‘The Eagle’ is a pretty strange placename, at least to this anglophone it sounds more like a pub. If you think ‘the eagle’ rings bells of the imagery of the Holy Roman Empire (for some reason, rather than the million other things eagles signify), you’d be right. L’Aquila was actually constructed for Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1194-1250), the Holy Roman Emperor who was really not well-liked by the Pope (‘the antichrist’ was among Frederick’s pet names). Apparently, the city was constructed as a defence against the Pope.

If you visit L’Aquila, and are, ahem, eagle-eyed, you will quickly notice a few 12th century church facades. These pre-date Fred II and point out the fact that L’Aquila is really an agglomeration of pre-existing villages, 99 of them. This number is of course extremely suspicious, but it’s much more difficult to refute than it was to make up. So I won’t dwell on that any more.

L’Aquila is undoubtedly a historic city, with an impressive number of secular buildings and churches from the middle of the middle ages to the end of the baroque, all of which are interesting, but none of which I’d seen in reproduction. So many of these buildings, however, remain somewhat injured or even partly destoryed by the earthquake that happened, at the time of writing, nearly twenty years ago.

There is no pleasure in saying this, but for an outsider, it’s this state of destruction frozen in time that makes the city to fascinating and poignant. Many of the hardest-hit buildings are some of the historic churches, whose great masonry vaults have been torn open and are fastened by giant exoskeletons of galvanized steel and giant bungee cords ratcheted from window to window. The damage to the buildings reveals their construction in a way which isn’t possible through layers of plaster, paint and gilding. And some plants have found a home in the highest of cracks.

By contrast, some of the secular buildings, the houses, have a direct economic need for repair and an investment potential for repairing them. They have been restored, on the whole, far quicker than the church buildings which remain on architectonic life support. Thus one can enjoy the marvel of a street of fresh-faced Renaissance town houses, still with the sense of authenticity, with some of the same stones even (though a little chipped), but with far fresher rendering and painting than one ever sees in the Italian peninsula. And, of course, the houses now have yet more steel fixings, the braces that keep them together in the event of another earthquake. This event might be far off in time, but is nevertheless certain.

What doesn’t necessarily prompt such thoughts is the giant fountain of 99 spouts, each one with a different late-medieval face or beast-face carved into it. The monument is well preserved and a wonderful sight: its asymmetrical walls awkwardly shoved into the location adding more charm while wrapping around the viewer.

Equally untouched by tremors thus far is the giant Spanish Fortress, a punitive piece of architecture. This building was built by the ‘Spanish’, at the time however this really meant the Holy Roman Empire once again. It is part of the same story of the Italian peninsula as Sicily and Naples and much of the south: external domination. Lea, an Italian-Korean translator, among our very generous hosts (more on that below), told me the old Italian expression “Francia o Spagna, basta che se magna”which I would loosely translate to— “France or Spain… Whatever, as long as you can eat.”

It is incredibly tempting for modern day anthropological types to draw a straight line from these medieval conflicts over Italy to a present-day nihilism about who is running the country and what they are doing. To put it another way, it’s easy to be drawn into an equivalence between 15th century European power conflicts to 21st century populist politics. When you put it like that, the equivalence looks pretty silly. You won’t find your explanation of Italy’s woes here—though perhaps you might find a clue in the attitudes expressed by such a phrase. I digress.

We didn’t stay in the centre of L’Aquila, but rather a small town overlooking the place called ‘Pianolo’, which was anything but flat. We stayed with friends and their family, who were extraordinarily generous, cooking delicious food and doing all of the dishes (!) while militantly insisting that it was, in fact, niente. The ingredients were from their own patch: figs, tomatoes, courgettes, red wine. Only the olive oil wasn’t their own production, and even that was made nearby, if I recall correctly. It was a delight, and indeed, the Italy that the whole of northern Europe longs for but which cannot be traced to a restaurant.

Obviously the above won’t be replicable, but L’Aquila is worth a visit nevertheless. Especially if you have any interest in buildings and how they survive over the years, and the care that is needed to keep them alive. What helps, too, is the cool mountain air and the backdrop of the Gran Sasso mountain—particularly if you’re escaping the heat of Rome a couple of hours’ drive away.

A dubious gift. Photo by Philip Romano at Wikipedia Commons (CC-BY-SA)

This year’s big Christopher Nolan film is perhaps an even bigger phenomenon than the -Heimer part of the Barbenheimer event of 2023, if only because the film is causing a splash entirely on its own terms.

Clearly the substance of the film must be pretty considerable, I thought. It is after all very difficult to inject life into a story as famous and yet so utterly weird, bitty, and unsatisfying as the Odyssey.

I am going to start by steel-manning, or should I say, wooden horsing the film. It has a couple of major achievements. The first of these is making the Trojan Horse actually look cool rather than risible. They do this by eschewing the Flintstones wheels that are normally appended to the giant gift. This is a great choice, and the flooding of the horse and the dragging up the bridge is great. That said, my friend Joe did remark how extraordinarily chocolatey it seems once it is planted in the Spartan capital.

The Trojan Horse is not actually in the text of The Odyssey. It’s from the Aeneid. The Odyssey is quite narrowly focussed in its action on the hero Odysseus’ inconvenient home commute. That makes the original text pretty strange if, like me, you read it before the first text (I’ve still not read the Iliad!). Nolan’s choice to integrate much of the preceding narrative into this one is quite wise in my view, because the narrowness of the original text and its refusal to go into the preceding stuff is one of the many reasons it’s a bit of a baffling read to the uninitiated. This is however going to be a real problem if (or perhaps when) Nolan decides to do the prequel, the Iliad, and finds that a lot of his material has already been hemmed in by the flashbacks in this film.

Another good choice in the Odyssey is his typical ‘non linear’ narrative, which people always treat as though it is some genius move. Really it’s just a way of chopping things up to make them a bit more interesting. In a story about homecoming and memory and unreliable heroes, this makes a great deal of sense. It also deals with some of the disappointing pacing of the original text and gives it a bit more zip in the first third of the film.

Speaking of zippiness, the film’s set pieces are also, by and large, impressive and well conceived to shock and engage. The magic and the monsters make good use of the film’s suitably epic budget. Likewise, the physicality of the boats used by Odysseus and his men are much appreciated.

I have now dispensed with the sunday-roast-trimmings of my praise for this film. Now I get on to the meat of invective. Nolan’s retelling is overall terribly stiff and yet somehow undercooked. The problem is the script.

You cannot spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a film and expect a weak script to evaporate in the heat of investment. A good script requires talent, it is the product of a clever mind and good judgement and some editing and some honest feedback. Nolan doesn’t have many of these things at his disposal.

The Odyssey will be described in a lot of harsh criticism as an action movie, but that gives it far too much credit: an action movie understands what it is, it understands its limitations. A good action movie of the ‘pure’ sort cuts its dialogue to the minimum to allow the pacing of the, err, action, to take the lead. A really great action movie will also have inspired dialogue in spite of its terseness, little lines that are memorable and bring joy to the audience.

There is no joy in Nolan’s dialogue. His dialogue is neither natural nor artful, it is simply strange. The way he constructs dialogue is with a series of declarative statements. When he is doing something ‘dynamic’, i.e. two people are really supposed to be talking to each other, they tend to exchange wisecracks. The result is accidentally Brechtian and at times actually difficult to follow. Saint Augustine’s advice comes in handy here as always: “one often forgets what one is trying to say while thinking of a clever way of saying it.”

The Odyssey has a surprisingly large amount of dialogue. The viewer has to trudge through long stretches of the stuff to be rewarded with each new sequence of practical effects. Mercifully, there are a couple of funny bloopers. When Odysseus is strapped to the mast listening to the Sirens, he lets out the head scratcher: “what you most want… what you most can’t have.” At other times, the overblown dialogue clashes with some silly interjection like “enough from that old guy”, a heckle from the suitors when Odysseus is playing the beggar in Ithaca. The result was laugh out loud funny, because Nolan’s insistence on the rhetorical high style leaves no space for normal interjections.

For me, the text of the Odyssey was a boring read that was very interesting to have read. I mean this because the style of the text was stilted and repetitive, but the narrative beats were fascinating. The translation I chose was deliberately done into prose, and grey prose at that. But to some extent this cannot be helped.

After all, if you don’t dedicate your life to mastering archaic Greek, you’re stuck in translation limbo, only ever parallel with the original. Christopher Nolan’s version is another parallel world of translation. And it surely cannot be one of the best.

As an adult, of course, I can’t imagine actually finding this difficult, and I’m not sure I would be physically able to screw up the task so badly. But when I was young, for a very short period, I couldn’t get it right. How did I get from one state to the other?

A short phrase was administered as a kind of medicine: “let the knife do the work!”. You hear this a lot. It’s a platitude. But when you think about it, the phrase literally cannot be true. You do not cut bread by plopping a serrated knife on top of the bread and hoping that its inner spirit cleaves the loaf in twain. Nothing will happen! You cannot let the knife do the work!

So this phrase “let the knife do the work” is actually a metaphor applied to an extremely simple task. What does it really mean, though? Bear with me: I am going to try and persuade you that this is quite complicated and interesting. There are three points the phrase makes:

1. Don’t just apply downward force, and

2. Don’t apply very much at all.

3. Do move the knife laterally, that is, in a sawing motion.

Why can’t we just explain the thing with steps 1, 2 and 3?

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first thing is that the above just isn’t very memorable. But somehow the strange metaphor gets across the meaning much better than the literal description (this is why we have metaphors). You need to understand how the serrated knife ‘wants’ to work, and apply force in such a way that brings out its abilities. It feels unintuitive to a youngster that you wouldn’t just apply loads of force to a task that you think it hard: that you have to let go. The impossible demand to let the inanimate object do the work gets this counter-intuition across, it makes you pay attention. And it takes practice and attention to actually be able to cut bread. You have to do it a couple of times, and when I see work in progress loaves at friends houses, I still see an alarming number of door-stop wedges. Oops!

Fast forward twenty years since my early youth, and I’m trying to learn how to cut lines into copper rather than cut bread into slices. It turns out this is quite a lot harder than cutting bread, as I explained in a previous article. But a recent lesson has strangely reminded me of my previous attempts with bread.

With copper engraving, like anything that’s a manual skill, spoken and written language really sucks at getting across what’s needed. You can’t just apply ‘not much pressure’ or ‘quite a lot of pressure’ to a copper plate, you need to do it ‘intelligently’. This means feeling and knowing what amount of pressure is going to do what with this particular material.

I first found copperplate engraving bitterly impossible. Then I started letting the tool do the work. This didn’t mean that I just started being less heavy handed. It meant that I started paying attention to exactly how much force I gave and the angle I cut, and whether the tool tended to dig in or slip out of the material given those variables.

But if you want to let the tool do the work, the tool has to be ready to do it. Here is where I found out that I had no clue how burins actually work when I wrote my previous article. You see, the burin looks like a square piece of steel that has a point at the bottom of the square. But it also has a tiny, tiny knife point along the edge of that square in a V shape. This tiny bit is called the ‘heel’. Without the heel the burin will just dig directly down into the metal and is essentially useless. One can go further, without the heel cut correctly into the burin, it ain’t a burin at all. Also, the jagged edge effect I was complaining about was also down to the ‘heel’ being too long, and the flaw even has a name among engraver circles (‘heel strike’).

This gets us to the deeper wisdom of ‘let the knife do the work’. It’s an anthropomorphism that hints at the fact that working with tools is a negotiation or conversation between you and a ‘living’ tool. Like a horse that needs feeding, the tool needs care and some level of understanding: for the tool really is doing a lot of the work.

There’s not really much to say at this point apart from ‘sharpen your knives’…

… It turns out that you don’t actually need a bread knife to cut bread if your kitchen knife is actually sharp. A sharp kitchen knife will not crush bread, it will go through the crust and the core correctly. So, the special bread knife with the special bread knife technique exists in large part because of our inability to let the tool do the work!

The thing is, the Faroe Islands do not have a very big population, and the capital Torshavn has a similar population to the town of Helston where I grew up: not even 20,000 people. The wonder of the city is the fact it has capital status in spite of its diminutive size, like a parallel universe where the village you grew up in went sovereign.

The most striking aspect of this is undoubtably the gubernatorial complex of the Faroes in Torshavn. This complex sits on a tiny peninsula between the two bays that make up ‘Thor’s Harbour”. The buildings of this complex are really the historic core of the village that’s the kernel of Torshavn. It’s a bunch of timber-clad, grass roofed buildings in the typical Faroese architectural vernacular. In the United Kingdom, the parliamentary complex is united by the Perpendicular Gothic style; in Germany the Federal buildings are bombastic and classical. In all large countries, the architectural style that proclaims officialdom and the seat of power is combined with high-level security.

By contrast, there isn’t a single assault rifle, barb of wire, or vehicle barrier in sight in the Faroese complex. And the ‘style’ that brings these buildings together? Red paint. All the buildings are painted in the same slightly off red colour, matching one another as a unified collection of summer houses that happen to run the country. My jaw was agape as I walked past the Ministry of Finance, and could peer in through the stable door. I guessed they must have a strict ‘shoes off’ policy. As I thought it couldn’t get more relaxed, I found the door of the Prime Minister’s office. Presumably they don’t accept walk-ins.

Once you’re in the Faroe Islands, however, you’re already in a skewed world. The capital is by far the biggest settlement of the lot. You will somehow be amazed at the hustle and bustle (occasional car, some pedestrians) of the sprawling metropolis (modest town with the odd flashy building). The islands otherwise consist of waterfall after waterfall and vista after vista of grass and basalt.

