive from that place, correct? So it seems. Looking at the Arrivi board, there is Milanoroma, binario 4. Looking back to Ancoromano, nothing. Binario 4, blank. Okay, you roll the dice again. You go to Binario 4 and you see, ES Monaco (which is very confusing because that is actually München, or Munich) 9:14. No Venezia train. No Romilancorona either. You decide to wait. There are a few coffee machines in the tunnels under the trains, so why not? Fifteen minutes later after having figured out how to actually get the coffee from seventy-two variations of sugar, coffee, water and milk with special names each, you go back to Binario 4. This time, it says Firenze 9:28. You go check the board. Arrival from Milano, binario 4. Some unintelligible gibberish that looks like there is an “a” and a “c” which you imagine could be Ancona, blank. As it is now well past noon, your hope of getting to work at all begins to dwindle. Back to the tunnel.

Now, you get to binario 4 and the mini-scroll bar is blank, except for two numbers a 9 and a 4. Suddenly, these scrolling signs aren’t so endearing. However, there is now a crowd forming and you hear whispers of faraway places like “Ancona” and “Forlì” and you figure out that you are not alone. So, then the crowd grows. Obviously you still have to work out some kinks on your analog system because magically every Italian has figured out that the 9:40 train is about to depart. It is 1:35. The mind literally boggles.

The crowd is now so large, that nobody from binari 6 and up (if you are paying attention, you know one of the trivia answers) can get by. There is a Doctor Suess story about two critters, a northbound one and a southbound one that refuse to move until an entire city and highway system is built around them. Something similar happens at this point, but eventually a little lady with more determination than most climbers of Everest have, breaks the dike and passengers from Balzonoroma come bursting through. When the confusion has hit its zenith, there is an indecipherable screaming over the intercom in a language that could very well have been spoken by the Italic tribes thousands of years ago, but you don’t understand a word of it. But somewhere in there, the Italians have managed to decipher, or at least you think they have, that among that cacophony of barking, static, and what may or may not have been singing, was the information that the train to Ancona would in fact be leaving from binario 4 as the train from Milano was in arrival. You dash to the main hallway to try and verify this, but just then, the scrolling bar has just finished spinning, and there is no train to Ancona. You sprint back to the binario to see that the train has in fact arrived.

And now, we get to the concept of antimatter, almost. The train glides towards a stop as there is another round of crackling howling and screaming over the intercom and everyone on the platform begins asking each other if this is the right train. Lots of lifted shoulders with hands out at the sides, which means in Italian, “don’t ask me, I’m invisible.”

The train stops. The air is thick with anticipation. No, that is smoke. Every single Italian has just lit up a cigarette and is frantically smoking it, knowing that they are about to board the evil “non-smoking” train. The pigeons begin to descend, shaking from nicotine withdrawal. Now, how the concept of non-smoking trains got passed in Italian is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that it is more or less obeyed, is nothing short of witnessing the birth of the universe. Smoking in a crowded auditorium after an Umberto Eco lecture is another story, again. Especially when it was Eco. But, that will have to wait.

The doors begin to creak open. The pigeons are going nuts, waiting for the Italians to toss their cigarette butts to the platform. As I said, this train is coming from one major place and going to another, stopping in a middle major place. This equals lots of people. Lots of people with mass. Let us restate our law: Two or more objects containing significant mass are required to fill the same place at the same time. And so it begins.

Unlike the buses which have an ingress and an egress, the trains have one, two-foot wide door for each end of the car. On the inside of the train, there are thousands of Milanese people who were last sighted in the Bermuda triangle when the train left the station 12 hours ago and on the platform, there are thousands of Bolognese who are now a week and a half late to work. And there is one, two-foot wide door standing between them. Instead of standing aside and letting the Milanese descend and then have the Bolognese board, it happens simultaneously. I don’t mean, about the same time. I mean sim-ul-tan-e-ous-ly. The Milanese would never yield to a Bolognese and vice versa, so what happens is antimatter. As a Milanese descends, a Bolognese boards and presto! Two bodies occupy the same space. The mutated result is a part fusion, part fission. At the beginning of the process, the Milanese and Bolognese masses merge to form one larger massive body of four arms and legs, two heads and several brands of designer clothing including at least six pairs of sunglasses. And then, the fission begins and the boarding Bolognese and the descending Milanese seem to appear more or less intact, though not necessarily with the same three pairs of sunglasses.

After this defiance of natural process occurs, you start to fight for the seats. But that, like the flight is another lesson in Italian Physics.

For now, the train begins to pull out of the station. The pigeons swarm the tracks, and an American comes running up the stairs onto the platform believing that he has just missed the 16:45 train to Rome and realizing that the “long lost friend” who hugged him in the station just lifted his wallet. In the distance, the ambulance can be heard responding to a call about a German tourist at the train station.

A Moveable Feast, Part III

(Note: reminder that this is a piece I wrote about six years ago and have recycled here. I would write this differently today, but that is not how life works. The greatest joy of a professor is the eureka-moment that we see in our students. Often it takes much longer for ourselves. Prego.)

But, on the other hand, Hemingway has previously warned us in the preface, that “[I]f the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” So, “if the reader prefers,” he may read this as fiction or fact, leaving the question in suspense of whether you are reading a work of fiction or fact. Simple enough, but what is the weight of your choice as the reader? Again, I asked my  students, just who was Hemingway’s audience?

