A Deal with Athens

Up the neighboring hill, the temple faces in the direction of the sea–or in the direction of the gods on Mount Olympus... The Sicilians at Segesta agreed to build this greek temple in collaboration with Athens in exchange for Athens taking on another powerful Sicilian town on the opposing coast which was currently threatening Segesta's interests. Between them, Erice and Segesta could control a good third of Sicily, but they needed help from powerful Athens.

To please Athens, the Sicilians started building this temple, starting with the most visually appealing bits–the columns. When Athens challenged Segesta's opposition, they actually lost, so Segesta simply stopped constructing the temple.
This left the temple in an interesting state, which makes it easy for us to identify clues about how temples were constructed. All of the columns were upright, with a connecting frame on the top, but the columns themselves were unfinished, with individual segments of the stack still visible and the long furrows undone. Each segment of a column has a square hole in t he center which allows it to be stacked on a sturdy piece of wood to hold everything together and to provide flexibility during earthquakes. A shallower cut around the base of the column provided a measurement of how deep the fluting should go. A new experimental method placed each column on top of a pad of soft lead–this may contribute to the temple's remarkable stability through earthquakes over the years.

In finished temples, a roof is added to the whole structure and an inner room is constructed at the back for the statue of the god to whom the temple is dedicated and for a vault containing the temple's treasures. This temple at Segesta, unfinished, remained accessible from all sides and open to the elements. Under Roman rule, there would have been funds to finish the temple (when the romans were tolerant of other religions), but the locals preferred the flat and open space of the unfinished temple for their own ceremonies and rituals.

Optical Illusions
The columns themselves are somewhat bulged in the middle to make them appear straight from a distance–which is how the gods view them. The better the temple looked from a distance, the better it looked to the gods...

The base of the temple at the steps is curved to make it appear a perfect rectangle from a distance.

Other notes
This temple is slightly longer than it traditionally should be. It has 14 columns on the long end instead of the 13 it should have with a short end of 6. Most temples have dimensions of X by (2X+1) columns.

The steps are unfinished–some blocks are missing because construction stopped early. There are also 'tabs' on the stones which were used to help maneuver them. These tabs should have been sheared off in the finished product.

Blocks of stone were raised and lowered by manpower, with ~20 people all walking in a giant hamster wheel, winding ropes attached to the stones up and down.

The surrounding vegetation was chock-a-block FULL of snails. I was surprised at their numbers in this dry environment and even more surprised at their numbers IN GENERAL. I've never seen so many. It was an invasion!

The white stuff on that branch, the stuff that looks like beads? All snails.

Matt & Me

Dear Aphrodite, Please Don't Let Me Die At Sea.

We got most of Wednesday to take a break from the talks at the workshop by going on an excursion to the temple of Segesta.

This is what we learned from the tour guide on the way there:

Erice was an important religious center because of its temple, dedicated to Aphrodite/Venus. The founder of the town was (by legend) supposed to have escaped the Trojan War & fled with his followers to Erice, where he set up a temple dedicated to his 'mother', the goddess of fertility.

At this temple, girls were trained from ~6 years old as 'priestesses' who would practice ritual prostitution from ~12 years to ~24 years. Sailors on shore would make trades in town & then send a representative to buy a very expensive gift to present to the temple. They would then sleep with one of the priestesses as a ritual of worship within the temple, under the open sky, where the gods could see. They believed when they 'reached a state of ecstasy', they could offer a prayer to Venus that she might protect them while at sea. Bringing pleasure to the priestess brought pleasure to the gods, though I have serious concerns about how pleased the child prostitute could be. With enough money, priestesses could be 'rescued' for marriage.

At Segesta, we traveled up to the site of former cities on a hill a little above that on which the temple sat. The city/town's location was highly defensible, as two rivers passed before it, providing natural barriers. From the hill, you could see the bay & Erice (supposedly–or the massive bonfires Erice would build each night).

