Today is January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. This is the official end of Christmastide in the liturgical calendar, when the Magi or Three Kings were supposed to have visited the baby Jesus.
Back in November in Naples, we saw a lot of nativity scenes just starting to be prepared in churches. The one shown here is permanently on display in the Chiesa de Santa Chiara, and it is huge. It also illustrates how the central scene of Mary, Joseph and the baby in a crib becomes elaborated to include not only a star, angels, humble shepherds, and exotic wise men…
but also townspeople and peasants, doing various tasks; animals, buildings, grottos and mountains…
…and even some wealthy landowners with their cows and pigs.
While churches and municipalities construct their own nativity scenes — the Vatican has a huge one in St. Peter’s Square that changes every year; recently they built one in the shape of a boat that had to do with immigration crisis — it’s also a family tradition. There’s nowhere better than Naples for finding everything you need to make or add to your family’s own presepe.
The shops that sell these figures, backgrounds, trees and shrubs, and everything else for making your own nativity scene were in full swing when we were there, and I found them amazing. The enclosures for staging your scene ranged from very small to quite imposing, and they are not cheap. In addition to endless variations of the main elements from the religious story, you can add figures that represent particular professions, crafts, hobbies, and passions, and now some of these are even mechanized. There’s a whole street devoted to such shops, called the Via San Gregorio Armeno, but we saw similar shops scattered all over the city.
I have a nativity scene that my mother and I made from terracotta clay we dug ourselves, back in the 1960s. It’s very simple, quite naive, and precious to me, but many years (this was one of them) I don’t even get it out. My life will not be long enough to collect and outfit an entire Italian presepe, but if I had known about this earlier, I might have tried — few could fail to be enchanted by the ingenuity and humor and sense of personal participation in the Christmas story that they represent.
One resists evil by doing good, and by being good.
This is a choice open to every one of us. A while ago, Peter Michael Gratton wrote about Hannah Arendt’s essay “Personal Responsibility Under a Dictatorship”. He said “What makes her essay so profound is that she locates resistance not in grand gestures requiring extraordinary heroism, but in preserving one’s capacity to think independently and refuse complicity in evil even when everyone else has capitulated.”
Gratton quotes Arendt:
I had somehow taken it for granted that we all still believe with Socrates that it is better to suffer than to do wrong. This belief turned out to be a mistake. There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same.
and he continues: “With such complicity in the background, one might be surprised by Arendt’s relative sympathy for those who typically receive much of the criticism: the ‘nonparticipants’ who chose internal withdrawal—what Germans called ‘Innere Emigration.’ These were the intellectuals, artists, and ordinary citizens who remained physically in Germany during the Nazi period but deliberately withdrew from public life, abstaining from supporting the regime in every way possible. While outwardly an abdication of political responsibility, their stance puts the lie to the claims of many that complicity with the regime was inevitable.”
I’m sitting up here in Canada, a country that may be directly in the crosshairs eventually. I sincerely hope not. Capitulation is not, right now, on the table for me as an individual, but our government has already had to make some concessions and compromises that it did not want to make and that go against its basic values. In Quebec, we have a conservative, populist, racist government. I can, and do, protest certain governmental actions and policies. I have somewhat limited power in the political arena beyond my vote, my written words, and my feet on the streets. There are many fewer limits, though, on my ability to be a good person and to try to do good to those around me. No matter who is in power in our governments, or where we find ourselves, the basic needs of our fellow human beings will still be there.
As an intellectual and artist and musician, what does this mean? For me, resisting evil means seeing who is affected by the cruelty and violence of this world, and trying to help. And there are degrees of affected-ness, aren’t there? We’re all affected: in our moods, our sleep, our stress levels, our ability to function normally, let alone to live and work with happiness and serenity. Some of us are affected economically more than others. Others are afraid, persecuted, separated from loved ones, facing great uncertainty, in detention or prison, or trying to adjust to major life changes.
Where can we actually make a difference? In one small way at a time. In my case, I can intervene by acting through the arts — trying to be a person who brings light into the darkness — and I can take a direct action like buying a winter coat for a refugee, speaking to a homeless person or beggar and asking what they need, listening to a friend who is in despair, contributing to a cause with time or money. It can be as simple as taking a box of canned food to the nearest food bank or shelter, or taking part in collective actions by organizations committed to doing good in the community or on a larger scale. It means thinking and acting beyond the needs of my own family and close friends.
On the most fundamental level, resistance also means taking care of myself so that I have the strength and capacity to help someone else. If I don’t do that, I’m very quickly drained. Self-care does not mean being selfish. There are plenty of people who, for many valid reasons, can just about take care of their basic life and that’s all. But it is no time for people with greater capacity or resources to be self-centered, so we have to take care of ourselves too. Paul wrote, in his letter to the Romans, that it was time to “put off the deeds of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” I find it helpful to think about that image. Because it is true that when we find the things that help us to be strong and resilient in the face of evil, it is like putting on spiritual armor.
For me, this can mean an hour with my flute or piano; drawing, writing, or reading literature and poetry; keeping some order, cleanliness and beauty in my home; and above all, noticing the world around me. While I’ve been writing here just now, in late afternoon, the sunlight crossed this room. I stopped for a moment and looked at the objects I’ve put on the shelf above my desk, because they are meaningful to me, including my father-in-law’s statue of Socrates. I watched a large flock of crows flying over my building to the north. I remembered to breathe.