To return to the beginning, I mentioned that Hemingway begins his book with the sentence, “Then there was the bad weather.” The Yoga sutras begins in a similar way and has troubled translators and interpreters for centuries. The sutras begin with the word, atha. This word may be translated as “now,” “then,” or “so then” and the like. “Now is the time for the practice of yoga,” or “Then, one begins the practice of yoga,” and other various translations begin this work. But what is before if we take the word to mean “then” in a concessive manner? What must happen before you begin yoga? A common acceptance is that the yoga sutras were composed by the same Patañjali who also wrote the grammar sutras and ayurvedic sutras. It has been supposed that the “then” aspect of atha is that first you must learn the grammar of Sanskrit and the science of living well through ayurvedic practice, and then you are ready to begin yoga.

In addition to this example by Hemingway and the yoga sutras, Thucydides is also known to play tricks with beginnings and use unconventional structures in his writings that frustrate students and translators of Greek. Derrida, a student of classical studies and philology took the concept of deconstruction in language to its logical conclusion by looking at every word and exploding its meaning into meaningless by exponential combinations of potential meanings in relation to all other words. He has been criticized for killing the possibility of reading, because of the inevitable entropy of communication as one reads a text or performs any act of communication. So, what do we do? Do we stop communicating?

I think not. Let us look again at Hemingway’s opening sentence, “Then there was the bad weather.” The students who were in my class are future interpreters, translators, and language experts. These students take three foreign languages from their first year in college and some are fluent in three from the start. As a “philologist” myself, this group really impressed me. However, they had not expected one of the first questions that I had for the class. “What does Hemingway mean by then?” Silence. Mummuring. Silence. More mummuring. Silence.

A hand goes up.

“Prof. Fulton, we don’t understand the question, could you repeat it please?” I repeated, “What does Hemingway mean by then?” Silence. Shuffling of pages. Coughs.

“Ok,” I asked, “how would you translate this word? Adesso (now), dopo (after), ora (now), ormai (from this point)? And what is the difference?” Signs of interest began to creep over their faces, brows began to frown. Now, they were starting to get it. How do you begin a work? How do you dive into another persons work and try and capture its meaning, dare I say essence? I asked again, “What does Hemingway mean by then?”

Now hands began to go up.

“Maybe he didn’t include what came before.”

“Maybe he is starting in media res and will tell us later.”

“Maybe he didn’t expect the bad weather.”

“Maybe weather has something to do with the story.”

“Why does he begin the story with bad weather?”

“It throws the reader off because everyone thinks of Paris in the springtime.”

“It is stream of consciousness.”

And so a discussion of a book begins. The responses move from “maybes” to more assertive responses and we are deep into the discussion of why Hemingway would choose to discuss bad weather in a book about Paris. Gay Paris, the image that many have of Paris in the twenties is suddenly inverted into dark, gray, cold and miserable Paris. Reality. So dark and cold and miserable that Hemingway and Hadley actually leave Paris, (though later to return) after the first chapter, quite surprising for a book that is supposed to be about Paris.

But, I returned to the question again. This time, they really listened. “What does Hemingway mean by then?”  What happens to people when they meet on the street, or when a conversation turns to mundane things. We talk about the weather. But what does the weather really mean to us? Why would Hemingway talk about the fact that then there was the bad weather. A time in his life that was to be remembered as the best, yet we begin with dirt, cold, and smells of stale beer and decadence in Paris.

Bologna has been cold, dark, and wet for the past four months. At the beginning of March, we had a record snowfall of over a foot in twenty-four hours. The red clay tiled roofs were covered with thick, wet, white and grey snow. Patches of red would slowly emerge above kitchens and heaters and the streets were slushed with black, messy sludge within a day. The sky in the Emilia-Romagna padana (valley of the Po River) is notorious for winter haze and fog. Ferrara, home of black magic in Italy, is often shrouded in a misty garment of cold, dark fog. The sky wraps itself in a mantel of darkness in northern Europe and keeps this mantel wrapped tightly for months.

I remember talking with people in Austin about my future in Italy and many were jealous that I would be sipping wine on rooftop terraces soaking in the Italian sun. Our rooftop terrace has been wet for a great deal of the time, and the sun has been vacationing in the environs of Ethiopia as was Poseidon at the beginning of the Odyssey. Yes, we have enjoyed some wonderful Italian wine, but more often then not, only after ducking into the apartment after escaping the chilled weather outside.

Living in another country presents many obstacles, challenges, and setbacks that can never be fully anticipated. On a daily basis, you are reminded that you are not from here, whether it be the language, or the simple fact that you order something in the wrong sequence at dinner. You have to deal with new customs, new schedules, new rules, and new ways of looking at life.

Standing in line for four hours at a time at the Questura to try and get your Permesso di Soggiorno (the Italian green card) only to be told to come back next week (for the fifth time) with no explanation tempers your nerves and your patience. Having people really think that you are actually quite ignorant because you speak well enough to get by, but not well enough to fit in yet, provides your ego with humility. Teaching a class of seventy students who laugh out loud (not out of rudeness, but mirth) when you mispronounce a word in Italian and then proceed to correct you in perfect unison reminds you that you  are not in Texas anymore.

There are countless events that happen in our lives that we often miss, don’t care to notice, or simply “don’t have the time to deal with,” and yet these small, or large if it be the case, occurrences weave the fabric that make us who we are.

Spring has found Bologna more or less, although as I write, winter is making one last stand. However, on the train to Forlì this week I saw the Po valley transformed into a beautiful tapestry of almond, cherry, peach, apple, and pear trees full in bloom. Spring does find even Bologna and it found Paris for Hemingway eventually. Soon, we will be able to sit out on our terrace again, looking out over an array of red-tiled rooftops dotted with green penthouse gardens, sitting in the Italian sun, and enjoying a glass of Italian wine.

Before that, however, there was then for us as well the bad weather.