Torshavn’s interest isn’t just from its context. There is plenty going on in the capital and its many contrasts are far more interesting than a town of 15,000 people would otherwise be. For one thing, the architecture is a highly effective mix of densely packed vernacular (usually only on two storeys, however), and the odd aspirational steel and glass building at the outskirts. The combination of timber and steel oddly reminds me of Portland, Oregon, though the latter is of course far bigger.

The other pleasant suprise (again Portland-esque), is that the Torshavonians are great at gardens. Most of the detached houses have lovely gardens of the plants that are well adapted to a MOIST but very temperate climate, similar to those you will find in Cornwall. The charming cemetery in the city centre (Gamli Kirkjugarður) is a must-visit in this sense. What you will find most of all in Torshavn’s gardens, though, is trees. The Faroe Islands are a bit like Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor, or the Scottish Highlands: all these places have been devastated by grazing and they are treeless compared to their pre human domination state. Torshavn, though, has a great reserve of windswept, lichen-daubed trees (many of them sycamores, again familiar to the Cornish!). These are a wonderful sight to a tourist newly sensitised to seeing trees.

The two harbours that give Torshavn the second half of its name are also of interest. The users of said harbour are a strange mixture of presumably wealthy but rather intrepid small yacht sailors and massive steel trawlers. The former can be found in the ‘foreign boats’ section of the harbour, and it makes for an amusing time guessing the motley crew of boats from random parts of the world. I saw one boat which was registered to Bern and had a Swiss flag. Iconic. There’s nothing that says “I ❤️ my tax haven” like registering a boat in a landlocked country known for financial secrecy, and I love it.

On the other side of the harbour, there are a few historic boats, including one we were very lucky to sail on (engines only, sadly), that is known for being the oldest boat in the Islands. It was only built in 1945: the Faroe Islands had no tradition of boat building, which isn’t as ironic as you think given the complete absence of trees for much of its human habitation (whoops). Then, next to these beauties, are a set of big warehouse-type stores selling Faroese woollens and a superb lithography studio. The place of the crafts in this small nation are admirably strong. Finally, at the end of the city centre’s harbour, is the immigration office. This office has an adorable logo on the front consisting of a paper chain of people in the style of knitwear. The interior of said immigration office is decorated with houseplants and highly ergonomic, highly Scandinavian furniture. It couldn’t be further from the Postmodern era gulagetta in Rome that I had my last immigration appointment, a building which is miles from the centre and on a street lined with people waiting desperately under umbrellas and sitting on cardboard, seemingly in an attempt to get an appointment.

I digress. The immigration office looked like a sign to me of a well-run government and seems typically Scandinavian in its well-funded liberal outlook. But don’t be fooled: to my eye, Torshavn doesn’t easily fit into the ‘Scandinavian’ label as well as you might think. There are just too many things that mark it as very distinct from Denmark or any of its nordic peers at least in the mainland.

The first point, a superficial one, is that during a walk through Torshavn you won’t see the tall blonde types of mainland Nordlandia unless they are Danish tourists. The people of the Faroes have too much Gaelic and Scots folk in their heritage to look like that. The resulting mixture means that I could easily be mistaken for a local, which is rare for me outside of the British Isles. More important point: no bicycles, lots of big cars. Torshavn may be the capital, and it may have some buses, but the Faroe Islands are rural and spread apart, and they rely on cars, including lots of SUVs. Even the capital has a slight outback edge which is different to other Nordic capitals.

Another important point, already made, is the climate. The climate of the Faroes is radically unlike anywhere in Scandinavia proper. The islands are slap bang in the Gulf Stream while being far north. There are no hot summers and there is no summer sunbathing (again c.f. Copenhagen in warm months) nor is there swimming. Remember what I said about the lack of trees? This meant a historical lack of fuel, which means no sauna culture, save a few new places probably catering to tourists.

We are also hundreds of miles from Denmark et al across an uncompromising sea. Torshavn itself feels conservative and homogeneous: it is not a melting pot. This has its drawbacks, obviously. It also leads to some charming things.

For example, when we visited Torshavn on a weekend evening, the town was buzzing, as much as is possible during mizzle, with teenagers celebrating graduations. They (just the girls) were clad in the latest patterned knitwear and (for girls and boys) a Faroes variant of the nautically themed graduating caps used throughout the Nordic world. Knitwear is a national institution here, and we later found out that these specific jumpers were imitation of one that featured in a TV show that was made by the country’s top designer-knitwear brand Guðrun & Guðrun. After the airing of said show, the nation’s teenagers had their grandmothers knit jumpers with the same pattern. Imagine a world where something made by your grandmother in the national style is actively cool for teenagers!

The said graduating folk were from time to time with their parents, but in all cases they were hammered. Indeed after we left dinner it seemed that the whole microcity was, as was once said, absolutely lit. I don’t mean minor merriment by this, but slurred speech and an inability to walk. This reminded me of the time I played the Lafrowda festival in St Just as a teenager, a plus-sized village at the end of the Universe (by which I mean south western Cornwall). The inebriation of the inhabitants from about 13 years up was striking, and gave the place an apocalyptic feel. Charming.

Here in Torshavn though the drunkenness was quaint, without a dark edge. It was just amusing, as long as we could get away from the roads and potential drunk drivers in time.

I’ll be thinking about Torshavn for quite a long time. It doesn’t fit into the usual boxes. It’s provincial but not a backwater. It’s surprisingly wealthy, but without much wealth inequality, productive but hardly a capitalist ‘satanic mill’. It’s quite a green city in an even greener (but treeless) land. It will never be the most loved part of the Faroes—because it’s not a breathtakingly beautiful ‘natural’ landscape—but it is a great little capital.

At school, I was not what you’d call a jock. I was not into ‘the sports games’ and I enjoyed reminding my peers that football was just a game. I did as little as possible in our physical education classes and I liked the activities about as much as having my teeth pulled out. I don’t think I’ve fundamentally changed as a person but I have managed to change my attitude to this stuff: I’ve moved from being a never-exerciser to, at least in good weeks, having a routine of moving myself and lifting things that makes me feel better and all the other stuff.

My natural inclination, and a lot of others like me, is to loathe the aesthetics of exercise and everything around it. Take playing football for instance: the shouty sincerity, the shiny shorts, the metal studded shoes. Honestly the whole thing still fills me with the ick. The worst thing though is the kind of music slop that is played not only in actual gyms but is baked into most exercise routine videos. This music is indeed some of the most dire available, many rungs below what is currently in the charts and just above the weird royalty free stuff they play in Co-op shops in the UK.

Physically I also hated exercise, partly because I had no idea what it was supposed to feel like. When I was at school I was significantly shorter than any of my peers and my complete lack of interest obviously meant I was outstandingly weak too. However, the PE classes made us do all the same stuff together, which included on one memorable occasion making us all run the same long distance in several circles regardless of ability. I remember being in agony afterwards, and humiliated of course. As most children do, I extrapolated from the one experience and I concluded that this is how sports are supposed to feel—so unpleasant that you hurt for several days afterwards.

Exercise is not supposed to be comfortable. That doesn’t mean it is supposed to be agony. The difference between these two statements is very important. As Peter Attia likes to say about exercise, “do no harm”, borrowing from the extremely abbreviated Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors for their practice.1 You shouldn’t do it such that you injure yourself, obviously (even we were taught that at school!). But this also means that you shouldn’t do it in such a way that it is so unpleasant you never want to do it again and you cannot for several days. It took me many years after school to cotton on to this point. Actually I didn’t work it out until a year or two after finishing my MA degree and mainly due to encouragement from Bea.2

To put this in stark terms, if you’re a non-participant in these matters, the first exercise you do will probably have to be so gentle that many would scoff at it. For example, I started by running in slow motion in tiny short bursts on and off and built upon it slowly such that I could keep breathing through my nose the whole time, so I didn’t get a brutalised throat and a headache. The latter is what running did to me because I had no idea what my limits were, and I actually assumed I must be asthmatic. My Damascus conversion came from slowing down, and simply not feeling this kind of agony but rather a gentle pain in the muscles, a warm face, and a sense of being a bit more alive.

We all know the huge importance of exercise for health and mobility in life and especially in later years, I would think. There’s further encouragement in that doable, moderate exercise makes a big reduction in risk of cardiac events: you don’t have to have muscles on your eyeballs. Or as this helpful paper puts it: “[…] A change from an inactive to a mild or moderately active lifestyle yields a relatively large risk reduction, whereas further increasing exercise volumes produce smaller risk reductions. Thus, any physical activity is better than none, although higher volumes, even above the 2008 guideline recommendations, appear to further reduce CVD.”

You don’t have to do crazy about it, you don’t have to make exercise or longevity-maxxing your life mission or personality. You just have to do something exerting and do it regularly and frequently, and you’re already winning compared to the baseline.

For me though the best subjective impact of exercise is mental. Exercise is the best reminder that you inhabit a physical body. We need this reminder. Anxiety makes you forget this by focussing on imagined perils and mistakes. And by forgetting your bodily reality, you become more and more susceptible to anxiety—or at least I do. By contrast, doing a bit of exercise gives you a sense of accomplishment and control in the face of a real (but not existentially threatening) adversity of hard physical work. This is good for your mind.

In what follows, I have a few pointers on exercise for those that hate it:

1. Start with something that you can realistically do in terms of ability (low) and equipment (none or almost none), and do it with some kind of external help. This doesn’t mean a personal trainer, it just means an app like ‘start running’ that chops running up into brief bursts.

2. You do actually need to warm up and cool down after exercise. Unfortunately it’s not a conspiracy, as I found out when each run made me progressively feel like my legs were made of water biscuits.

3. People will try and tell you that this or that type of exercise is bad and induces injuries. All exercises do this to a greater or lesser extent and there is ‘no safe level of exercise’ (i.e. no exercise is free from risk).3 The classic is to say that running is bad for your joints—which it may well be!—but doing no exercise at all is really bad for your whole body. People will often tell you stuff to make themselves feel better, whether that’s because they don’t do exercise at all or because their favourite exercise has become their big thing. So make your own decisions!

4. Try different things and notice what you enjoy more or less. When it comes to videos or to running or whatever, and control the aesthetic environment such that you don’t have to listen to horrific music.

5. Similar to point 4. Exercise stuff on YouTube varies massively in quality. Some people just don’t explain things very well. I really like this Northerner called Tom Peto who does calisthenics stuff, which is my favourite resistance exercise because it’s varied, and it’s impressive how hard it is when it’s just your own bodyweight. Peto also makes really good observations at the right moment that stop you slipping into the wrong form when you’re doing a given exercise. He also has this very gentle personality which is really not about being shouty and sadistic. Important.

6. If you’re an anti-jock (read: nerd), then you probably find exercise annoying for its lack of a significant mental component. There are two solutions to this. The first is to use exercise as a time to listen to interesting music or podcasts, or, you can find exercise that has a mental component. Wall climbing is an amazing example of the latter, as each climb is about solving a puzzle as much as it is about strength.

Everyone knows that Copenhagen is expensive. Upon arrival I made a pact with myself not to complain about the cost of anything. But I couldn’t help myself: every time I saw a price and did a calculation in my head and was shocked again and again. As far as I can tell, the prices are significantly higher than in comparably wealthy cities that might come to mind, for instance, Amsterdam or Stockholm. Bea and I had a lunch at a (very good) pub-style place consisting of smørrebrod (stuff on bread) ‘small plates’, four of them, plus two beers and an acquivit. It cost about €115. Pastries hover around the €6 mark, per piece. Any kind of alcoholic drink tends to float above the €10 mark, and Denmark doesn’t have an alcohol monopoly like in Sweden and Norway (that are, in part, designed to drive alcohol prices into punitive territory).

Though one can easily descend into complaining, and most Google Maps reviews of places in Copenhagen indulge in this, the prices are an important part of Copenhagen. It’s your ongoing reminder of the immense strength of the Danish economy and the fact that you (unless you’re Swiss, Norwegian, Emirati, possibly Swedish or well-paid American) are poorer than these guys. The GDP per capita is about $80,000 and the nation is fourth place in the Human Development Index. Inequality is far lower than it is in the UK, for instance, and in the UK the GDP per capita is a paltry $67,000 per capita.

Once you absorb this context, the prices no longer seem arbitrary and are the obvious and unavoidable consequence of what can be best described as “people doing very well”. The cost of your coffee contains all that prosperity in Denmark, so don’t fight against it, just meditate on it.

The other thing you’ll need to meditate upon in Copenhagen is its spooky aesthetic familiarity. Look at the clothes of the Copenhageners: natural fibres, light colours, heather beiges and cornflower blues. Look at the cafés. Birch ply, birch ply, birch ply, birch ply and birch ply. Your coffee cup: a brown and blue stoneware ritual beaker. The metro stations: identically cut steely grey granite blocks and stainless steel plaques marking the date, for instance, “2019”. And finally, many of the bakeries are one-worders, like “Hart”, “Juno”, or “Skipper”.

These, dear readers, are all the trappings of modern fashion in what I will broadly call “the north” of the world. The UK in particular has been in thrall to all this stuff from wearables to cups to buildings for decades. I had finally traced the source, the origin of all of the things that make me laugh about Dalston or Falmouth. The beiges. The birch ply. The stoneware. The one-word bakeries. Even London’s absurdly high build cost recent infrastructure (the gold-plated Elizabeth line) is explainable in terms of a competition with this city.