Books read in 2025, most recent first. # indicates books read with my book group
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf#
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes (partial; postponed until later)#
Pompeii, Robert Harris
The Moment of Caravaggio, Michael Fried
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway (in progress)
To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway
The Torrents of Spring, Ernest Hemingway
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño
Picasso and Truth: from Cubism to Guernica, T. J. Clark
On Breugel, T. J. Clark
The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell#
Ake: The Tales of Childhood, Wole Soyinka#
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway#
Return to Damascus, Jonathan Sa’adah
The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín
Long Island, Colm Tóibín
Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante#
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard#
Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano
Intimacies, Katie Kitamura
The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz
Electric Light, Seamus Heaney
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles #
A Separation, Katie Kitamura
Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck (DNF)
Doctor Copernicus, John Banville
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago #
The Promised Party, Jennifer Clement
The City and its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami #
Reading and music have kept me sane during this political nightmare of a year, when so many of the words coming across my screen are things that just make me angry, or are sheer drek that doesn’t deserve to be called “writing.” There’s a limit to how much our brains can take in, and we have to choose what it’s going to be. Thanks to my intrepid book group, I got through a number of big books again in 2025, though when I look back over my list, it doesn’t seem as ambitious as in some of the years past. Considering what we have all been dealing with, I am not going to judge! I’m grateful to have had the concentration to read as much as I did, and grateful for companionship for a big chunk of it.
A few comments, then, working from last January forward…
The recent Murakami is not one of his very best, but it’s good. Like many readers, we felt he left too many threads hanging (ok, it’s Murakami, he’s not going to explain everything) and that the ending was unsatisfying but the book itself was enigmatic and enchanting in the ways we’ve come to expect from this writer.
I had read The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, byJose Saramago, once before and liked it even better this time around.
Kairos, by Jenny Erpenpeck, was too much for me. Once I figured out where she was going, I decided to stop and spare myself the pain. I also put aside Terra Nostra (Carlos Fuentes) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway) because the graphic violence and cruelty were not what I wanted to subject myself to, not right now. I will go back and finish the Hemingway (which I read long ago but don’t remember very well) because it is simply too well written a novel not to finish. I also want to read the Fuentes, because of my deep interest in Mexico and its history. He starts out, however, with Philip II of Spain and the excessive cruelty and craziness, in the name of Spanish religiosity, are over the top.
However, I liked both books by Katie Kitamura – A Separation and Intimacies. Both deal with violent events, but the narrative and characters are treated in a sensitive and restrained way; there’s nothing gratuitous.
A lot of readers have liked A Gentleman in Moscow, but I found it amusing and forgettable.
Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, is a good book but it goes on far too long, and that means you spend a long time with the narrator, who comes off as a really unpleasant person. Our group loved Arturo’s Island, by the same author. It’s also about a child with an unreliable, absent parent, but far more about the delights and discoveries of growing up, and less about anger and scores to settle.
Best written books of the year? Probably A Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Each one is brilliant and unique. I’d read the Hemingway before but somehow had never gotten around to Mrs. Dalloway.
Also worth mentioning were several books of art history and criticism. I was given On Breugel by T. J. Clark – a small book that I sat down and read in two evenings, coming away knowing much more about Breugel than I had, and captivated by Clark’s non-academic style. I immediately went to the Bibliotheque nationale, which has a great collection of art books, and took out Clark’s book on Picasso. It was equally intelligent, and like the book on Breugel, takes an original approach to a subject that’s been analyzed to death. It’s technical but was compelling enough to keep me reading. By contrast, I learned a lot from Michael Fried’s book on Caravaggio, but it was derived from lectures he gave at the National Gallery of Art, and written in the academic art-history-speak that tends to put me to sleep.
Lest this list seems too highbrow, it includes two books that were not literary but that I enjoyed a lot, set in places I care about: Jennifer Clements’ The Promised Party, a memoir of her bohemian childhood in Mexico City, and Robert Harris’ Pompeii, which I raced through in a couple of days: even though it had “made for a movie” written all over it (a No. 1 bestseller; Harris is the author of Conclave), it was an entertaining and well-researched novel of the last days of that ill-fated city, through the eyes of the “aquarius” – the Roman official in charge of the Aqua Augusta, the huge aqueduct that served the whole region near Vesuvius.
I also read, and re-read for editing, my husband’s new book of photography and essays, Return to Damascus, which is described in detail here.
Toward the end of the year, I found myself using the library more. I usually read e-books, and almost never buy new volumes because my own shelves are full, but it was a pleasure to read (and hold) some books on paper. I had a trial subscription to the New York Review of Books last year, but am not sure I’m going to renew the paper subscription; I can read this journal through my library membership. I’ve also cut way down on the amount of news and commentary I’m reading, choosing quality over quantity, which frees up more mental space for reading books.
How about you? Has it been hard to read this year, or a welcome refuge? What stands out in your own list? Please share!