The temple of Segesta

The oldest settlements (or remains) at the site appeared to be the Byzantine tombs or the muslim town. This latter was a rare find in Sicily– the foundations of a mosque finding Mecca. When the Normans arrived & conquered the hill, I think they left the mosque alone (unusually), and instead turned their ever-destructive forces towards dismantling a lot of the greco-roman housing & stonework (including the acropolis) in the area. They appropriated the dismantled stone to build their Norman castle & accompanying donkey stables. Niiiiiice one guys.

Restoration efforts have re-used some of the stolen stone, but where the stones are small & numerous instead of large and flat, you can see what the Normans took.

Large flat stones from the acropolis

The acropolis

Further ruins of the dismantled acropolis. Smaller stones indicate Norman construction.  

The final site on the former city was a half-circle amphitheater. This half-circle shape is different from Greek amphitheaters, which enclosed more than 180˚ for better sound capture. This amphitheater once had a tall theater stage closing off the opening, but as with everything else, the Normans dismantled it. 

I'm unsure where in the timeline the Romans fall, but they allowed classic greek plays at the theater for a long time until they instituted Christianity as the official religion. At this point, they banned the plays & named the actors sinful for calling to Zeus and the Pantheon all the time, even if only as part of the play.

As an aside–the guide kept pointing out different plants in the area with special significance. Here's a couple:

Mandrake Root–used for love potions

I've forgotten what plant this is and what significance it held. 

Next: The Temple on the neighboring hill.

Eating in Erice: Option 1 or Option 2?

Eventually, everyone got tired of the standard pasta and sausage the conscripted restaurants were serving and went off menu to explore a bit more.

Granted, once we got through the list of restaurants serving the conference, we started to find more interesting choices: "arancini"–aka 'oranges', fried balls of risotto with delicious ragú center, pizza (eggplant/aubergine was a Sicilian favorite), and meatballs.

Regardless, one night we went to a wine bar for dinner. Here, we had a delicious antipasto with cheese, salami, procuitto, olives, & some sort of sweet garnish. I followed this with some great gnocchi (which I've never been able to pronounce). We tried a local pastry for dessert: a sort of round pastry crust filed with ricotta cheese or cream. My impression of Sicilian cuisine (at this point) was that it is heavy on sugar, carbs, and pistachios and light on vegetables.

Most of the restaurants we went to served a house wine in an unmarked glass decanter. It is served by the liter or half liter and comes in 'red' or 'white', unless you're specifically looking for something. The red we had at the wine bar reminded me of strawberry lip gloss.

The inner courtyard of the converted monastery which hosted us. 

Foot Traffic

Inside Erice, our home base was the Ettore Majorana Foundation & Center for Scientific Culture. The center is named after an outstanding Italian physicist who was born in Sicily in 1906. It hosts many, many scientific meetings across many different disciplines every year. It seems to be one of the two main sources of incoming money for the city–the other being tourism (for the view).

Tourism is here

The center uses several converted monasteries to host meeting participants–I stayed in the San Franciscan building; ironic, I know, what with me being from San Francisco and having just come back from a visit home. Room 21. OF COURSE. (The number stalks me.) The room, though refurbished, contained bare walls, a stony and sandy floor with a few decorated tiles, high ceilings, twin beds, and a tall, shuttered window that opened onto the stairs leading to the floor above. The double doors entering the room were also shuttered, giving a kind of french door feel. There was a bidet in the bathroom (every bathroom had one in Italy), and the soap they gave us (olive oil based) was impossible to open. I wonder if it was more of a philosophical tool: We seek the means to cleanse ourselves, but no matter the force we apply to the method we think will get us there (this being the screw top cap), we are foiled. If this is the case, then f#^k you philosophy, I stabbed it in the side of the plastic bottle with my tweezers and got soap out that way.