In our era of boreal minimalism, going to Copenhagen is rather like going to fin de siècle Paris in… the fin de siècle. It’s not even clear that we recognise that our fashions are a slavish imitation of somewhere or something else, but that’s the way it always has been and the way it always will be. Enjoy it, but don’t forget to remind yourself you’re doing it ironically somehow.

You don’t need much irony, though, to enjoy Copenhagen’s many lovely vistas of brick and water, especially on a summer’s day. Or its superb Baroque churches that are rather more Gothic-Survival. Well into the 17th and even early 18th centuries, these buildings have Y-tracery windows in heavy lead and iron, but suspiciously minimalist interiors with the occasional accent of gold: beautiful; bakery-ready.

You might find yourself sneering at the many Anglophone tourists taking photos of the pastries on display in those above-mentioned bakeries. And then you will take a photo yourself because they are just so damned pleasing to look at and the quality of the pastry is so damned high. Each one I had was excellent.

In search of grit and weirdness we found ourselves taking the very reasonably priced public ferry up and down the Hønsebroløbet main canal that reads like a wide river (sadly it is not called the ‘Cope’). We didn’t find much industrial grunge but did find a small shipping port and enjoyed people watching as crowds of cheery ‘Copenhell’ heavy metal festival goers were waiting for their journey to another of the festival’s many venues. The closest we got to the ‘back rooms’ of Copenhagen was going to the big old car park with the sauna ‘Plugin Heat’. This area is sliced in two by a big railway sidings on one side and a multi-lane highway on the other—hah! Got em. Not so Scandinavian Utopia are we now! This was of course the exception; most of the city is the envy of the world with its bike ability and astonishing absence of cars. The sauna itself was very good, very hot, and again eerily reminiscent of certain things found north of the Thames.

Architecturally, Copenhagen is a Battenberg slice alternating between ca. 2010-2020 spreadsheet architecture, generally of decent quality, ca. 19th century rendered vernacular townhouses, and ca. dour early 19th century Greek Revival buildings. The Town Hall and the adjacent Palace Hotel however are from around 1900 and are a similar kind of bonkers mixed historicism. Stockholm Town Hall is comparable. They are all highly successful in their own way, engaging the imagination and delighting the eye by reliving medieval ‘changefulness’ and wilfulness in architecture.

Unlike Stockholm, Copenhagen is not an archipelago but rather a piece of presumably once boggy land sliced up by canals. It does not, therefore, have the random lumps of granite that dot Stockholm, so it loses points in that rather niche department. But the overall ensemble is quite coherent and certainly delightful, all helped by the world class public transport and the complete absence of trash on the streets.

For me, looking at Copenhagen was rather like looking into a mirror of all my worldly desires: bicycles, public transport, shipping, low inequality and high incomes all around, and herring (which I haven’t mentioned yet because this Substack is continually in danger of becoming a herringstack). Like seeing a caricature of yourself, this was slightly uncomfortable mixture of “oh, I guess that’s me” and “oh my God, is that really me?”. Strange as it may seem, there are so many others—especially architects—who are going to keep coming to Copenhagen to see where all the plywood and artisan ceramics are coming from. And they’re not wrong, they’re just a little easy to parody.

Ah yes, the loquacious butchers. The generous butchers, the helpful butchers, the exploratory, the dynamic butchers…

These butchers are a figment of the British recipe writers’ imagination. Only in Britain is it necessary to “ask your butcher” for anything other than chicken breast, yet only in Britain will the response be “you what mate?”

A pork pie, made with trotter jelly. In Rome. Questions were asked of the butcher, and they were answered.

Do you have any bones? “No, they get rid of them at the slaughterhouse”—use your imagination for ‘get rid’. Do you have any livers, kidneys, giblets? “No.” Trotters? “No.” In my experience butchers of the British Isles are bereft of the kinds of thing they theoretically specialise in, that is to say, edible body parts of animals that aren’t fish. Why?

For some decades now, easily all of my short lifetime, the Great British Public has a festering squeamishness about eating animals. I remember when I grew up there was a kind of libel about the ‘city folk’ (I grew up in Cornwall) not knowing that beef came from a cow, or that chicken comes from chickens. In one sense, this had to have been patronising nonsense: even if you’ve not visited an abattoir you surely know that meat comes from animals in some abstract sense. But in a deeper sense, even the folk touting this phrase about the town folk were guilty. So few of the parts of animals are understood or are eaten. How many people can describe the flavour and texture of a kidney and compare it to a liver? How few people have ever eaten tripe, were they not born before about 1970 (perhaps much earlier)?

This ‘crisis’ in meat knowledge has, again, been acknowledged for quite some time. It’s the whole reason the St John restaurant (now a small chain) came into existence, to promote “a kind of British cooking” that used ‘nose to tail’ as a route to a distinctively British authenticity. Of course, nose to tail is not remotely unique to Britain, but the historical ways of using those noses and tails were, once upon a time, distinctive.

The St John phenomenon, founded in 1994, is partly successful. Today, St John is on the map and those in the know about ‘British food’ understand it as a kind of benchmark of what is possible with pork. A while after St John’s opening, in 2003, Jonathan Meades broadcast a series of episodes on the state of British cuisine which made largely the same points as the restaurant, albeit in his campy-dour style. The creed is all the stuff I have complained about above. It’s all about an infantilisation of our kitchens and the bowdlerisation of our recipe books.

The problem with all this is that the St John phenomenon has remained a ‘foody’ thing. Those that like food will readily agree with Meades’ precepts on food, and they will acknowledge the importance of the St John project, even if they are a vegetarian. But this whole ‘thing’ has barely dispersed into the food culture. In 2026, the food culture of Britain remains one based on import (that it does well and should absolutely continue to do) but of which the population is scared to make the introspective dive into organ meats, parsley, rock samphire, terrines, cheeses beyond cheddar, and perhaps most importantly of all, eels.

Could Elizabeth David ever have predicted a situation where the average London resident will cook a passable aubergine parmigiana but turn green at the thought of liver and onions? The point here is not that the aubergines are a mistake. Rather, the point is, why did the rise of one thing have to mean the death of another: why can’t we have both, and rather than either or?

Another predictable argument one could make here is that we are doomed to do the mediterranean stuff badly, because we haven’t got the ingredients. It is true that Dutch gas-heated greenhouse tomatoes are pretty poor. This is a half truth: it’s imperfect, but with the right cooking techniques all of this can be pretty decent. We have canning technologies and a refrigerated supply chain. These are good things; and it’s always worth remembering that buying local is not necessarily green at all. When you inhabit an island for whom watercress is most at home, and the transport of food is only really a problem when it’s on local roads, food miles are a red herring.1

No, the reason to care about all this stuff is entirely cultural: the old-school foods of the British Isles are actually good if you can ever go out of your way and cut through the social opprobrium and the incorrigible butchers to get the thing. Melton Mowbray pork pies are unrivalled; a really good pickled egg made with malt vinegar is equally peerless; the same can be said of eels cooked in basically any method. The pies can be got, the eggs are very rare, and the eels are almost unobtainable.

I have never had tripe cooked outside of Italy or France, and even the great British food historian/ experimenter Neil Buttery seems to think the task is impossible. But it cannot have been, back in the day. Tripe done well, (here in Rome at the time of writing), is exquisite. It’s partly soft and wobbly but has this sticky toothsome quality and a delicate but slightly farmy flavour.

What’s the problem with eels? I guess they are mildly phallic, but so are sausages, and aubergines (apparently). They’re greasy—like everyone’s favourite fish, salmon. Liver tastes intensely meaty, like people presumably want their meat to taste. Even brains have a light flavour and a texture akin to lemon posset. Muscle meats by contrast all taste fairly similar, it’s just as though the intensity levels of the same flavours are dialled up or down a bit. What I’m saying with this paragraph here is that these things aren’t even that scary. What’s happened over time, is that new categories of ‘normal food’ and ‘travel documentary’ food or ‘challenge food’ have invisibly emerged, under our noses. It’s an interesting process, to be sure, but a sad one.

Back to the butcher: the last hope for these manual meat merchants is to give something the supermarkets can’t get us: niche things like offal. But the collective nouse and courage to eat these things are lost, and so is the demand. So we have this strange situation of cookery books like St John telling us to ‘talk to our butcher’, butchers who ain’t interested, and a public that looks at you like you are into extreme sports if you say you like organ meat. Thirty years after the St John project, then, the lie of the land is similar. The only thing for it, to experience these lost arts, is to go and eat offal in Rome, because there is a lot of it there.

Will this change? I think it may do. Eventually the forces of globalisation will give more and more great chances to eat ‘other’ foods, which are ultimately finite. At some point, the cuisine-o-sphere will need to start being more creative than geography and start thinking historically, which has already happened with things like Tasting History with Max Miller. Equally, it may be that a ‘green’ ethic on eating, including eating meat, means that there is enough demand for ‘by-products’, or at least enough social caché for being seen to eat such by-products. Instinctively, I think this would be tokenistic, but if it gets those butchers a-talking, I’m in.

Innsbruck is wedged between two mountain ranges, with snow-dusted peaks even in late spring. The chromatic perspective effects of such mountains—deep blue on the horizon—is similar to having the sea in the distance. In my view, mountains are even better: they rise up and impose themselves in the background between narrow side streets, competing with architecture in a way water doesn’t (or hopefully doesn’t).

Innsbruck’s mountain sandwich has a juicy filling, namely its river, the appropriately named Inn (i.e., Inn-Bridge). It is a wide, fast moving river, and thanks to the small size of the city, you’re never far from it and never fail to benefit from its salubrious effects. Innsbruck is exactly the place you would be sent to to get good airs and heal from a 19th century pestilence.

Today, Innsbruck’s functions are as a skiing base and as a university town. As far as I could tell, the place is populated only by tourists and chirpy undergraduates. The architecture of the place is a rather fine Central European combination of 18th century rococo or baroque, and the odd Gothic survivor. In Innsbruck there aren’t many early survivors but what is still there is good. First of all, there is the gilt-copper roof of the —house. This would sound tasteless, but it’s built at a rather charming scale which completely changes the effect. It looks more like a Dürer woodcut than a real building, an early piece of fantasy architecture, one of those romantic little adjuncts (think of the projecting castle-bartizans in Romantic Scottish tower houses). The pointy tenting of this small but unmissable roof plays off the pointed mountain peaks behind it perfectly.

Then there is the Hofkirche, the ‘Court Church’. This is a very strange building indeed. It was constructed in 1553-1563 in the reign of Ferdinand I. When I first saw it in photographs I was convinced that it had to be a much earlier building that had simply had a Renaissance and then Baroque facelift. The true answer is a mixture of yes and no. The building was indeed completely built ex novo, designed in the year 1553, but it was designed by a team of masons hailing from Trento. That is significant, since the architectural waters these chaps were swimming in were thoroughly mixed. On one hand, they were on the right side of the alps to take in the revival of classical antiquity, on the other hand, they were close enough to the Germanic regions to know the much more dynamic and complex rules of designing vaults of intersecting ribs: late Gothic.

Unfortunately the Hofkirche was subsequently “stark Barockisiert”–“strongly Baroquified” according to its only historian, Egg. Internally the architecture is both mildly underwhelming and incoherent. Matters are made worse by the polished ‘red marble’ sticks which are pretending to be Corinthian columns when they were clearly originally Gothic piers. The sticks of marble have no entasis, that is, they don’t get wider at the base. This is a typical mistake of McMansion classicism, and it looks really bad once you notice it. This is the kind of blooper Nikolaus Pevsner would have called “inexcusable.” Also unfortunate is the fact that the marble poles are being pushed outwards at the middle: they can’t cope with the thrust coming from the vault, but that’s probably the original architects’ fault…

The Hofkirche interior is rescued, however, by sculpture. The aisles of the church are infilled by a sequence of over-life-sized bronzes that look perpendicularly into the central nave. This European version of the Terracotta Army is at a smaller scale than its Chinese counterpart, but it makes up for this in the visible weight of bronze and the extraordinary designs of each figure. They are confrontational and charismatic. Each one is a different ancestor to the man buried at the centre of the room, Emperor Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor.

The Hofkirche was built to house the remains of this Emperor, probably best known to readers as Albrecht Dürer’s flashy patron. The idea was originally to have the funerary chapel in or near Vienna, but the artist that was sent to scout out those sites concluded that there was no sufficient place for the chapel there (this seems suspicious to me: was he simply too lazy to keep looking, and therefore opted for a more constrained site?). In any event, the small town of Innsbruck got the gig, but it didn’t get Maximilian’s cadaver, which is actually buried in a castle at Wiener Neustadt.

Unfortunately for Maximilian, his burial monument is completely upstaged by the giant bronzes staring it down. These figures, which actually pre-date the building in many cases, are extraordinary. Each one is dressed in clothing or armour that is simulated with hyperactive attention to detail. They are knights, kings, and a few queens, and they include dubious but fascinating attempts to depict ‘deep history’ around 1510, for instance Albrecht Dürer’s King Arthur sculpture in which he tried to imagine what early medieval kings might have looked like. The result is a sort of ca.1500 knight covered in bands with giant cabochon gemstones, which does recall Carolingian cruces gemmatae from before 1000 AD and therefore looks ‘old’, to be fair to Dürer. The fabrics themselves are perhaps the most impressive, with a whole world of different textures in each statue.

