Day 6 - Tivoli

A very pleasant excursion to nearby Tivoli today. For some reason the name was familiar to me, but I couldn't identify why. I didn't really know what to expect from the place, but knew that we were going to see some quite famous gardens.

Zoë and Jacquie remained behind, so the 8 of us set out, with me ending up navigating for David. Luckily Tivoli was very close and the journey was swift and uneventful, affording us the opportunity to enjoy the fantastic sights of mountain roads dropping away and revealing a number of beautiful waterfalls. The town above them was our destination, which whet the appetite somewhat.

The place of interest was Villa d'Este, and its unassuming frontage concealed an extensive villa with fantastic Renaissance decor, each room themed with some biblical story or other. At points the floor was cut away to display the Roman mosaics, evidence of a Roman site here discovered during renovation work.

But it was the grounds that were the most remarkable. A beautiful ornamental garden that kept descending down the hill slopes away from the house. The outstanding features were the fountains (apparently there are one hundred of them but not all of them were working). Once again, the photos will give you a better picture than my words ever could.

Towards the end of the tour I found two small adjoining rooms that were dedicated to printing - it seemed from the exhibits (although none of the ones I found were translated into English) that Villa d'Este had once housed a printing press. This in itself was not totally engrossing, but I found myself poring over the other cases, which housed examples of writing through history, including hieroglyphs, Phoenician letters, Runic scripts and a variety of others I couldn't identify. The alphabet was laid out on something like a coloured swatch, showing how each letter had evolved through millennia. I found this utterly fascinating, more so than I expected. Even though I couldn't read the information accompanying these displays, looking down at these ancient curves and sweeps of ink, I felt captivated by the implications. Unidentifiable voices echoed up from the earliest of human experiences, as people tried to find a system of naming their world that could be understood by everyone else. The shapes of the letters seem in most cases arbitrary, and this in itself was fascinating - why does one specific combination of lines and curves mean one thing rather than any other. I was reminded once and for all how fragile human communication can be, despite its endurance through the ages. Meaning relies one hundred percent on consensus, on enough people agreeing that a single letter, or word, refers to one particular thing, regardless of its similarity to the object it signifies. Being presently in a country that speaks a language I have very little knowledge of, this train of thought seemed especially pertinent. Language has long held great interest for me, but now my desire for a greater understanding of its origins seems to have awakened. I hope this will be something I can pursue further when we get home, although it might simply be another thing I won't have time to do.

Staying with the subject of language a while longer, it fell to our contingent to try and book a table at a restaurant discovered yesterday for our Friday evening meal. Armed as always with my desperately useful phrasebook, I eagerly volunteered to attempt the transaction, with David as back-up. I have been keen to grasp any opportunity to try my hand at Italian, and this was a task I felt confident with. I had rehearsed the unfamiliar words and sounds as we approached the restaurant and on encountering a waitress, reeled off the question with all the words in the right order, if not perfectly pronounced, only to be net with the following response:

"Speak English?" asked the waitress.

"Si. Yes." (Natch! How could she tell?)

Another girl was summoned. She could speak fairly good English, and I think she instructed me to 'speak through her.' Not being an accomplished ventriloquist, I interpreted this as meaning speak to her. While I was somewhat relieved that the previous drawback to speaking the lingo wouldn't arise here, I was quite disappointed. I'd made the effort, I'd got the words right, the table was effectively ours, why was I being asked to speak English? They could at least have humoured me.