The night we arrived, I was peer-pressured into trying Limoncello (it is STRONG and leaves a lemon drop after taste in your mouth), resulting in the hilarity that normally accompanies my alcohol-face, and marsala wine–both sweet and dry–this resulted in less severe alcohol-face, but it is also definitely something you drink sparingly.

The courtyard at Ettore is beautiful. There is an inner garden inside the open courtyard plan of the building. Many of the buildings in historic Erice follow this style. The streets themselves feel narrow and fully enclosed in stone, like a maze made of identical stone streets at every turn (or this is how it feels at first), but inside the front doors, buildings open up into private courtyards with gardens or plants–you've walked into personal space carved out of the crowded surroundings. As it turned out, this architectural structure was echoed in several of the other cities I visited on this trip.

This isn't to say the streets themselves feel unpleasant in Erice–They're mostly very clean and the windows and balconies have interesting ornamentation, ornate railings, and sometimes plant growth along the walls. The walls are largely smooth and bare, without ornament besides what seems to be several species of lichen giving the town a characteristic rosy brown hue. Several dogs have the run of Erice–they stake out one or two streets where they have dominion and flop down on a doorstep.

Some dogs might be street dogs, but not all of them.

Largely the only traffic that passes these canine observers is foot traffic, but once in a while a little garbage cart or an absurdly full-size car will try to make its way through the narrow streets. They really must have a special reason for trying to navigate Erice any other way than by foot.

Beautiful door

Pasted on the wall–fake old?

A private inner courtyard

Outside a restaurant

A typical street in the city.

Artisanal painting

One of my preferred ways to explore a new area is with early morning runs. I'm not a fan of long distance running in general (especially without a dog), but something about exploring areas with old buildings and long histories makes it easier to get up in the morning and lace on my running shoes. On my first morning run, I tried to stay inside the streets of historic Erice (there isn't any room up here for any other, more modern sectors of the town to surround it, leaving the old town isolated and lacking the modern expansions we generally see with other european towns. In those cases, a central city often expands outwards until it swallows several other nearby towns–this helps explain why there are so many churches within one town or city in Europe).
I immediately struggled to pick out landmarks that would prevent me from getting lost. The best I could do at one point was to identify a street by the smell of doughnuts.

The morning sun was gorgeous over the walls and by the mountain next to the bay. I still hadn't quite figured out where to best see this incredible view. It was only the next day that I found my way to the flat outcropping that afforded the best view from ground level. The best view overall was by far that from the coffee break room above our lecture theater; it looks like an oil painting (pictures in the previous post).

Erice: Too bad the view was shit.

This October, our lab took a trip to a workshop on "Genomic Imprinting, Epigenetics, and Physiological Functions" in Erice, Sicily. This gave me a sneaky way visit Sicily by taking advantage of covered airfare. It's bunches of fun to be the only non-EU traveler in your group when there's limited layover between your connecting flights with separate airlines.

Of course, I set myself up to do this in the most difficult way possible–by pre-loading my jet lag with a week trip back home to California. Go me! This of course landed me a sore throat that made me feel like a bullfrog most of the time and like someone was carving me a Chilean necktie when I swallowed. Sicily itself turned out spectacularly, but one of the lessons I learned (and looking back can apply here) was the phrase our friend Francesco gave us: "In Sicily....maaaybe." Maybe the pharmacy would be open.... maybe it wouldn't. Most of the time it wasn't. Especially when we were on a cliff 750 feet above sea level and still right next to the coast line.

View from the furthest edge of the cliff on which Erice is perched

It turns out this coastline of Sicily (we flew into Palermo and drove to Erice) is characterized by a lot of abrupt cliffs– they appear very suddenly compared to the rest of the landscape, making you wonder what sort of geological magic brought them into being. As you're climbing the clifftop on which the historic city of Erice is perched, weaving back and forth on tight turns, you simultaneously get a sense of how high these mountains are and of the surrounding landscape.