The complete set of figures took decades to cast. As an unmanageable projects, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to find the inconsistencies that are inevitable with such a long gestation. For instance, the figures have completely different bases; some have signatures, many don’t. But the variety of these statues is what makes them an immense pleasure to look at. Thanks to their dark patination and in many cases absurdly pointy late-Gothic aura, they look a little like space marines and would surely make Warhammer fans drool.

Looking at early-mid 16th century bronze sculptures is what you might call an indoor pursuit. I did not have a chance to see the outside of Innsbruck for long, save a short run in the morning, which was superb. Hiking and skiing in the area are further assets, of course, which must be looked into. Also essential is the nearby Schloss Ambras, which can be reached via a punctual bus. The castle is, and I cannot stress this enough, VERY important in art history, but appears to be somewhat under visited (at least in May 2026). Go there. But above all, go to Innsbruck, and feel yourself healed by the fresh air, mountains, and the liminal space between so-called Gothic and Renaissance style.

Imagine, further, that you might get stuck somewhere late at night and be forced to turn your magical, traceable, countable and secure money into slips of linen with shiny foil on them so that you can pay someone with them? And perhaps get robbed on the way, with not a trace of proof of the event? Or at least, not remember how much you spent, and have to count the bits of paper and bits of metal and check that the other person counted the difference correctly?

Of course none of this is actually hypothetical. I’m talking about the difference between cash and card payments. Card payment is a bit of a simplification, because in today’s world card payments are turbocharged by arguably the most useful apps on your phone: banking apps. Banking apps give you the power to know exactly how much money you have, whether you’re in the middle of the Atlantic, at your inlaws’ house, or at work. The apps also give you the power to send money wherever you want, to check your purchases, to get statistics on what you buy and when and why, and to freeze your cards. The latter can completely undermine card theft and other types of fraud—a small miracle.

I have framed this short piece as a hit-job on cash, but it’s only a hit job on cash insofar as the use of cash (or specifically, the demand that you only use cash) is an epic missed opportunity. Going cash-only is like doing surgery without antibiotics; it’s like walking in the street with socks and no shoes. It’s just worse than the technology that we now have, a technology that is wonderful and that we should all be grateful for.

Of course, I don’t think you should be prohibited from using cash. There are certain things that you might want to pay in cash for, including if you want to keep it a secret, and only an authoritarian society tries to remove the possibility of secrets as a matter of course. Only an authoritarian society wants to pry into every communication (and monetary transactions are a kind of communication) without getting a warrant.

The problem is, once you’re running a business, you’re not a private individual and you do start to have certain responsibilities to society like accurate bookkeeping and paying taxes. There are a lot of businesses, especially in Germany and Austria where cash-only restaurants and shops are still a really big thing, that move huge amounts of money only in cash. Who knows how much of this gets reported relative to what is actually earned. I think this is unfortunate. I find it particularly annoying because the motivation behind the choice is so clear: it’s especially clear because handling large amounts of cash is actually expensive, a hassle, and potentially dangerous—cash vans are armoured vans!

We have also moved through a cultural threshold for some decades now where the amount of money we have in our bank accounts, a digital ledger of numbers, is far more real than the low-value linen notes that quickly disappear in inflation ever can be.1 We have also moved into a world where the ‘real’ payment system is putting a piece of plastic on a reader, rather than handing over the bit of paper or the round bits of base metal. Both of these things are of course absolutely absurd, but there’s no social construction like the value of money.

And, because they’re equally absurd, I really think businesses should be required to accept both cash and card payments. Sometimes your phone might die, and you are going to have a massive headache without buying some water or paracetamol, or you can’t get home, and so on. Sometimes, though, you just don’t carry cash at all—if you’re like me and you resent it and don’t like the enhanced downsides in case you get your wallet stolen.

The Italian Republic might not always be seen as a paragon of good policy, but its very talented Mario Draghi (aka “Super” Mario Draghi) instituted a law (Decree Law No. 36/2022) which is exactly the ideal I am talking about. It requires all vendors to let you pay in both formats, cash or card. Everywhere in Italy you can pay exactly how you want to, and the difference it makes to your life is significant. Yet there are none of the downsides of the de-facto cash ban that you see, say, in the Netherlands or Sweden. So if you’re into linen and metal, you do you. All too often, good and extremely simple ideas in politics are not celebrated. People are gasping for a new politics, but they want this to come purely from a place of critique. This is not enough. Neither is a vague ‘optimism’. What needs to come, along with the critique, is a real knowledge of what has been achieved, and a thankfulness for what has been achieved.

Thank you, Mario.

A couple of weekends ago, I took myself to Civitavecchia, which is a modestly sized port town on the Tyrrhenian sea. Looking at Google maps, it was pretty clear there wasn’t a lot to see there, apart from a bit of port action.

It turns out there is quite a lot of port action in Civitavecchia. Rather than shipping containers or fishing, it’s all about tourism. Lots of it. Civitavecchia is a major cruise ship hub, it turns out. There were so many people with enormous suitcases heading back to their floating headquarters from Rome, that it was almost impossible to get on the train.

I got on the train eventually. As we all got off, we completely clogged the train station, not only for the mass of sunburnt people but because of those hulking suitcases and a hopelessly undersized elevator. I joined the logitistical excitement all the way to the ferry terminal, with a strangely solemn procession back to two giant ships. One of them was Odyssey of the Seas, a giant Royal Caribbean beast which I think may have featured in one or two internet memes.

What ensued was a walk around a bizarre and gently desolate set of port infrastructure. This, my friends, is grey tourism—tourism of the places in between; tourism for all the wrong reasons. Importantly, this is not dark tourism, which is all too similar to normal tourism since it favours famously ‘dark’ places (Chernobyl, North Korea). The thrill of grey tourism is a perverse one, it’s the thrill of being in the wrong place, it’s the thrill of being the first person to visit a place for this very specific reason.

I hope you enjoy the pallid photos.

I’ve lived both in town and in country. I’ve not lived in the biggest of cities, but I have lived in a few different ones. I have also spent my childhood and a slice of adulthood in deepest Cornwall. For the entire time, I’ve felt unable to describe what differentiates the two types of places and the kind of lives they encourage.

Certain things are obvious, or seem so. The seasons are much more present in the countryside. There, we walk on mud when it’s rainy and dust when it’s dry, we cannot duck into a metro station, and indeed we probably can’t even duck into a bus, because they’re so damned infrequent. We are surrounded by people who extract value from the land and sea, farmers and fishers, and there aren’t many people who work for consultancies.

Some things that might seem obvious are not quite so. For instance, is the countryside really all that quiet? There is always the distant groan of a tractor to be heard, or the nasal shriek of a chainsaw to be enjoyed. There might be less air pollution in the countryside, but can these be counterbalanced by the respiratory ill effects of getting far less passive exercise (because of driving everywhere)?1

More pressingly, there is a particular feature of the countryside that is so often missing, but is so important. I hinted at it above: it’s to do with a particular kind of human agency and a necessity to do things that neither can, nor need to happen in the city. That human agency involves fixing things, maintaining things, and changing things. The countryside is not an inert or natural place, certainly not in Europe at any rate. Rather, it’s a giant laboratory and factory that’s coloured green and full of plants. The farms around us shape the landscape in radical and irreversible ways, dividing it into grids, churning up the soil.

The countryside is particularly well suited to certain kinds of art, sculpture, and design. One can erect a shed of tin sheets and start hammering away at metal, or turning clay pots, or weld things together. I often think of the tools that one finds in a farm, and their wonderful abilities. One weekend as a child me and two friends made a cannon using an air compressor (designed to inflate tractor tyres), uPVC pipe, and plastic coke bottles filled with water. It was Leonardoian. You could not do this in a city, not only due to space but due to the fact you would probably be arrested.

Of course many of the tools of the countryside aren’t that fun for kids, like mattocks, pickaxes, axes, shovels, Cornish shovels (a very special one), or hydraulic attachments for tractors. They might not seem that sexy either. But they are all adapted to their own jobs, and are modest bits of human ingenuity in metal and wood. Though even ‘townies’ probably have seen spades, they haven’t seen the full gamut of iron-on-a-stick equipment.

This may sound ridiculous, but I think it is important. It’s important because solving practical problems is good for the soul. Like exercise, it is a special reminder that we inhabit fleshy bodies that are weak and we inhabit a world that has to be continually changed to make our lives better. By contrast the city, for all its greatness, takes the tool out of your hand and tells you to make an appointment for the professionals to do it.

There is a certain state of mind that comes with rural problem-solving. It is both can-do and sceptical. Can-do, because that damp problem in the house might just be a clogged gutter; sceptical because you should try and fix it yourself first before asking someone else.2 A particular sense of humour comes with all this, too. For one thing, the humour becomes more slapstick, because people are doing a lot more varied tasks and don’t work in offices. The humour is also a bit darker, probably because rural lanes and fields are awash with death, from roadkill to foxes’ hapless prey.

Is all this worth the downsides of the countryside? No. The countryside is not superior to the city. The countryside annoying to traverse, it doesn’t concentrate innovation and ideas (with the important exception of 18th and 19th century Cornwall, I hasten to add!), and it tends to have very conservative politics.

Personally, I inevitably and boringly hark after whichever (town or country) that I am not currently living in. I think I will probably always oscillate between two different types of nostalgia. The grass may always be greener on their side. But to them, the asphalt is shinier on ours, and the mud—oh, the mud—doesn’t get stuck in your boots when it rains for weeks on end. But the main point here is that we shouldn’t forget, but we should rather celebrate, the things that make the two domains of life so different.

I am very lucky to have tried quite a few art techniques so far in my life. This comes down to a couple of things, but mainly growing up in Cornwall which is awash with art making, and to two parents who are involved. But there are so many art techniques out there.

Some of these are still well-known today, like oil painting or etching, but some of them have either been modified beyond recognition or just aren’t done. One example of this is engraving (which I’ve written about before), which started to become obsolete by about 1600, at least in the hands of so-called ‘fine artists’ who replaced it with etching, which is in many ways easier.1 Of course, etching is not actually a replacement for engraving, since the quality of line produced is completely different.

Then there are techniques that are downright dangerous. I’m thinking of ‘fire gilding’, which is even worse than it sounds. It involves making a liquid metal amalgam of gold and mercury, painting the mixture on bronze, and then burning the mercury off with a torch. Obviously, you’re going to breathe some of that mercury in in the process if you’re, you know, in the Renaissance and don’t have a fume hood. As it happens I’ve found at least one living person who does this, but he does have a fume hood. Now, we’d tend to just electroplate things with gold instead.

I’m not very worried about my lack of fire-gilding experience. But I have made it my life mission to try ‘every’ artistic technique. There are two reasons for this. The first is just a sense of completionism: “gotta catch ‘em all”, as the late 20th century children’s media franchise puts it. The second reason is a bit more detailed. I am a big believer in understanding what you write about, and I tend to write about and research physical things that were once made by people: “art”.

People write about this stuff all the time without having attempted it themselves. I think this is just about OK, as long as you have read something about the physical process of making. Just about. But you’d be amazed how in some quarters of art history, the substance of the things we talk about—paint, wood, canvas, clay, granite, marble, varnish, bronze, gold, silver, plaster, brick, steel—are seen as beneath us. What an absurd view! What an indefensible view!

We are not literary scholars. We deal with objects, and objects are made, and the way they are made determines a huge amount of what they are and what they mean (albeit not everything). Even if you agree with me and decide to read up on your materials, you are still in danger. You can never be quite sure that you are getting the right end of the stick (or paintbrush, chisel, burin). You will never know exactly how difficult something is, exactly what the material wants to let you do, and what the material wants to resist.

I remember the first time I looked at Rembrandt’s etchings in person, and I thought it remarkable that the master never let the scene go to pure black: there was always some kind of texture to the mark making. I later learned that Rembrandt did this because there is no alternative. You cannot have pure black in an etching because then there would be nothing to grip the ink. I’m glad I never wrote this thought down at the time, because I would have made a fool of myself.

In the spirit of trying not to do that, here is my big old list of things I have and haven’t done, and notes thereon. I’ll come back to this a few times as I make more progress before I pop my clogs. Here goes…

1. Oil painting. Done.2

   Linseed, walnut or poppy oil blended with ground up colours is what we call ‘oil paint’. It’s very difficult to use. It’s not difficult to use in a muscular way, in a dangerous way, but just because it’s so easy to get lost with. Should you do an underdrawing? If so, in what medium? Do you start with dark or light? Do you paint the background first or last? What bits, exactly, should you paint first? How much should you blend? Should you mix siccatives, oil, or other stuff into your paint, or leave it alone? What surface should you paint on? Oil paint allows and to some extent forces you to work slowly, and in the mean-time it presents an unbelievably large number of choices which can be headache inducing. It tends to do slightly weird and inconvenient things, too. If you make an underdrawing in pencil, the oil will tend to suck up the graphite and make an ugly mess. If you’re unlucky, your painting surface might decide to drink up the oil from the paint, causing it to ‘sink’ into a matte effect. I keep trying, but oil painting is just really difficult. This is a relief, in a sense—the ‘old masters’ deserve their praise!