Duccio, Nativity, 1308-1311, tempera. (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
I’m responsible for the “prayers of the people” at tonight’s midnight mass, and I spent much of the morning writing, and rewriting them. Some of these intercessions follow a standard form, where we insert the names of people who are sick, the recently deceased, the worldwide churches we’re asked to remember in the Anglican cycle of prayer, and so forth. But the beginning, where the intercessor asks the congregation to “pray for the world,” is open to their discretion. This is what I will be saying:
Let us Pray for Peace on Earth
On this holy night, our thoughts turn toward the humble manger in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, and the joy and hope represented by that birth. We also realize that the oppression, fear, violence and political instability of that time are still with us. Let us remember all the women in our world who give birth in dire circumstances, in fear, and without adequate care, including in the land of Jesus’ own birth. Let us remember the many children who are born into war zones or poverty and will live without adequate food, shelter, or safety. We pray for peace in Ukraine, in the Holy Land, in the Sudan, and all the other places on earth that are torn by war. Most of all, we who are so fortunate to live here, pray for peace in our own hearts, so that we may be instruments of your peace.
Let us Pray for Goodwill Toward All People
In this time of troubling division, when voices of hatred seem very loud, help us to be patient and steady voices of goodwill. Give us the strength and direction to protect refugees, deportees, and migrants; political prisoners; the homeless and displaced, and all who society sees as “other.” Help us to comfort the lonely, bereaved, and broken-hearted, and to continue to be a community of welcome and refuge, ever opening our arms toward the larger world.
This Christmas, help us to look deeper into the needs around us, and into our own hearts for ways in which we can be of service. As we face the many problems of our world and our own lives, please give us courage and the wisdom of discernment, and joy as we do your work.
Today there have been a lot of images coming across my Instagram feed. The Duccio tempera, from his Maesta altarpiece, made me stop and look; I’m a great admirer of Duccio and the way he tells a story. This painting, from around 1308, starts to move away from the static Byzantine representations that preceded it, but it also has a lot in common with them. There’s gold, there’s grandeur, and a whole host of angels surrounding the swaddled child and Mary, peaceful and resplendent in her blue robe on a bed of red.
Caravaggio, Nativity, oil on canvas, 1609. Whereabouts unknown.
Three centuries later, in 1609, Caravaggio painted a Nativity for the Oratory of San Lorenzo (St Lawrence) in Palermo, Sicily. In style it resembles his Seven Works of Mercy I saw in Naples: the almost-black background, a large group of figures, an angel hovering above stretching a hand down toward the human scene. It’s less complex though, and our gaze — like that of the participants in the manger, even the cow — keeps returning to Mary’s own gaze at her infant who lies naked on the ground. In addition to the shepherd, his hand open in wonderment, the painter has depicted Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence, both saints associated with poverty and simplicity. All of the figures, modeled on real, ordinary people, convey a feeling of poverty and humility — this naturalism was new in religious art, and gained Caravaggio both fame and derision by certain patrons who felt it was unseemly.
The nativity story is almost certainly apocryphal for the most part, but it has kept a hold on many of our imaginations for a very long time. “No room at the inn”, a birth under difficult circumstances; a star which seems to herald an event of enormous magnitude; angels announcing the birth to shepherds, the arrival of exotic wise men from the East — and then a desperate flight to safety for the young family. Duccio’s painting is beautiful, but it took Caravaggio to give common people an image with which they could identify. No gold here; just a weary mother gazing with adoration at her newborn, somewhat oblivious to the other figures who have been drawn into this story and are held there forever in this image.
The physical painting, however, is gone. It was stolen from the Palermo Oratory in 1969, cut from its frame by thieves probably associated with the Sicilian Mafia, rolled into a carpet, and taken away, never to be seen again. Whether it was bought, or destroyed after a planned sale failed to happen, is unknown; a copy was made from the study of photographic images and Caravaggio’s other works and hangs in the oratory now.
Nevertheless, this work reflects what I was trying to say in my intercessions; the scene is repeated even today, including in Palestine where so many mothers have given birth without hospital care, without anesthesia or medicine, only to be faced with raising their children in a war zone even less safe than in the time of Jesus. No one wants to become a refugee, and yet so many are forced to flee. Let us do whatever we can to help the people around us, and to be people of good will and of peace.
I had always wanted to go, and I didn’t know what to expect. Would Pompeii be as astounding as the National Geographic photos that fascinated me as a child? Would I be able to envision Pliny trying to come here on the night of the eruption in 79 AD; would I feel any of the horror and tragedy of those doomed people, so long ago? Or would it be a Disney-esque reconstruction that didn’t feel real?
We arrived on the Circumvesuviana train, about an hour’s ride from Naples, and entered the site. At first it seemed like a maze of streets, with the stone walls of former buildings towering much higher than I had expected. After wandering down a couple of those and arriving nowhere, we sat down and consulted our map and made a plan. The city was far larger than I had thought. Some areas (many, we would find out) were still being excavated by archaeological teams, and no wonder — the site is vast and even several centuries of excavation have not been able to complete the task. We walked uphill toward the Forum and found a wide open space that we could easily imagine teeming with people.
In the background, the mountain below which the city had been built: the deliberate focal point, we would discover, not only for its Forum but for many of the streets and public buildings.
Via della Scuole, looking toward the Forum. 5” x 12” in sketchbook
From there we went on to explore the city for the rest of the afternoon, moving into residential areas of large villas with magnificent mosaics and wall paintings.
I was surprised how much of this sort of decoration remained on-site, although there were some replicas. The biggest surprise here, as in Herculaneum, was how much of the original structures had been preserved by being buried in the volcanic eruption. Unlike other sites from the same period, where time and the elements have worn down the walls and toppled the columns, much of Pompeii was practically intact.