The view of Trapani as we climbed to Erice

The air was hazy, which made long distances difficult to pick out, instead fading them into the sky as if there was no true horizon. This was particularly prominent when you looked out to sea. In once instance, while at the conference, we trekked out to one edge of the cliff (I could run around the cliff edge and the historic city center in about 10-15 minutes) to watch the sunset. The water ran into the sky as if there were no horizon, and the clouds in the distance cut across the sun very like the rings of Saturn, giving me the impression that we were on some alien vivi-sphere, encased in blue but absent of any boundaries or landscape beyond what we could see.

A panorama of the unfortunate view we had EVERY COFFEE BREAK.

Morning run around Erice, view over the wall

A view of the coast through an alley

Castles

Matt and me, wondering why we ever got into science.

Another view of the castles at sunset. We're looking the wrong way to see the sunset though...

It's hard to capture sunsets on your phone.

A ring around the sun, like Saturn

Inland, Sicily looks brown like California, with dry orchards and many, many olive orchards perched on rocky mountainsides. These orchards often have deteriorating rock shanties with low, small doors–sheds perhaps? They have no road leading to them, suggesting they serve people who tend the orchards on foot.

Vineyards on the way to Erice 

It seems Sicilians spend a lot of time on their doorstep, watching the world go by and smoking. It's so central to the culture, even the stray dogs do it:

These dogs were hanging about the streets most of the time. It's a small city center, so you run into them a lot.

Even in this isolated city center on top of a mountain, there were a lot of dogs around Sicily. Some of them are strays, some are not. It's hard to tell at times. I suppose we must have more programs to pick up stray dogs in the UK and the US? I could tell people really loved their dogs, but they must have focused on their dogs particularly, rather than dogs in general.

Next up: The history city of Erice (which is small and whose economy seems to run mostly on hosting science conferences and tourism!)

Even I cannot escape Louis Vuitton

The Louis Vuitton Foundation Museum was at the middle of the green space in paris–it was so big! I had no idea it was there, but it's heavily wooded and smells of chlorophyll, with lakes and ponds and rowboats to rent.

And oh my goodness the architecture is incredible. 

The whole building is a giant billowing flock of sails with a beautiful shimmery look, but also with transparency for looking from the inside to the out. It's surrounded by a pool of water, fed by a series of cascading waterfall steps that create waves tumbling down towards the pool and in the direction in which the sails are pushed, adding to the illusion of lightness and motion in the building.

The building is very lightly colored (I have no idea how they will clean it), with light colored laminated wood arches supporting the 'sails'. 

The inside is also a very light shade close to white, and at the entrance a large role in silver and pink is on the floor. There are glowing lamp fish weaving their way across a different plane, above us. It smells of new paper–lots of printed guides are waiting for the influx of visitors who deposit their umbrellas at the coat station and spread out into the various sections of the building. The museum just opened the previous October, and everything still feels shiny and new. 

We really only had time for one of the exhibits in the museum, the feature called "The Keys to Passion". There is a permanent collection, but we missed it this time around. They keys was divided into several 'Acts'. I'll only touch on a few of the pieces that interested me...

The Otto Dix portrait

This across was known for scandalous nude dancing. She was addicted to cocaine, old before her time (she was depicted here at 24 years), and died young. 

The Scream (Edward Munsch)

Practically everyone knows this piece. I'm willing to bet you or one of your family members has this on a coffee mug in the cupboard in a gesture to the agony of a pre-caffeinated morning existence.

The counterpoint to The Scream was a series of fairly disturbing self-images or portraits, all of which pulled away from the viewer, keeping the viewer at a distance purposefully–by sheer force of emotion or by simply checking out. 

After this abrupt and jolting entry to the exhibit, we were fed into the "contemplation room". 