2. Acrylic painting. Done.

   The technique has only existed for about 70 years, if you generously include the early acrylics like “magna colours” that emerged in the 1950s. These early acrylics sucked, to use a cherished term from technical art history. They would dissolve the layer beneath them, so to do more than one layer you had to use some kind of isolating varnish. Then, as materials chemistry got better and better, they developed the complex mixture of catalysts, biocides, plasticisers, pigment and medium that we know as ‘acrylic paint’ today. Now they give this to children to learn how to paint, because it’s water soluble and less messy than oil. This gives acrylic paint the reputation that it is ‘easy’, which it is not. Acrylic paint dries fast and refuses to be blended on the canvas. This makes it very unforgiving. Acrylic is the go-to medium for bold graphic stuff, though if you use many many layers, it can be much more subtle. Mainly because my period of interest is way before the development of this medium, I’m not that interested in using it again though I used it quite a lot in my late teens to do these hard edged pixel art things that were agonisingly boring to make.

3. Tempera painting. Done.

   Tempera painting is a mixture of egg yolk and pigments. It’s simple stuff, and in some ways it’s like acrylic: it dries ultra fast and forces a slightly graphic approach. But it’s also totally unlike acrylic in that you can’t really use it to be big and splashy. Rather, it leads you to make very studied and ‘dry’ things that are in some way reminiscent of early Renaissance art. It also clogs your brushes. I do not like painting in tempera.

   

4. Encaustic painting. Not done.

   Encaustic is unlike other painting techniques. Instead of using a paint which is liquid in its initial state, you use a ‘paint’ that has to be molten: wax. This is a little strange. I suspect this forces a very mechanical process, a bit like tempera but even more extreme, but I’m not sure exactly how mechanical this is and how difficult it is to make anything recognisable. On the list.

5. Watercolour painting. Done.

   Watercolour is a powerful medium and easily underestimated. On parchment it’s cheekily called ‘miniature painting’, but it is essentially the same thing, pigments in gum arabic applied with a gentle brush to a gentle surface. It’s both friendly to the young renter-of-housing, and, apparently, in the Tudor court of Nicholas Hilliard who called it the most ‘gentle’ of styles, by which he meant acceptable to the elite—perhaps even appropriate for women to do! The tidiness and ‘sensitivity’ of watercolour, perhaps unsurprisingly, has leant it a slightly less-than-serious reputation which tells you all you need to know. Contrast with that below. I have done a lot of watercolouring in various different ways by this point, and I think it’s great stuff. It’s often about what you leave out, rather than what you put down, and you generally have to work from light to dark. In the latter sense, it is utterly different to oil painting.

6. Fresco painting. Not done.

   Chaps in the Renaissance called this the most ‘manly’ style, probably because it is done at scale. It’s allied with architecture itself. The technique involves pigment and wet plaster, and allowing a mixture of water and pigment to get ‘captured’ in fresh plaster as it crystallises. I’ve heard from my partner that it’s quite unsatisfying to do, because the colours look weak when they first hit the surface and then change as they cure. Pesky. It also has a reputation for being the longest-lasting of all techniques, which is BS, because buildings crack, mould, subside, and are re-purposed all the time. Nevertheless this is an essential one for me to try and it’s on the list.

   

7. Digital painting. Done.

   Digital painting is choice paralysis on steriods. There’s so much you can do. Too much. It will kill you with its kindness: you can undo anything, but this is more of a curse than anything else. I have a lot of respect for people who can stomach the eyestrain of digital art of any form, whether that’s painting on photoshop or video editing. Too often we think of things on a computer as having no bodily dimension, but using computers in this way takes a physical toll. I’ve had some fun manipulating things and ‘painting’ using GNU image manipulation program, and a digital pen and paper kindly given to me by a MA friend. It’s both a very powerful technique and a thankless job.

8. Etching. Done.

   Not exactly an easy technique. But it doesn’t give you sore muscles, like engraving. There are loads of different optional extras with etching, like aquatint (here you can achieve watercolour effects). This, and its alchemical vibes (bitumen, acid baths, etc), make etching a pretty sublime technique. 10/10

   

9. Engraving. Done.

   Ish. See previous article. I’ve since done a second session and it is starting to get easier. The trick is to focus on the angle of the tool above anything else, not to use too much force, but above all to ensure you concentrate on the tool THROUGHOUT your line cutting, including at the end of each line, so you don’t slip.

10. Mezzotint. Not done.

    If you thought engraving was injury-inducing, try mezzotint. Mezzotint causes repetitive strain injury. It’s based on using a ‘rocker’ that has loads of steel teeth and taking it a cross a copper plate approximately a million times. Then you un-do your work with a burnisher to destroy the grit of the plate, creating smooth areas that will print white. It’s a bit like making a drawing using an eraser, except it makes you hurt. :) I’ve done something similar once, and it was pretty horrible, but the pictorial effect of a good mezzotint are second to none. Stunning. On the to do list.

    

11. Woodcut. Not done.

    I’ve only done linocuts, which must be so much easier than woodcuts (I imagine!), because the medium is so much softer. This one is on the to-do list, though I’m not sure how much I’m looking forward to it.

12. Screenprints. Done.

    Screenprints are probably the least ‘expressive’ medium on the planet. It’s all about fancy reproduction techniques which remove the hand and body from the process at all points. I love a great screenprinted T-shirt, and I’d love to churn some out with weird designs, but alas, I don’t have the workshop for it, and I wouldn’t have enough fun.

    

13. Lithographs. Done?

    Lithographs are a pretty weird technique. They use a polished stone as a surface and exploit the repulsion between oil and water in ways I can’t explain. It turns out, if you are extremely bored, that you can actually replicate something similar using a bit of tin foil, some oil, and vinegar. I did this once and managed to get a half visible image. But like with most pseudo techniques, it felt very unstable and very fiddly… What’s special about lithography in my view is that it is the first technique to really reliable reproduce painted images in full colour and detail (we’re roughly talking about the mid 1800s here), hiding the peculiarities of the printing process itself. Thus lithographs started to ‘kill’ the uniqueness of paintings before the inkjet printer or the computer screen. Real lithography remains on my to-do list, though I suspect it might feel a bit like screenprinting.

14. Bronze casting. Not done.

    The Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini put me off bronze casting by describing at length how he almost burnt his workshop down when trying to cast something particularly big. There is something demiurgical about bronze casting, and something perverse about it. It involves a lot of destruction (of wax, clay, and plaster). Absolutely on the to-do list.

    

15. Stone sculpture (of any type of stone). Not done.

    ‘Subtractive technique’ doesn’t quite get across what stone sculpture is: waste, waste waste. And presumably some level of bashed-in thumbs and particulate breathing. But I just don’t know how much this ancient technique measures up to, say, engraving or painting in difficulty and what it feels like. So it is on the list.

16. Wooden sculpture (of any type of wood). Not done.

    I’ve cut wood on small carpentry projects and even spent a week in a furniture workshop in my early teens but I’ve never actually tried to carve the stuff. It tends to a smaller scale of course than stone but all wood types are unique beasts with different possibilities. I suspect wood carving is towards the very top of the difficulty scale. Those late Gothic prayer-nuts seem utterly impossible to me, given my limited experience with tree-flesh. Horrifying. Still, it’s on the list.

    

17. Ceramics. Done. Ish.

    I’ve only tried this once, and raising pots on the wheel is as ‘kinetic’ as you’d guess and also very unintuitive to the untrained hands. A bit like being able to make bread, though, there is something fundamental about making useful ceramics that feels very in-tune with the ancients and therefore attractive. On the list for further practice.

18. Blacksmithing. Not done.

    Whether it’s making Spanish war hats, swords, or whatever, I have not done blacksmithing. It seems a bit like sculpture with all the hammering, but with added danger. Yet making iron and steel artefacts was seen as a kind of art in the period of history I’m most interested in, so I need to give it a go. One day.

19. Silversmithing. Not done.

    We’ve all done it. You walk through the museum and you get to the vitrine full of shiny gilt silver. Suddenly, the brain switches completely off and you start thinking about lunch. I don’t think I’ve got to the bottom of why this once highest-of-high art forms has turned into something vulgar and boring to be passed over. But there we are. Silversmithing it turns out has a great variety of pesky and strange tools. The basic way of making vessels, ‘raising’ on a formwork with careful hammering, is a little bit like ceramics in the sense that you are trying to stretch a ductile material into a consistent round shape. The similarities end there, I think. On the to-do list.

20. Stained glass. Not done.

    There are a lot of stained glass courses out there, but they tend to start with readymade glass pieces, and stretching leading around them, then soldering the thing together. The problem with this is that a lot of the most interesting stuff in the history of stained glass is to do with, err, the glass. But constructing a 12th century furnace using Theophilus’ instructions is probably not feasible. I’m not sure where to go with this one.

21. Mosaic. Done.

    I went and did a mosaic workshop in Rome. It was pretty good. I love the end results of the medium. But there is very little material or chemical transformation involved in the hands of the maker. You take pieces of stone or manufactured glass of various shapes and cut them slightly to get them to go into a tight matrix of squares (tesserae). Don’t underestimate this: it’s a much greater brain scramble than you might expect. But the medium is a bit ‘inert’ to me. No longer on the list.

    

22. Enamelling. Not done.

    I guess you could say this is somewhere between stained-glass making and silversmithing. The main method of enamelling has you put glass paste into a metal form with lots of different raised ‘cells’ (champlevé) and making a sort of graphic colourful image. Then the plaques are either used as-is or nailed to a wooden core or soldered to some piece of metalwork. I think this could produce some quite charming medievalising imagery, and I’d love to do this one day. On the list.

There you have it. There’s quite a lot to do here, and obviously this is a very European-centric list of techniques. I haven’t included silk painting, batik, glazed ceramic tiles, featherwork, and I’ve completely failed to list textiles, which terrify me. I’ve also failed to mention ‘drawing’ techniques, which I’ve done a few of including some very ‘expired’ ones like silverpoint.

Please do tell me the things I’ve missed! I won’t be able to gain ‘experience of my inexperience’ if the unknowns remain unknown unknowns!3

Thank you.

Prejudices are of course a bad idea. And Budapest does its very best to show what a large assemblage of well thought out and often ‘modest’ architecture can do. There are endless fairly grey palazzi with identical neo-Renaissance detailing. Often the only clue to where you are is the very particular design of wooden windows, which scream ‘central Europe’. For some reason, window design (is it hinged, how many panes does it have), is always a good ‘tell’.1

It turns out that the sum of these often less-than-remarkable parts in Budapest is charming. This is for a couple of reasons. One is that the capital of Hungary has stuck aggressively to the formula, with a very limited number of brutalist and modernist interventions in the mix, in spite of oh-so-many opportunities to make replacements after the bombing of the city in the ‘40s.

The other key ingredient in Budapest is the Danube, the river that slices Buda and Pest in two. Over-done point: they were originally separate, like so many cities and their little sub-regions. What’s different here is just that the merger is reflected in the name.2 The river is big and wide and carries little ships adapted for river travel and a fair number of river cruise boats. It’s the lungs of the city and it creates a wonderfully open view across to Buda over the way.

Buda itself, which is perhaps more interesting to look at from afar than walk through, is absurdly picturesque. Arriving at the Hungarian Parliament, and taking a left turn, I could not believe the perfection of the vista. It was almost AI slop, such was its normative attractiveness. There’s a gothic tower which cuts up out of the old town and fortifications (the latter a 19th century sham; the former a post-war reconstruction), there are red tiled roofs, and there is a rich green set of hills in the distance.

The Hungarian Parliament is as good as it looks in photographs, too. The building commits the cardinal sin of Neo-Gothic architecture in that it is symmetrical.3 However, such are the towers, crenellations, variations, that the building gets away with the symmetry. It doesn’t seem like a warehouse or factory, but some majestic heavenly Jerusalem. There are pinnacles on top of pinnacles, a great variety of materials and play of colour, there are pointless gables and dormers all over the place.

If you are going to do Neo-Gothic, in my view, you have to throw absolutely everything at it until it is camp as Christmas. The Hungarian Parliament succeeds at this where so many fail.

Other exceptional buildings are in stall in the capital. There is, for instance, the beserk building that now serves as the treasury, an attempt to make a ‘national’ version of Vienna succession. art nouveau architecture. Unfortunately the building can only be seen from a sliver on Liberty Square. Also divine in its effect is the great lump of the former Stock Exchnage which is abandoned. It’s a gristly kind of architecture, made somehow more relatable by its great panels of peeling painted timber and clapped out air conditioning units.

This abandoned building gets at a good point for Budapest: the city isn’t very busy. I went in mid April and there weren’t all that many people there. At the time of writing I live in Rome, so I’m calibrated to big crowds whether there is a holiday on or not. Surely things must be different in high season, but Budapest remains in the ‘less visited’ camp of places in Europe, and this is a good thing.

After the elections of 2026, it is hard not to sense a good feeling in Hungary. The amazingly representative sample of two people that I spoke to who were decidedly not pro-Orban (a tour guide and a renowned curator). They were both relieved and surprised to have ejector-seated out of backsliding and corruption so easily. Time will tell how successful the new government is in undoing the mess, but the joy of having a second chance is in the air. Also, the exchange rate got gradually ‘worse’ for us with each day, as markets seemed more and more delighted with the new leadership. Good for them.

Like so many places in the world (perhaps most?), Hungary has been kicked about. It has been kicked about by the Ottoman Empire, by the Russian imperialist project of Soviet communism, and well, then, by itself (Fidesz). So has Budapest, not only for its bombing as mentioned above, but for the much older phases of destruction and re-destruction, from its Ottoman Siege to the Habsburg re-taking. From time to time, tiny Ottoman fragments can be seen (notably in some of the bathhouse architecture!). These fragments are a reminder of how history can go in any direction. If some battles were pitched a little differently, Hungary might instead be a muslim-majority region like some in the Southern Balkans.