Imagine being the archaeologists who, while excavating a Pompeiian villa called the House of the Faun in 1831, found this floor mosaic which depicts Alexander the Great in battle with the Persian king, Darius II. It’s thought to be a copy, in mosaic, of a Greek painting and contains millions of tesserae, the tiny ceramic tiles that were used to create the complex picture. The mosaic is approximately 9 feet high by 16.5 feet long.
detail of head and torso of Alexander in the original mosaic
The original was removed to the Archaeological Museum of Naples and is currently undergoing conservation in an adjacent room to the gallery where it is usually displayed on the wall; we were only able to see the conservators working on a small piece of it. In the early 2000s, a careful copy was made and installed in the House of the Faun in 2005 – that’s what you see in the top picture.
We walked, and walked. Other areas contained temples, shops, tavernas where the residents would have taken their lunch, a huge public bath complex, and many more modest houses, some as small as one room. On the far end of the city, past gardens, orchards, and vineyards, we came to the stadium/amphitheater.
I sat down in the distant dark area of this picture, and drew the trees, looking in the opposite direction.
In addition to this stadium, which would have hosted gladiatorial contests, there is also a large theater in the Greek style.
When patrons exited the theater, they would have seen this framed view of Vesuvius, the omnipresent companion of the city of Pompeii.
We stayed until the sun was setting, and loudspeaker announcements told us the site would be closing soon. What did I feel? I felt that I had visited a city that had clearly been beautiful, carefully designed, and eminently livable for those of sufficient means; life had been good here until it came to an abrupt, terrible end. As in Herculaneum, perhaps even more so, it was sobering and emotional to be there; I was moved.
Ironically the eruption preserved for us, as in no other place, the ability to step back into a Roman city and learn a great deal about how the people actually lived.
Leaving Pompeii. A larger watercolor, 10” x 14”, on Arches cold press.
I have thought more about Pompeii, and already made more drawings and watercolors of it, than any other site we visited in Italy. There is much more work I want to do as I try to unpack the impression it made upon me: both the actuality of what remains, and what the place and its history represent in the human psyche.
Market Day, and a visit to the Galerie d’Italia…and Caravaggio.
November 11, 2025
I only managed to keep up the detailed journal for five days or so. I think it was functioning as a way of acclimatizing to the disorientation of jetlag and being in such a different place, as well as all we’d been through just before coming here. Then, after such a bad night, we took that astonishing trip to Herculaneum, and after that everything fell into place: I ended up loving Naples, loving the food and the energy and life that pulsate here from early morning until late at night. Loving the color and the light, and the beautiful time we were having together. So, to continue:
On Sunday, November 9, we had a late start, and on our way to the metro discovered that it was market day in Piazza Dante, so we changed plans and I bought food while J. took pictures. We took our purchases back to the apartment and I cooked the fresh porcini mushrooms I’d bought for our lunch.
Part of Via Toledo, a main shopping street in the old part of Naples, becomes pedestrian at certain times (which we never quite figured out). On Sunday afternoon it was very busy, with many people out shopping, eating, or just taking a stroll. We enjoyed seeing men arm-in-arm with other men who were clearly just friends of theirs, not partners, and people who had obviously carefully dressed for their walk. I hadn’t expected to see “fashion” in Naples the way you would expect in Milan or Rome, but there’s everything here from the most casual to the most put-together, confident, and very beautiful Italian style. If I ever come again, I’m bringing an empty suitcase and heading for the vintage shops, which I did peruse, but ruefully left empty-handed because there was no room in my carry-on.
In the afternoon I went alone to the Galerie d’Italia, not far away on Via Toledo, to see their collection which traces Neapolitan painting through the centuries, and has several very important holdings including one of Caravaggio’s final works. It was very difficult to photograph in their galleries — there was a lot of glare. Here are a few works that stood out for me.
Giovanni Battista Caracciolo (Battistello), The Holy Family, 1610-1620.
Gaspar Adriaenz Wittel, View of Naples from Posillipo with Vesuvius in Eruption, 1730.
Antonio Mancini, Landscape, 1880 — moving toward Italian impressionism. The brushwork in this small painting was exquisite.
Two rooms were devoted to the work of Vincenzo Gemito, a sculptor who lived from 1852-1929 and is credited with modernizing the art of sculpture, especially portraiture, in this region of Italy. He was a superb draftsman and I spent a long time admiring his drawings that were displayed. Here are some of his self-portraits.
I was sad to read, later, that Gemito’s life was punctuated by periods of mental instability that prevented him from working. What beautiful work he produced during the rest of the time!
The collection culminates with its two most valuable and famous holdings. First, Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of Delilah about to cut the hair of Samson, thereby taking away his power. It’s a large canvas and very beautiful, especially the lavender-pink of Delilah’s dress in contrast with her red hair.
Detail, Artemisia Gentileschi, Delilah and Samson.
But perpendicular to it, on the far wall, is Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. Nothing prepared me for the impact this painting had on me.
The painting is photographic in the way it captures a moment in time: the arrow has just been released by the spurned Hun who wishes to marry Ursula, and it has entered her heart.
Ursula looks down in astonishment at the still-quivering arrow; already the color has drained completely from her flesh. An outstretched hand, trying to protect her, is too late. Behind her, mouth open, Caravaggio has painted himself — should we see him here as a horrified witness who can do nothing, or a tormented man haunted by thoughts of his own possible execution?