The story behind a piece of artwork matters–it feeds into its meaning, and connects you into the network of impact it has had over the years, emotionally demonstrating why it has lasted, becoming a timeless demonstration of a facet of humanity... The story is equally as important for portraits (as with the Otto Dix portrait which began the whole exhibit) as it is for landscapes. Monet's waterlilies are very famous and numerous, but they mean more when you know he painted these obsessively at the end of his life, as his vision was failing... you have more to look for, and think you can see the progression throughout this period of his life reflected in the art; they become a set to be viewed together, a thought process extended over time and lifespan, condensed for you to see all at once.

It was easier to connect with the Monet paintings because I knew this, than with the Finnish landscapes, quadrupled with subtle variations on one view, because I didn't know the significance of the scene. 

The landscapes in the contemplation room were followed by more abstract pieces–the primary colors and shapes you imagine snooty art people seriously nodding their heads at, deriving meaning that isn't there from arbitrary composition. I didn't connect well with these. 

In the popular art section, words began to come into paintings, and artists started to use photo montage techniques. These to me seemed less focused, throwing more information at the viewer at once, and perhaps shallower. They were, perhaps, attempting to throw too much in at once, failing to give the viewer an idea to hold onto, a paradigm through which to view the era or scene depicted. 

The final room was the music room. There were some very interesting 1910s pieces that seemed to reflect the business of the modern information age... There is a story there, but it changes direction many, many times, and displays two moments at once (in the manner of futurist painting), so it takes a moment to see the big picture. It felt very relevant to today; the other pieces–not so much. 

Lulu and I carried on an interesting discussion through these exhibits, concerning the aura of art and the effect on that 'aura' of the mechanical reproduction of that art. Is there an individual interaction between each viewer and the artist, or something more universal? Is the artist depicting for a viewer at all? If an original and forgery are physically identical, could you'll which was a forgery with the two side by side? Is the 'aura' something we ourselves create with the story we hold in our minds when we view it and the continuity we imagine it to have? (For more contemplation on this topic, read Walter Benjamin, "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" from 1936.)

Does it make a difference to "getting" the piece if you're in its (legitimate) presence? 

Lulu and Yaya seemed to think so–they told me their story of seeing Michelangelo's David. Yay talked about see the David, and feeling like David was stalking Goliath, sure of the outcome, and almost casual about it. This feeling clicked for them in seeing it in person, and affected them deeply. 

After exiting the Keys to Passion, we went up to the terrace to see the view–high vantage points seem to be a theme of our trip. It was breathtaking. Not only could we see the whole green park laid out around us, a ship within a forest, we could see the omnipresent Eiffel Tower through the gaps in the 'sails'. 

It's covered, but it feels so open.

The omni-present Eiffel Tower. It looked a lot bigger in person.

Hard to tell you're in a city!

Such amazing angles.

On our way out, we passed a few miscellaneous pieces of art: one a living piece featuring decomposition and growth, and another a reproduction of the Thinker in miniature, watching a video reproduction of the Thinker... (A meta 'aura' interference of mechanical reproduction in different mediums of an absent original?)

We caught the electric shuttle back to the Arch of Triumph. 

There was a very dramatic French flag hanging from it. The arch itself is filled with WWI, WWII, 1892 (Franco-Prussian), and Algerian war memorials. 

We took a walk down the shopping street and went back to the apartment for bread and cheese and a beautiful apricot jam Lulu & Yaya had been given earlier in their trip. Cheese from the alps + apricot jam = food heaven. 

Red! The blood of angry men!
 Black! The dark of ages past!

They took me back to the bus station and we just made it (as usual), despite planning ahead to leave early. I love those two–there are so many things I admire about them, especially their love for travel. It was good to see family.

The bus missed the ferry, and we had to wait, delaying our arrival in Victoria Station by 3.5 hours. The delay did mean we got to see the sun rise on the white cliffs of Dover though, so that was nice. 

I'm so glad I got to join Lulu and Yaya in Paris– I had an amazing time and some equally awesome discussions about art and culture and depictions and food!