This liminality is a bit disturbing to many travellers, I think. This might explain why this side of Europe still gets fewer visitors than the rest, and some strange looks when you’re announcing plans to go there. Of course, this is all part of the joy.

The ‘orient’ according to Edward Said is not really a description of ‘the east’, but rather a ‘power relation’ where the West dominates the East through language, institutions, study, and so on. Think of romantic paintings like the one above; perhaps even think of desert-level music in modern videogames. All of this, he says, is part of a game in which the West is able to do colonialism.

But again, it’s not a matter of truth or falsity in any case, it’s just the very fact that such depictions, descriptions, and culture is made about the east. As he put it: 1

This sounds very clever. It is in my view, though, very poor reasoning. Said relies on the rhetoric of untruth—“it claims to be”—while protecting himself from any kind of factual error by saying that he isn’t actually attacking un-truth. Thinking about this more deeply, it is very unclear to me how you can have a ‘discourse’ which is fundamentally just about dominating one other place through ideas if those ideas are at the same time truthful, or even substantially truthful. The description, then, could be held by anyone regardless of their power structures, economic superiority, military might, and so on.

After Said’s book was published in the 1970s, there was a steady stream of literature which points out his factual errors. To put it bluntly, the historical perspective of Orientalism is hokum—at least, or especially as it discusses the Ottoman world.2

Yet there is, of course, a ‘myth’ of the Orient which can be better understood by looking at the cover of the book Orientalism than actually reading it. What I mean here is the lurid image of The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Said never talked about it, and it’s possible (I guess) that his publishers slapped it on the front.

Anyway the painting features a young naked boy who stands before an audience of older folk in the corner of an ‘Ottoman’ tiled room. The boy is ‘charming’ the snake which is enormous, and there’s some pipe music being played. Importantly, the scene is also hokum: snake charming wasn’t a thing in the Ottoman empire, for one thing.

19th century Europe was awash with this kind of weird eroticism, a combination of condemnation and fascination. The mix is clearer still in Gérôme’s painting of The Slave Market, which invites viewers to be horrified at a naked woman being ‘examined’ for a life of slavery. The painting to a 19th century audience was also titillating in that the woman’s nudity is centre stage.

Orientalist visual culture about the ‘east’ can be put bluntly as a Victorian (insert relevant European monarch here) ‘bad kink’. The images are revolting to us today mainly because of the hypocrisy we see in them, and the desire to project that hypocrisy onto others.

Jonathan Jones (art critic) gets it right when he calls The Snake Charmer a “sleazy imperialist vision of ‘the East’” insofar as the image is made from an Imperialist context (19th century France), and is sleazy. However, he gets it very very wrong when he goes on to talk about a “pernicious and exploitative western fantasy of “the Orient””. The implication here is that ‘The East’ in question (the Ottoman Empire!) was a defenceless subject of imperialism, that these images are predatory not just on the imaginary naked figures at the centre, but a whole civilisation, a whole ‘other’, that was (this part is even more silent) ‘innocent’.

One of the political left’s biggest problems is that its magnetic attraction to the ‘underdog’ is very strong and often goes haywire. Orientalism I would suggest puts this tendency in its least flattering light.

There may not have been naked boys doing snake charming in the Ottoman world but there most certainly were slave markets. Since the foundation of the House of Osman in 1299, the whole Ottoman project was predicated on slavery at the edges of the expanding empire. In the course of the 15th century, the Ottomans’ successful campaigns in the Balkans and in Hungary led to a huge depopulation event as those who were defeated were either beheaded on mass or taken into slavery. Much of this slavery was indeed sexual slavery.

What’s more significant than all of this is that the Ottoman Empire continued to be a society based on enslavement throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed slavery didn’t stop in the Ottoman Empire until the Ottoman Empire stopped: until it ceased to exist and Atatürk outlawed slavery.

By all means condemn the eroticising hypocrisy of 19th century painters depicting the Ottoman Empire. But in my view the simplest facts about what the Ottoman Empire did, what it was based on, what it was, rule out any rendering of it as some kind of victimised ‘subaltern’ or other. It simply doesn’t make sense, however accurately or inaccurately it was portrayed, that any such portrayal represents an unfair, asymmetrical power dynamic. The Ottoman Empire by 1800 or 1900 may have ‘sucked’ at being as rapacious as it once was under Mehmet II or Suleyman the Magnificent, part of the long ‘decline phase’ of the Empire, but that doesn’t make it the good guy.

Under stylish writing and clever rhetorical twists like ‘knowledge production’ or even ‘discourse’ itself, it’s possible to bury major factual errors.

What about in the ‘field’? Here’s a photo from an exhibition in Nuremberg, on the late-medieval and early modern city and its place within the wider world. The object label accompanies a woodcut illustration of european slaves being taken by Ottoman soldiers and brought along in a long chain.

The label states" “these pamphlets were not designed to provide factual information; instead, they relied on emotionally affecting language and dramatic images to attract customers […] [they] were war propaganda.”

Any reader not acquainted with the ABC of the Ottomans would go away from reading this label and likely think that the Ottomans did not take slaves. It is of course true that the image is propagandistic, it is not ‘objective’, and it is targeted and persuasive. But the unspoken implication here is irresponsible.

The origin of this euphemising about the Ottomans in the west is probably Said’s work in some cases but in many others it’s more of an amorphous soup of ideas and politics that motivates things.

Ironically in Turkey you find the same end result. But the reasons are different. If you go to Topkapı Palace, the former main Ottoman Palace, you’ll find lots of information about people who ‘arrived’ mysteriously in Istanbul and converted; women of the Harem who were ‘brought’ from places all around the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Not once, as far as I am aware, is the word ‘slave’ used, at least in the English Language information.

Little by little, the cognitive dissonance builds up: am I going mad, or were these women of the harem in fact living a life of sexual slavery? It may be true that they had some kind of political power, that they influenced the direction of the Empire. We can grant all of that historical complexity while acknowledging the basics.

Although the Turkish Republic is a republic, and one that came about by repudiating the predecessor state (and some of its small trappings, like fez hats!), the current Turkish Republic goes the way of so many authoritarian or authoritarian-lite states. It worships the strength of a past incarnation regardless of its ideology, because strength is good. Thus we have the nostalgia for the USSR which is tolerated by the allegedly Christian-right Putin; or the veneration of Mao which is still technically in-place in the quasi-capitalist post- Deng Xiaoping China.

The museums of Istanbul want to push their visitors in a certain direction, to be impressed by the might and civilization of their Ottoman prequel. Does this work? Hard to say, but I think it might.

Some time ago I waded into a debate about the worth of travel. It hinges upon whether travel actually ‘opens up our minds’ to new things, or if it is a more base kind of entertainment. I went for a pro-travel line, and I would still go that far. But visiting Istanbul and thinking about museums in an increasingly sceptical light has modified this view. When we travel, we need to take certain principles with us. Not all places in the world will tell us the truth even when we are ‘really’ there. History is not just a foreign country but an inaccessible one hidden by layers of bias or, even worse, other historians.

This is at least one reason why visiting places can never quite ‘open our minds’. On the one hand, our minds can be closed by new propaganda; on the other hand, if we ‘inoculate’ ourselves against this propaganda, we are also being close-minded.

It’s not just the ‘orient’ that’s inaccessible in this way, I should add. The inverse is also true of many a European museum. The abject distortions in Cordoba’s Grand Mosque/Cathedral are a pretty good example: the ‘Visigothic Church’ which is claimed to be in the floor was originally just a house, in all likelihood. Why do they want it to have been a church? Because, of course, that shores-up the idea of an eternally Christian Spain.

In the end, I agree with Edward Said. When I went to the ‘orient’ I didn’t find it there: I couldn’t!

I have noticed something that I can no longer ignore. It’s a fact so obvious that almost the entire blogosphere, journalism, and podcastosphere constantly forgets. Politicians persuade people.

What do I mean by this? I mean that politicians actually have the power using language, rhetoric, emphasis and crucially omission of certain facts to change the minds of electorates. This also works in authoritarian states: even if polling is lying to us in say, Russia or China, these populations won’t be harbouring secret liberal egalitarian democratic values in the quantity they exist in democracies. This should be obvious.

You won’t get this impression from the news, or from the unfathomable hours of political content out there. The study of politics takes certain opinions for granted. At its very worst, such opinions are tied directly to demography: race, religion, tribe or language. Thus the Democratic party in the United States for some time believed it would win all future elections because it had ‘won’ the Black and Latino demographies and they would forever vote for them.

A more sophisticated mistake, but a mistake nevertheless, is the view that if opinions can change, the only theory of change is actual events in the world. This is the ‘financial crisis’ and ‘austerity’ is the source of political populism view. This is the ‘eggs are 12 dollars’ view, too. We have to think quite carefully about what this really means. It means that publics are tuned-in to real world events and vote for politicians as teams that talk about the things that are really happening, in predictable and stable ways. Politicians are simply selling an unchangeable product to people that either want it or they don’t, and they want it based on stuff that goes badly or well in their environment.

If all this were true, there would be very little theory of change for the world of politics. Politicians would only become unpopular due to unforseeable disasters or unsavoury revelations. Of course that happens quite frequently. But this avoids a major point which we’re all taught about when we’re doing civics and then forget: politicians persuade people.

The fact that Trump was elected persuaded other nations that there was a ‘vibe shift’. Places that had nothing to do with Trump started to look and sound more trumpy, they started to appease rather than criticise, and a whole lot of business CEOs started to sound a lot more happy about Trump. Immediately. What happened here was politicians (and one in particular) persuading people.

Politicians also persuade other politicians. The 2016 Brexit Referendum was created through a non-electoral process of political persuasion from one charismatic right wing personality (Nigel Farage) and his relatively fringe party, along with another wing in the Conservative Party, persuading the rest of that Party that membership in the European Union was in fact up for debate and something that needed to be ‘seen off’ by a nice quick plebiscite. There was no big tangible event that caused this to become an issue. Rather, it was a series of decades of discussion and introspection on the part of a chunk of the party What was a hypothetical issue became a ‘real’ issue through a process of talking.

When people are told that something is an issue, they can often (but not always) be persuaded that it is so. Presumably, vice versa, though it is difficult to prove a negative in life and so I suspect it is much harder for a politician to ever say ‘nothing to see here’.

What I see in my home country at the minute is an attempt to see off a problem by acknowledging it and making tweaks to policy that require no legislative change. I’m specifically thinking of the Labour Party’s quiet tweaks to Home Office policy to make immigration harder and retroactively make the post-Brexit settlement schemes stricter). Their aims with this are clear: show the public that they’re taking ‘the thing’ seriously, even though everyone knows (particularly Labour’s own base) that much of the party is actually very pro immigration.

The problem here is that Labour is unwittingly doing persuasion of the public. The party is adding fuel to the rhetorical fire that ‘immigration is a terrible problem that we must do something about’. The solutions they are offering in this situation are ‘tweaks’ which are likely to be ignored by those they’re designed to appease, and enrage those they are designed to be overlooked by.

Once they have gone down this path, it is now impossible for the party in question to say ‘oh no the other side are exaggerating this’. They would struggle to point out facts, like the fact that the UK does not have enough taxpayers to sustain its ageing population, let alone medical experts to fill its hospitals, builders to build things, seasonal harvesters, and so on and so forth.

But forget the details. These issues apply whether you’re dealing with an issue ‘on the political right’ or ‘on the political left’. The point is that salient political issues come from talk, persuasion, discourse, and not directly either from reality or from demographic groups. Opinions change, and whatever way you try to tackle an issue will implicitly tell the public something persuasive about that issue.

Of course, some opinions and demographics are relatively stable. This is why we have political science. But they are clearly not rock solid. Politicians have agency, and they are able to use the ancient skills of rhetoric (see notes passim!) and charisma to surprising effects. This is why people should understand how rhetoric works in detail, and appreciate it for the powerful art that it is. This applies to more than just politics, but really to any aspect of life. As Augustine of Hippo would have it, the facts alone are disarmed, they cannot defend themselves. In a world where everyone else—including sophists—has the weapons of great language, the word must be armed.

What I mean to say here is that Ferrara is like a chunk of inland Netherlands plonked into the northern part of Italy known as Emilia Romagna. This may be a hard pill to swallow, rather like a late medieval brick.

Bricks are the first reason for the astonishing Dutchness of Ferrara. The city is built of bricks, big red bricks everywhere. Whether the building dates from the early renaissance (and there are a few of those) or the late 19th century, they are mainly built of bricks. The effect is remarkably Dutch: the Netherlands, having no decent building stone to speak of, made their best monuments out of an artificial material, that is, cooked clay. But what’s special about the Netherlands’ bricks is that they were using this material earlier than everyone else.

Now, bricks might not seem that special, but we have to remember that the art of brickmaking was pretty much lost, at least in northern Europe, with the coming of the “middle ages”. Brickmaking was revived in northern Europe starting with the Netherlands, where it enabled the growth of towns and cities upon the Rhine delta slime that much of the Netherlands are based. This creates the conceptual schtick of the whole area: artificially reclaimed lands, cut through with artificially diverted dykes and canals, upon which are built artificial landscapes of artificial houses built to the last grain in an artificial material. It is beautiful artificiality of the sort that only the early modern Dutch would understand.