Even though the painting is not in the best condition, and even though the painter has compressed and angled the figures more than would have been possible for the shot to arrive at that point-blank angle, its power created a strong visceral reaction. For a moment, I actually felt faint, and my heart pounded. Then I settled down, and stayed in front of the canvas for fifteen or twenty minutes, trying to look at every part.
This was one of the very last, if not the last, paintings that Caravaggio made, about a month before his death from a malarial fever. Fortunately it was not one of the canvases he had rolled and put in the small boat that sailed without him and apparently never arrived. I will write more later about this and the other Caravaggio paintings I saw. My reaction to Saint Ursula felt very much the same as the open-mouthed self-portrait Caravaggio had painted into his canvas, but included awe at the skill of the painter, and a heightened awareness of the raw, personal experience of violence, sorrow, and death he must have had to be able to express them in his works — this one in particular.
We went to the National Archaeological Museum today. It’s nearby, an easy walk. And it’s vast. Too much. The building itself is large and really beautiful, with lovely courtyards where we sat when we needed to take a break.
There are only so many Roman sculptures and portrait heads that I can absorb at one time, although I was pretty fascinated to see portraits of many Greek philosophers and writers — all were Roman copies of Greek originals. Did they really look like this? Perhaps — each one is entirely individual.
Bust of Aeschylus. Pentelic marble from Greece; Roman copy of Greek original of 340-330 B.C.
Most interesting to me were the Roman mosaics from Pompeii and the wall paintings from Pompeian villas. These works are very skilled, detailed, and human — the physiognomies reminded me of Egyptian funerary portraits — with knowledge of perspective and modelling as well as interesting ways of representing space and time, as in some paintings showing different scenes of the Trojan War in different parts of the same panel.
A fine cat mosaic from Pompeii, with ducks swimming below.
I was very surprised to see some “sketches”: wall paintings of market/forum scenes done in a very loose, brush-y style that would be at home in any modern travel sketchbook.
The Romans really loved their horses.
I’ve been thinking about a few works in particular. One was a painting of Achilles giving up his mistress, Briseis, to the Greek commander, Agamemnon — a personal sorrow and insult that caused Achilles to withdraw from the fighting in anger and jeopardize the Greeks’ chance of victory after nine years of war. This wall painting is from the salon of a Pompeiian villa entirely devoted to paintings from mythology or epics: the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. What’s hardest to understand is how all this representational skill could have been lost in Western civilization for centuries.
The other was a monumental sculpture of a Greek warrior carrying the body of Astyanax, son of the Trojan prince Hector and his wife Andromache, referring to a story from the Iliad that has always moved me. The warrior is thought to represent either Odysseus or Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son. There was no way to photograph it well, no angle that captured its three-dimensionality.
This sculpture was part of a group of huge Roman marble sculptures from the Farnese collection (the same collection that forms the core of the Capodimonte Museum.) In the mid- to late 1500s, twenty or more of these sculptures were arranged around the sides of a bath complex that would have been a major attraction for guests at the Farnese villa. One of the most famous of these is the Hercules, below, with a real person for scale:
This group of sculptures included the Farnese Bull, an enormous, complicated, multi-figured marble sculpture: the largest statue ever discovered from antiquity. It’s a 3rd century Roman copy of a Greek original and was discovered in 1546. At that time, excavations of a known Roman bath had been commissioned by Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese), who wanted to find sculptures for the family’s palatial residence in Rome. Michelangelo planned to use it as a fountain. It’s been restored, altered, and added to since then. While I appreciate its complexity, the result we see today is a pastiche of styles and ideas that struck me as confusing and pretty dreadful.
I tried to imagine what that bath complex would have looked like, probably with pools, fountains, and formal gardens, and these huge sculptures lining the outer edges. The grand scale and general excess reminded me of today’s oligarchs, who sadly have wealth but far less aesthetic sense — but it’s the same human impulse to display one’s wealth and power in the largest possible way, and impress this upon others. These people have been with us forever, but will anyone want to fill a museum with the artwork being produced for the oligarchs today?
Another difficult night last night. Maybe too much caffeine, maybe just the cumulative effect of the noise and crowdedness of this city; the motorbike traffic is constant and unpredictable, and you really have to pay attention. We received my brother-in-law’s obituary in the evening, which certainly didn’t help with peaceful sleep. During the day, I had felt surrounded by male aggressiveness (the traffic, Roman imperialism) and by death –- room after room of artifacts from Pompeii, room after room of Roman portrait heads, evidence of people trying to make something that would last beyond their inevitable death. The news continues to be horrific and inescapable, and the loss of small pure consolations, like Manon, feels even harsher. The good news this week is that Mandani won the mayoral race in NYC, and Democrats swept other elections, which put the Republicans back on their heels. The shutdown continues; air traffic in the U.S. will be cut by 10%.
In any event, I slept for an hour and a half and then was up for three hours, feeling utterly miserable but trying to let J. sleep because he’s exhausted. I got up and was on the couch in the kitchen/living area, and he came out to find me around 4, and eventually I did fall asleep until 9. We may go to Herculaneum today. Rain is predicted, but not much.
View of Herculaneum with Vesuvius behind. The sea is behind me, maybe half a mile away.
8:00 pm. We’ve returned from an epic trip to Herculaneum. The first challenge was figuring out the trains at Garibaldi Central Station, which we finally managed after walking in a circle for fifteen minutes. Once on the platform, we had to wait for the passage of the first train on our tracks, which was not ours, and wait for our own (unmarked) train, the “Circumvesuviana,” to appear in a few minutes, which it did, covered in graffiti. Nine stops later, we arrived at the present-day town of Ercolano, where we shared a pizza, quite a good one, at a little local restaurant before walking down the long hill to the sea and the archaeological park.
The little pointed tomatoes hanging from the ceiling of the restaurant where we ate lunch are typical of the Naples region. They’re hung up in the fall and last all winter.
The first view of Herculaneum as you approach the site, looking toward the sea; the city of Naples is on the far upper right on the other side of the Bay of Naples.
It’s almost strange to call this site the “ruins” of Herulaneum, because the state of preservation is so excellent and the work that’s been done to present the site so extensive that you don’t feel like you’re walking through ruins, but something much more akin to a real town, with real shops, houses, streets and seaside market. Looking down into the site, and then up at Vesuvius in the background, I felt moved almost to tears; what a terrible fate these people suffered! The feeling only increased as I walked through homes decorated with wall paintings, mosaic floors, courtyard fountains, and read that “over 300 residents stopped on the shore, awaiting the rescue coming from the sea, when the poisonous pyroclastic blast rolled down from the mountain at 1 am in the morning.” There would have been no chance of escape.
Loggia and garden of a large villa.
This building was a gathering place for the Augustans, or freed slaves.
In A.D. 79, the shore was right at the edge of the town; now it’s perhaps half a mile further out. So you can stand one what was the pier, where the boats would have come in, where the markets must have bustled and fishermen brought their fish. It was also where the residents waited to be rescued that terrible night. Jonathan walked further along the ancient quai than I did, and came upon the place where archaeologists have recently unearthed many skeletons. He saw them. I didn’t; it was enough to imagine what had happened.
At the same time, Herculaneum is extremely beautiful. The setting right next to the sea, but with the mountain above, is magnificent, and it’s easy to see why some of the wealthiest Romans had their villas here.
Daily life is also easy to imagine as you walk through the streets, paved with large stones and crowned to allow water to flow into the side drains, past taverns with domed bread ovens and large terracotta food pots still embedded in the lunch counters, past shops and craftsmen’s workrooms, and then enter people’s homes by walking on their own elaborate mosaic floors, and looking out into their gardens, or into their intimate atria and house shrines.
A house shrine with mosaic and painted decoration. Note the elaborate fresco fragment on the wall at upper left.
Evidence of Roman engineering is everywhere, and the high level of craftsmanship evident, as well as a gracefulness and elegance that must have been enjoyed by this class of Romans, at least. It’s clear from the (ongoing) excavation just how deep the town had been buried, which happened very rapidly, and you quickly see why the ash hardening into stone allowed so much to be preserved.
The reconstruction is not Disney-esque; it simply feels real. Because we were visiting in the off-season, not many other visitors were present. You are able to enter most of the structures on your own, simply asked not to touch the walls or lean or sit on the stones.
As a result, after a little while, you are really able to feel what it might have been like to live here. I had not been prepared to have their reality be so palpable to me, a visitor two millennia later, and I had not expected to feel so much empathy.
We stayed until the site closed at 5 pm, with the glow of the setting sun on the walls of Herculaneum, then the modern town, with Vesuvius in the distance.
We walked out of Herculaneum a different way than we had come, along the former seashore, past greenhouses covered with flapping plastic, and the sun setting over the sea in the distance, then on narrow winding streets up into the present-day town.
On the way back up the hill to the train station, we stopped for supper at a little trattoria run by an elderly man and his wife. It was early, and we were the only guests. J. had a salad with prosciutto, and I ordered zuppa di pesce, expecting fish soup, but what arrived was a bowl of delicious broth upon which rested a mound of mussel shells, tiny clams, calamari, shrimps, and fish, to be eaten with crusty sourdough bread (photo in this previous post.) During our meal, the proprietor started a fire in his wood-burning stone pizza oven at the back of the shop. Then he and his wife disappeared, leaving the restaurant with two other women, with whom there had been a constant high-volume conversation since we walked in. These two seemed unable to take our money when we wanted to leave. Finally, one of them took our 50-euro bill and the dinner check and walked out the door, presumably to a neighboring shop, returning a few minutes later with our change. Perhaps less has changed here than one might think.
We rode home on the train in the dark, and slept well.
Capodimonte in late afternoon. The Palazzina dei Principi and palm trees, seen from the side of the Royal Palace. (A watercolor in my sketchbook, done the next day.)
Thursday November 6, 2025
After a truly terrible night in a too-hot apartment — fitful sleep, when sleeping at all, and bad dreams – we finally awoke at 11:15, figured out how to better ventilate the bedroom, had some breakfast at home, and eventually left on the metro for the Royal Palace of Capodimonte, one of the world’s major art museums, since it was far too late to try to go to Pompeii. It was a ten-stop metro ride, and then a fairly long bus ride. All the Italians on the bus were talking loudly to each other but we couldn’t tell about what. “Bologna” kept coming up, so maybe football? It wasn’t obvious; the only thing that was clear was that they didn’t know each other, but that was no barrier to lively conversation. When they realized we weren’t sure where to get off, two of the women started debating. Finally the younger one signaled to us to listen to her and follow her off the bus (this was after the older one had gotten off, pulling us with her, with the younger woman gesticulating wildly for us to get back on the bus). We did as she said, and soon found ourselves at the entrance to the park complex.