Ferrara is not in northern Europe. The presence of bricks speaks to a similar need and similar means. The city is along the Po delta, a big river valley which cuts through the province, which means no stone and lots of clay. Brick is such a marker of the city that there is even a “rosso ferrarese”—it’s brick red.

If Ferrara was a hilly place, the comparison would fall flat (ironically). The other factor that makes Ferrara so Hollandaise is the fact that it is super, super flat. Once again, because of its fluvial situation, the city just doesn’t have any hills. Not only is horizontally intrinsically Dutch, but it also produces further Netherlandish trappings. Chief of all: bicycles.

There are bicycles all over the place in Ferrara. And because the streets are so medieval and narrow, it’s not car friendly, which means it’s bike and person friendly. In a country with more than usually bad traffic planning, this is a pleasant surprise. The streets of Ferrara, as a result, are rather quiet. Not like Amsterdam, no, but like Delft, Leiden, Dordrecht, and so on.

Italy is a famously incoherent country. The north-south divide is just the start. It is an amalgamation of different micro-states that were merged together in the mid 19th century. Before that point they were neither bound together by the Holy Roman Empire nor a successful industrial base: indeed Italy was irrelevant on the world stage pretty much from about 1600 onwards.

The exception to this is an industrial belt in the northeast of the country, an area which is, crucially, flat. This is where, in the 1960s and 1970s, things like cars and coffee machines were built. This relative sense of dynamism is still clear in northern Italy today: it’s richer. What’s weird about Ferrara is that you have the gems of great age (i.e. the Renaissance) hanging around amidst a clearly wealthier background. It does not have the decadent melancholy of, say, Rome or Naples. Neither does it have the hordes of tourists of Florence, that make it a slightly Brechtian experience.

Ferrara then is highly recommended as a very Dutch-Italic and very Italic-Dutch experience. It’s full of little cuboid churches from the same period, bedecked with adorable repeated brick ornaments. And it has the ‘Palazzo Schifanoia’ (‘avoid-boredom palace) and its delightfully absurd cycle of Renaissance paintings of the Zodiac. You should probably go off season, but that advice isn’t very useful as it applies to everywhere.

Hamnet did not follow my usual rules. The first third to two-thirds of the film had me convinced. The choices were very tasteful, studiously avoiding its non-protagonist, a moderately successful Warwickshire playwright. Like the book the film is based on (so I am told), the film focusses instead on the mother of two children, Anne Hathaway, the miracle and suffering of childbirth before modern medicine.

There would be more than enough in that story for an interesting film: how is an early modern poet more interesting than the creation of life? The refusal of Hamnet’s first two thirds to enter into much other than that question made it fascinating. At this point I’m going to give out the customary “spoiler” alert, although most people are probably aware of what happens in the story.

The Hamnet film works in chronological order. Hamnet, the son of the film’s protagonist, dies. He dies of the plague, something which had been in western Europe since 1347, and which re-asserted itself in merciless wave after wave of death. He dies after his sister Judith was herself ill with the same disease. A touching and horrifying scene has the two children sleeping next to one another, with Hamnet saying that he will ‘trick’ the pest to have it get him instead. As he says so, he exchanges breaths with his sister at close range. The dramatic tension of the scene has our modern knowledge about disease communication collide with the anthropomorphic/demonic pre-modern idea of disease. It’s a clever moment.

Quite rapidly after this the film’s eponymous boy dies. The film could end there. The book could also have ended there (it doesn’t either, because it’s in reverse order). Unfortunately, the film does not end.

All the imagery that the film has been building up, all the subtlety and its statement about the importance of life versus art (life is more important), the mortality of ‘great artists’ and their children, the great labour/works/opere of women in childbirth, are violently thrown out of the Tudor window and into the street. In the final third, the film takes its tastefulness, its sophistication, and all of its conceptual interests and stabs itself in the chest with Shakespearian fan service and screams “O, I AM SLAIN!”

How exactly does this happen? Thinks first start to go wrong when we’re treated to a scene of the now-tempestuous grieving bard repeatedly correcting two players who suck at delivering his dialogue. “Again!” he shouts, taking on the role of the filmic director cliché. This is bad. What is FAR worse is the next scene, when Shakespeare stands on the banks of the Thames and starts to recite the most famous soliloquy of all time “to be or not to be, etc” as if he is talking for real!

This soliloquy from the play Hamlet is a big enough problem in performances of Hamlet. Its central idea—“should I kill myself?”—and however deep you want to go into its other implications, is just so strong. But the main problem is formal. It’s just one iconic word choice after another. It’s distracting, jarring. This is a massive problem. There are basically two strategies for performances of Hamlet in the modern day. Either you try and deliberately chop up the metre with hesitations and shoutiness to make it seem “naturalistic”. Here you end up with something that sounds amateurish and overplayed. Or, you play it straight and stick to the meter and deliver it properly, and you end up with something that sounds amateurish and overplayed. This is why I stress ‘avoiding’ things so much when you’re dealing with things that are this famous. Simply don’t do it, show us or tell us something else.

So with all that said, the Hamnet film takes this bit of dialogue and puts it INTO SHAKESPEARE’S MOUTH as he is looking across the water in a moonlit CGI London. I needed a facial massage after the strenuous cringing this induced.

Unfortunately we have to listen to the soliloquy once again in a Globe performance of Hamlet which is played to Anne Hathaway standing right in front of the stage. We sit through some of the play’s most famous bits. Hathaway is initially enraged because she thinks they are saying her son’s name, which is the central conceit of the book and of course of the film that follows it. I’m sure there were some other bits that were bad in this scene. I’ve already memory-holed much of it due to severe trauma. At the end of the play (ooh it’s a play within a play just like in the real Hamlet), the player of Hamlet reaches out to the arms of everyone watching the play and holds hands, which makes no sense.

Adding insult (slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to injury, a thousand unnatural shocks, etc), was the soundtrack. At the peak moment of ridiculousness (the holding hands with the audience thing), that piece of music by Max Richter starts playing. My jaw really hit the floor here.

I found all of this unbecoming. Even if it could somehow be executed well (and I’m not sure this is possible given the Shakespeare play we’re dealing with), I don’t think taking the audience into the Globe at the end of the film would be a good idea at all.

After the film ended, I saw the accursèd mark of Steven Spielberg in the credits. AHA! I thought. That will be the culprit. I have since read online that Steven Spielberg ‘joined’ the production a little late—and thus I think it’s possible that the dramatic U-turn for the worse in terms of taste probably comes from Spielberg’s populist input.

Whoever’s to blame for the absolute scenes at the end of the film is not that important. The bigger issue is that Hamnet’s central conceit isn’t very convincing. Sure, Hamnet and Hamlet are very similar names and sure, Shakespeare would have been grieving when he wrote Hamlet. But that’s about it. Hamlet is about the Prince of Denmark, it’s about paranoia and court intrigue and thoughts of death and incest and identity and adolescence and naïvety. It is not a story about disease, childbirth, and normal lives in western England in the Elizabethan period. And Hamlet is very much not a story about women.

The problem with Hamnet is that its Hamlet conceit crowbars the life of the Bard, about whom we know too much, into what was a much more interesting story. To put it another way, we had a great story about childbirth which was ruined by all this Shakespeare stuff. If I were Zhao, I would wait a few years and release a kneecapped directors cut that deletes the last third of the film, which would make it a much tighter study about childbirth and grief. Ironically, by putting Shakespeare to one side, audiences might also leave with more interesting thoughts about the writer. Give audiences more space to think and they will re-consider the Bard as entirely contingent on a mother for his existence and a wife for his sustenance.

The biggest and most important reason for this is that it is jammed with Italianate architecture. The architecture imitates various bits of the Italian renaissance, from the medievalising hulk that is the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, to the enormous copy of the Loggia dei Lanzi at the end of the same road, to the weird expressionist neo-early-medieval temple thing which is the Ludwig Maximilian University building.2

You’ll also find super-baroque buildings scattered in the city centre, which has a small area with a medieval street plan. But the general effect is of “rational” street planning over grids and a general predilection for the classical orders of doric, ionic, and corinthian and some frilly plasterwork.

Munich, as a result, feels utterly unlike other cities, not just in Germany but in Bavaria. It has very little in common with Nuremberg, for example, or even Bamberg. Both those latter cities are probably what the tourists are imagining when they think of the urban centre of Germany’s german germanic heartland. They’re medieval cities, they’re small, their Gothic architecture matches the Gothic writing and they have smaller breweries in more picturesque settings.

The breweries of Munich, one of its great contributions to the world, are massive. They’re not on the scale of Beck’s in Bremen, but they still take up city blocks. The ‘smaller’ one of the ‘big six’—Löwenbrau—has its own chonking beer palace of 1910s construction with rather cutesy sgraffito designs on its tower. Inside, you will be treated to the performance of Bayerischness and very good Helles beer. When checking the details of the keller just now, I also realised it was used as an ‘anniversary venue’ for the Beer Hall Putsch under national socialism, so it has that going for it, I guess…

All architecture is the architecture of power: you cannot build without money and resources. But classicism speaks particularly plainly of order, its rhythm and symmetry are irresistible to authoritarian rule. It is entirely logical, then, that Munich should be a classical city with an imposed grid, given its historic ties with national socialism.

Thanks so the disaster of national socialism, of course, Munich was bombed rather heavily, just like Nuremberg (but not like Bamberg). As is typical in German cities, much of the historic space is filled up with utterly thoughtless ‘spreadsheet architecture’. These squared buildings of cement and repeating windows are a kind of national flagellation, such is their dreary modernist worthiness. They are a shameful waste of a great opportunity for national reconstruction. Of course Germany needed national repentance—a lot of it—and Italy should have undergone the same process (but did not).

Nevertheless, I don’t think really, really boring architecture was exactly the way to do it. Much, much better is the direct reconstruction that was done in places like Frankfurt’s extraordinary and beautiful new-old town (Neu-Altstadt), whose weird old-newness and new-oldness speaks eloquently to what was lost and what had to be re-done after the second world war.

Much of Munich, though, is even less flavourful steel and glass. It’s a productive city, an expensive city, and one which is visited by plenty of tourists in spite of the fact that there’s not that much more to see than in Frankfurt, which in my view has more charm (and is helped by the greater presence of its river, the Main).

Munich does have things going for it. When you don’t think too much about architecture and power and / or NS, the classicism can be rather nice when it hits the morning or evening light in the right way. The place has a distinctive identity, thanks to its Bavarian-ness, all the more because that ‘Bavarianness’ is a kind of self-parody and make believe. Equally, the quality of the Glypthotek and Alte Pinakothek collections is very high indeed, better than what you might find in a place like Hamburg, an otherwise more fascinating place. Other great things happen here too, as you might expect from its decent population. And they also have the retail outlet of Kremer Pigmente, (a specialist art/ art-restoration supplier) which I could write a separate article about…

Munich is a good city, but not an outstanding one, which in its own way is an interesting result for one of such importance. That’s just how the Lebkuchen crumbles, I guess.

But as a ‘fine art’ medium, engraving is six feet under. By the 17th century, artists had started realising that they didn’t need to learn the profoundly physical process of cutting lines into a sheet of metal. They could just use chemistry to do the work for them. That’s what etching is: you cover a metal plate with a surface based on (simplifying) waxes and soot powder, which is hydrophobic. Then you scratch ever so delicately away the black surface and dunk the metal into the right type of acid. Then you take the plate with the lines cut into the surface, cover it in ink, wipe off what’s on the surface, and put it through a high pressure rolling press to force the ink onto damp paper.

With engraving however, you don’t use a little needle to scratch away your lines. You use a solid metal V shaped tool called a ‘burin’ that comes to a very sharp point, and has a circular wooden handle that fits in the palm. With this tool you dig into the metal directly and (try) to make neat, fluent lines.

Where engraving requires the strength and control to cut each line through the hard material, in etching one is really only selecting what should be cut. Etching then is a kind of art by remote control, it’s like dictating letters rather than writing them yourself. Or a more chronologically accurate metaphor. Etching is to engraving what the crossbow or arquebus is to the bow and arrow. Any old chump can pick up etching with the right setup, and achieve results which are about as good as their drawing skills.

Engraving is nothing like drawing. The difficulty curve starts from 0 whether you can only make stick men or your Albrecht Dürer. In fact, Dürer is a pretty good example of what makes engraving special and why it died a sad death. In his early career, Dürer took up the relatively new art form of engraving on metal plates. He had already more or less mastered drawing in a late-Gothic style at the age of 13.

Some ten years later his first engravings appear (1495). Let’s take the hideous one called The Ravisher (it’s a metaphor for time). There’s no easy way of saying this, but the engraving is full of mistakes. Focus your attention on the big empty ‘banderole’ (banner) at the top of the image. You can see two tendrils coming off teh top right hand corner. One of them has this weirdly long straight section. That’s where Dürer, one of the greatest artists of all time (and specifically, one of the greatest graphic artists of all time) lost control of his tool.

The burin has slipped and shot across the surface of the plate. Then look at the shading of the banderole. The lines are supposed to be sinuous and smooth, but they run into each-other, probably because (like peeling an orange without breaking the skin), it’s really hard to keep going in a long smooth line because the more you continue, the more of a wire of metal you have coming out the other end of the tool. When you look further into the image you start seeing more and more lines that run off over the edges of whatever they are supposed to be shading in. In Time’s locks of hair that cling to his skull, there’s a line that skips right out of his head. There’s another one that juts out of the woman’s clothing on the left near the tree.