The former palace of the Bourbons is immense. It was built by Charles of Bourbon beginning in 1738, on a tall wooded hill that became the royal hunting park, with a commanding view of the bay of Naples, and Vesuvius beyond. Charles’ mother, Elizabeth Farnese, was married to Philip V of Spain, and had an enormous art collection that eventually came to Naples. Much of it is still exhibited here, though some 500 paintings were pillaged by Napoleon’s troops and went to France.
The palace is currently under renovation, but they’re doing it in such a way as to keep the museum open. (We saved nearly the entire price of the Campania ArteCard pass on this admission alone.) Then it was a climb up three flights of wide unlit stairs to the second floor galleries. In the very first room, dimly lit, I was stunned as my eyes adjusted to realize I was facing two larger-than-lifesize Michelangelo charcoal cartoons (preparatory drawings for frescoes). The drawings were protected by glass, but there were no guards or other barriers, so we were able to get very close to them.
Michelangelo Buonarroti. Group of Armigers. 1546-1550. Detail from 19 sheets of paper glued to canvas, pricked in preparation for pouncing with charcoal dust for transfer to plaster for fresco painting.
Even in the low light I could see the individual marks clearly, and follow his hand across the paper as he drew the strong forms. It would be an afternoon of one extraordinary work after another, but to me, these drawings remained the most moving. The full image is shown below.
Then, in the first room, shimmering Italian Renaissance paintings by Filippino Lippi, Mantegna, Botticelli.
Above, Detail of an Annunciation by Filippino Lippi.
Madonna and child with angels by Botticelli
In the next gallery, many Rafaels.
The hand of a cardinal, painted by Rafael.
Then, the first of many, many Titians.
Detail of a portrait of Philip II, by Titian (1553-4).
Further along, in rooms where the lights don’t even stay on but are motion-activated when you walk in, two very famous Breugels.
Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Misanthrope, (tempera).
Another room packed with ancient Greek vases and terracotta figurines; helmets; Roman glass; chinoiserie; Meissen porcelains.
Roman glass.
Long hallways filled with Dutch landscapes and still lives; wide doorways opening into large unlit galleries and parallel corridors: it was once a palace. Not a guard in sight, and perhaps twenty other visitors the entire time we were there, almost never in the same rooms where we were.
Finally we went upstairs to the third floor, where there were only two galleries open, first the entrance gallery with some stunning portraits by Francesco Maria Mazzola, known as “Parmigiano,” especially his Antea, in which the beautiful aristocratic Roman girl — a courtesan? the artist’s lover? — wears a mink fur, its head seeming to bite her gloved hand.
Parmigiano, Antea
And in the very large main gallery, many Titians. (I was glad to see a guard in this hall of priceless treasures — bored in his chair, but at least present!) At the far end, the famous Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentisleschi hangs on the right. Across from it is Titian’s gorgeous Danaë and the Shower of Gold.
Titian, Danaë and the Shower of Gold.
Originally commissioned to be a portrait of the mistress of Cardinal Alessandra Farnese, perhaps the artist or the cardinal had the idea of making her into the mythological figure of Danaë. Although the painting was intended for the cardinal’s private chambers, one couldn’t be too overt…
Flanked by these two paintings, and alone on the large far wall, hangs Carvaggio’s Flagellation of Christ.
I studied Titian’s Danaë forquite a while, holding back from my inevitable confrontation with the Caravaggio.* But finally I did turn and stand in front of this extraordinary painting for a long time, moved to be essentially alone with it, and astonished by the painter’s mastery of form and composition which give the painting tremendous concentrated tension and power. One of the reasons I wanted to make this trip was to see the Caravaggios that are in Naples and Syracuse, all from the final years of his short life. I plan to write an essay about these experiences, specifically, later this winter.
The Flagellation of Christ, by Caravaggio, 1607.
We looked at each other, wide-eyed, as we walked down the palace steps: physically tired from our jetlag and lack of sleep, and also emotionally and visually –- it had been a lot to take in and a lot of concentration. The sun had already set by the time we left the museum, so we walked briefly around the beautiful grounds, unable to see them very well, and then headed for the bus back to the city center below.
Napoli from Capodimonte, as painted by Dunouy Alexandre-Hyacinthe in 1813 — the view that we didn’t see. Apparently there is a belvedere below the palace. From where we were, the trees obstructed the view, and it was nearly dark.
At the bus stop, I asked if anyone could help us make sure we had the right bus, and after another animated discussion, one fellow escorted us across and down the street to a bus stop in the other direction, saying the direct bus downtown would be faster than returning the way we had come. We got off several blocks before Piazza Dante and made our way to Pizza Starita, in a narrow street full of careening motorbikes; they didn’t open for 45 minutes so we had a coffee at a cafe/bar up the street and came back for two truly stellar pizzas, plus a glass of thick, local Campanian red wine.
Wednesday, November 5, 2025. Above, the bedroom of our apartment.
We actually slept well, and for nearly nine hours, according to my new $39 Chinese smartwatch, which also keeps track of body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen, steps, calories, and other things I haven’t explored, as well as being waterproof, which is quite a bit more than my original FitBit, now defunct.
Spent most of the day wandering through the narrow streets of the old part of Naples. First to the market, where we bought a soft chocolate-laced bread, a hard bread with nuts, and something akin to pizza but not really – delicious and flaky, with the tomato inside. Then clementines, plums, big white grapes, and beautiful small tomatoes on the vine. The grocer, a small, wiry man with dark eyes behind heavy black glasses, watched me like a hawk and when I reached for a branch of tomatoes immediately said, “No touch, madam!” I gestured apologetically, smiled, and pointed, and he put whatever we chose into bags; OK, I had learned the rules. In another, friendlier shop, where we bought excellent prosciutto and some marinated eggplant, the proprietor stood, nearly hidden, behind the refrigerated display of cheeses and cold cuts while a young man on the floor of the shop interacted with the customers. He spoke some English, and wanted to talk to us; he described each item and then, once we’d made our decision, relayed the information to the owner, who fulfilled the order and carefully wrapped each item in paper.
The cloister and garden of Chiesa di Santa Chiara (The Church of Saint Clare).
After eating at the apartment we went to the Chiesa di Santa Chiara and spent a couple of hours in their beautiful cloister garden with its majolica columns and benches, orange trees and cypresses, and their museum with its Roman and medieval antiquities, photographs of the terrible destruction during WWII, and their many reliquaries and images of saints.
At the museum of the Chiesa di Santa Chiara, a Renaissance polychromed wooden reliquary of St. Thecla. Described in a book of the apocrypha, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, she was a devoted follower of St. Paul who was miraculously saved from the executioner’s fire by a sudden storm, and also miraculously escaped the wild beasts sent to devour her in a gladiatorial stadium. As legend has it, she lived out her life in Maaloula, Syria, where the rocks closed the entrance to her cave when assailants tried to capture her. The Convent of St. Thecla in Maaloula, built near her supposed tomb, is still active today.
Through the rest of the afternoon, we walked through the narrow old streets filled with shops selling clothing, souvenirs, religious objects, leather goods, cheeses and sausages, and the intricate figures needed for Neapolitan nativity scenes — both the characters, angels and animals of the bible story and the ordinary Italians who also populate these elaborate, iconic assemblages (more on these later.) J. took pictures in the busy, winding, darkening streets. I took a detour into a clothing shop with beautiful but relatively inexpensive Italian-designed clothing, and, uncharacteristically, tried on a few things. The store’s credit card machine wasn’t working and I didn’t have enough euros to pay in cash, so they put aside a blouse for me until later, but I had doubts; I’ve learned that buying things that seem wonderful when traveling doesn’t always mean they’re going to work in one’s daily life back home.
—
The late soccer hero Maradona is everywhere; he’s been made into a Neapolitan saint/martyr. We saw an enormous mural of him in a pope’s mitre; he’s on posters and flags; Maradona as Jesus on refrigerator magnets; Maradona as St. Sebastian, shot with arrows, Saint Maradona with a halo. Bars offer Aperol Spritzes, which are orange, and Maradona Spritzes, which are blue like the team’s jerseys. When he arrived to play for Napoli in 1984, a local newspaper wrote that despite the lack of a “mayor, houses, schools, buses, employment and sanitation, none of this matters because we have Maradona”.
This window display in a religious shop has Maradona images along with baby Jesus figurines (both white and black), cherubs, candles, rosaries, and Jubilee Year souvenirs reading Peregrinantes in Spem: Pilgrims in Hope.
Last night Naples was playing a German team. Our landlord told us the polizia had contacted all the short-term rental agents to ask if their booked guests were German, because last year they trashed the city.
Today, near the big Maradona mural, a parade of mourners carrying pink and blue balloons followed a hearse to a local church. All the passers-by crossed themselves when the hearse went by. When it was parked and the back door opened, four pallbearers pulled a small coffin out and carried it easily into the church: a young child, which explained the sad procession with balloons.
We ended up eating at Pizza Michele and then walking back to our apartment with a stop at a grocery store for the staples we couldn’t find at the market: butter, milk, eggs, yogurt, cereal.
Tonight I painted, finishing the sketch of Via Toledo at night from last evening and doing another of our fruit bowl. Unlike the sketchbook pages in Mexico City last March, which were mostly very detailed, I’m trying to do looser sketches and watercolors that create an impression and memory of things but are less literal. I have almost no energy right now for either drawing or writing. When I said I wasn’t sure why, J. said it was because I’m completely drained. Which is true. But it’s more than that; not only do I not have much energy for it, I feel like whatever I do is going to be unsatisfying and uninspired — which is pretty much a guarantee that it will be. So I will do a bit, but try not not to be too demanding of myself.
—
A close friend wrote that if he were a doctor, the medicine he’d prescribe for us over the next week would be a city like Naples, teeming with life – which it is. It’s full of life, but death is never far away. The air is terrible from the diesel fumes and the smoking pedestrians and cafe-sitters; we can’t believe how many people are smoking and vaping. J. remarked that it didn’t seem like most people here “were planning to be in it for the long haul.” Maybe not. It would be a hard city to survive in through a long life. But the older women in the last night’s trattoria were doing all right: clearly they were good friends, and well-known to the waiter, who took very good care of them, even cutting up a pizza into small pieces for one of the women, at her request, leaning over and smiling at her, to make sure he’d done what she wanted.