So about ten years ago I read about engraving techniques in my undergraduate degree. I understood in theory that it was really difficult, and started being able to recognise a technically good engraving from a bad one. But this is rather like saying you’re a world-class footballer because you have watched lots of football.

For years I’ve been desperate to know exactly how hard engraving is, what the medium does and doesn’t want to do. Every medium has a subtle pull towards a certain style, and typically in pre-modern art the artists worked as hard as possible to overturn that impetus. In modernist art the artists give in to that impetus, because giving-in is ‘honest’ to the medium. Thus woodcuts really want to be blocky and jagged and expressionist (which happened in the 20th century), but in the 16th century they were made to look like ultra-busy pen drawings.

Some time ago I tried to persuade the master printmaker who taught me etching and a few other techniques to show me how to do engraving. He said “you have to be one of two types of people to do engraving. Mad, or a masochist.” For both our sanity he gently suggested I do etching instead. So I did.

At the minute I live in Rome, so I started seeking out the appropriate madhouse where I could let loose my dark desire to understand the lost art of engraving, hoping that I wouldn’t slip and lacerate my left forearm in the process (this is not foreshadowing by the way, I was very careful).

I found my madhouse in the form of a really tiny print studio in a quiet corner of Trastevere, one of Rome’s especially touristy spots (it’s the Soho of Rome). The workshop was tiny, and had all the brown splatters of mysterious chemicals that give print workshops their unending charm.

We set to work. The first problem was that the master didn’t have many plates and asked if I had one with me. I did not. So she rooted around in her drawers and found a nice, very thin sheet of copper. We had to cut it in half, but the workshop that normally cuts plates to size for them was closed. So I had to literally drypoint the thing in half (by this I mean that I took a drypoint needle and repeatedly scored into the plate for about 10 minutes straight). It worked.

The next stage was preparing the plate’s edges and surface which was about the same as I had been taught for engraving but with some minor variations. The main variation was that the plate was pretty scuffed up, so I used some P1000 sandpaper (this grade feels like velvet!) to take them out. Then I used a white abrasive and cotton wool (I’m used to using jeweller’s rouge and brasso) to get it to a mirror finish. This is important because any residual ‘tooth’ in the plate will hold on to ink, so you’ll get ugly scratches.

Then we were ready to start cutting lines into the plate, but I had to transfer my design first. We used a kind of grease chalk on the inverse of my (photocopied, ironically) design and impressed it through. It produced an extremely faint image. This was a drawback of engraving that I had never imagined. Because there is no pitch black ground (and one that will take graphite or chalk), you have a copper coloured shiny surface that nothing really wants to stick to, because it’s metal. So the very first step is much harder.

Then I set to work with the burin (cutting tool) after practicing a few lines.1 One of the few advantages of engraving compared to etching, but a fundamental one, is the fact that you can control the depth and width of lines, line by line. With etching, the acid doesn’t care about your designs so it’s all a matter of ‘cooking time’ in the liquid, and it’s all applied equally. You have to do several ‘baths’ in the acid to get a similar effect, and it really won’t look the same. Therefore I wanted to do some really deep lines that varied in weight as I went. I did this, but cut way, way, way too deep into the plate and threw up some massive burs on the sides of each line that I should have got rid of after each line. I didn’t. These printed as big blurry patches of dark ink when I made the first print.

Cutting deep into the plate in engraving is really hard. It’s physically hard, requiring strength, and it’s easy to screw up. So cutting gentle lines is easier, right? Right?

This is where I encountered the ‘slippage’ problem I mentioned in Durer. If you don’t go really deep into the metal, the burin you’re cutting with (also made of metal!) wants to slide across the top of the surface. So you lose control very easily indeed, and make these ultra-straight, light gouges into your printing surface. This can mean anything from giving someone half-meter long eyelashes to looking like they have a nail in their chest. Not ideal.

The final realisation in my learning-through-doing was that tight corners are really, really, really difficult. The burin absolutely does not want to do curves unless they’re circles with a huge centre. If, like me, you’re a zero-day engraver with a skill issue, the burin will make the circle on one side, but on the other side it will make these jagged sunburst shapes on the other. I think this is the far end of the cutting point (it’s a three dimensional tool after all) cutting into the back side of the curve. It looks bad. Have a look at my test plate to see what I mean.

To get a sense of what’s possible, now look at a couple of details from Hendrick Goltzius, my favourite engraver and possibly artist of all time.

Look at the earrings. They are tiny spheres made of extremely tight circles. Earrings are almost everywhere in Goltzius’ engravings; just as weird unexplained spheres turn up all over the place in Dürer’s mature engravings. Now I know why. It’s a flex, as the kids say.

I am genuinely unsure how Goltzius did these. If you take a burin at a really high angle, you might reduce the length of the cutting blade in the plate and therefore avoid the jagged wheel effect. But if you do that, you need a lot of force to go into the plate and risk injury or a big slippage. So I’m not sure if that’s the trick, or it’s something about him being a master of sharpening the tool, which is also really difficult (see previous points about sharpening knives). Also note from this engraving how he is changing the line widths ever so subtly in the course of single lines), to describe the collageny-contours of Juno’s neck.

The act of skill that really hides in plain sight though are the inscriptions in Goltzius’ engravings. He uses a kind of mannerist/renaissance hand with curving, round ended serifs and, again, exaggerated differences between heavy and light line weights.

If you haven’t tried engraving, or have talked to someone who tries it, this just looks like text. But not ‘just’ text: it’s heroic.

These are all physical acts of artistry. It’s not the artist as philosopher, but the artist as footballer, ballerina, marksman. The morning I wrote this article, both my left and right arms were sore as though I had been doing weights the previous day. My left arm was sore from holding and turning the copper plate under tension, my right arm was sore from driving the metal thing into the other metal thing for about five hours.

At this point I should mention that Goltzius takes the ‘muscularity’ of the engraving technique and the Mannerist ideal of overcoming difficoltà to the max through his biography. As a very young child he severely burned his hand by falling into his parents’ hearth. The scar tissue fixed his dominant hand like so:2

The artist made this part of his persona, and you can read about this in a very good recent article (that’s open access), here.

Precisely as expected, the process of trying engraving was a humbling experience. This was exactly what I wanted, and I’ll keep trying more to see if it gets any easier (it probably won’t without years of practice). There’s a ‘meta-level lesson’ here that I want to mention, too, though. Engraving has changed the way I think about art techniques in quite a major way.

There are some techniques that are just fundamentally resistant because of their literal, well, resistance. The copper plate is exactly that: it is not an extension of drawing, it is far harder than marble (i.e. in sculpture) and that is omnipresent when you try and do it. There’s really nothing, no style, no movement of the burin that comes easily. Engraving doesn’t have ‘openings’ to particular effects that the technique wants to ‘permit’. Sure, you can change line weights half way through in an engraving, but to be able to do so fluently requires, it seems, years of experience.

So masochism or madness really do capture the technique. I can’t wait to try again.

Of course the Appian Way is really an ancient road, not just any old road. The road was begun in 312 BC, a full 2,314 years ago (plenty of Mayoral terms to fix the thing then). It once extended all the way to the heel of the Italian peninsula. This is no longer the case, which is why it was physically possible for me to cycle the entire****** Appian Way in the course of a single afternoon after a lie-in.

What I was really riding of course was the whole Appian way from its starting point in Rome to the point at which it ceases to be a continuous road. As a linear strip of much-decayed stone, the Appian Way is the perfect metaphor for time. It’s all the more perfect because the way it ends is humiliating, base, amusing. All the monuments of Ancient Rome are ultimately monuments to hyperinflated egoes and the impossible struggle against death.

All Ancient Roman monuments are necessarily decayed. They are normally decayed beyond the point of legibility, or worse (from a Roman point of view), renovated into an utterly different function (the Pantheon, now a church, for example). The Appian Way is a strange case, because its rather basic original function survives, but only up to a point. It was of course once a major trade and military route, with considerable traffic of all types, particularly on wheels.

Cars do occasionally still go on the Appian Way, but they don’t enjoy it. The stones of the Appian Way are carved out by rain and cartwheels, and shimmied about by centuries of earthquakes and roasting summer heat. They’re challenging enough to go over on foot. They will give any car’s suspension a good seeing to.

Most people therefore experience the Appian Way by having a leisurely walk along a short section of it, mostly starting from Rome and heading south-east along its axis. In this way, one can slowly take in the rain-munched marble monuments and dour piles of brick that dot the wayside. It’s melancholic, reflective, cerebral. It’s exactly the kind of aesthetic experience that was considered “done” in the 18th century. This experience of the Appian Way is Romanticism.

Experiencing the Appian Way by mountain bike, on the other hand, is praxis, it’s experimental archaeology.1 One feels the throttle and shake of the broken, mangled stones. One feels the parts where the road has given way to sludge or miniature lakes (in the winter rain). One feels the parts where it has turned into thickets of grass.

Above all, one sees the road at the right pace: it’s a mode of transport, not a giant outdoor gallery. The latter is of course what the so-called Renaissance and everything that came after it wants us to do. Don’t be fooled: it’s a road. Going through the road at appropriate speed, you’re able to get far enough to notice things.

For example, the Appian Way is not straight. The road looks absolutely precisely straight on Google Maps, but this isn’t true. Even before the road has to traverse much more difficult terrain, it goes through a couple of major kinks which ruin the ‘see the enemy coming’ effect fairly close to the eternal city. Whoops!

One also notices the fairly steady decline of the road’s condition from archaeological artefact that’s still traversable to a hot mess and, in its final incarnation, to a dirt track. More interestingly still, you get to the far points of the road and its collision, both metaphorical and literal, with the hulking feats of modernity. The Appia Antica, as it travels east, slowly catches up with a big strada, specifically the SS7. the roar of cars gets louder and louder as you get closer and closer to the two line segments intersecting.

You hear another sound: planes. Passenger jets come into Ciampino airport, almost all of them Ryanair flights (in another fatal blow to Romanticism), and they take a flight path which is not quite parallel to the ancient road but close enough. The blue and yellow tail of the Boeing-737 and their screaming white paint-job is a kind of blaring visual fanfare of our own achievements and their aesthetic effects on the old. They’re not that flattering, it has to be said. But what was clear as I wrecked my legs and knees on the Appian Way is that we are so much better than the ancient Romans.

Sure, building with marble cladding is quite cool; mastering sculpture is quite cool, even if it is based on copying the Greek works that were plundered in the early Imperial period, and even if they ruined them with polychromy.2 But even if we focus on the main theme of this essay, transport infrastructure, the Romans sucked. Their suckiness is all the more enhanced by the fact that they actually invented steam power, and proceeded to only use it for toys.

The ultimate statement of the Appia Antica is the way it ends. Not with a bang, but with a couple of tarmac roads with cars that just cut the thing in pieces at 90 degrees to its direction of travel. But these last bits of the remaining Appian Way are some of the best bits. You get to see the ancient up against the friction of modernity in ways that provoke the most interesting thoughts about ruins.

Ruins are a big problem, in the way they resist utility. Ruins are a bit like airports (like Ciampino) in that they are non-places: you cannot go ‘inside’ a ruin most of the time because its enclosing walls have been destroyed. With every meter of the Appian Way, its very authenticity is resisting your attempts to actually use it as a road. As I’ve already emphasised, getting through it from ‘beginning’ to ‘end’ is now very hard work. All the more interestingly, the idea of the road’s safety—from visibility—is in question too.

As I got tantalisingly close to the end of the road, two young men in the terrible shiny black coats that look like bin bags with suspicious handbags strapped to them emerged from under a pine tree, stood close to the middle of the way, and just stared at me as I cycled towards them. One raised his hand toward me, as if trying to get me to stop. They didn’t say a word. Neither did I. I should make it clear at this point that this was a pretty secluded part of the Via Appia with barely any footfall and that would be pretty hard for police to access. With all my male privileges, daylight, and a bike, I just got convinced in the moment that they were going to try and rob me.

I picked up the pace and cycled straight between them. They didn’t make chase. I really thought they might. I used my two wheels to one of the many advantages for which they were presumably originally invented, didn’t stop, and pedalled hard. I’m not a super fit person, but I became unchaseable thanks to the circular objects beneath my feet. I felt rather pleased by that. Of course, I’ll never know what their intentions actually were.

Medieval paintings, particularly the famous Injustitia by Giotto and the mal governo by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, show the countryside as a very dangerous place indeed. Whether these boys were just loitering or trying to pull a fast one on me, they were unwittingly part of a stage set of the pre-Enlightenment tradition of the countryside as a place of danger. That idea comes from something pretty specific, I think, which is the collapse of urban life that came after the end of the Roman empire. After Rome fell, there were no truly great cities in Europe for many centuries, until their rise around the 13th century onwards. The splintering of power and the complete lack of access to justice meant that the border zones and the rolling hills were indeed the worst place to be.

Appropriately enough, the Appia Antica is now all border zone. It’s liminal. It switches between ancient authentic stones to replacements, to mud and water, and back again. It has monuments that were meant for posterity but are now little more than brick piles. But for all this uncertainty, it’s also rather beautiful. I didn’t let the two chaps ruin my day, and I circled around the small town that sits at the very end of the Appian Way (the amusingly named Santa Maria delle Mole if anyone’s asking) and got back on track. On my way, I re-visited the pop-up food truck in a little field by the way side and had a glass of red wine and some left over bread in an olive grove. Thus, the civilised aspect of the countryside.