Opera Rat: The Blog

NEW COUNTRY, NEW CLUB, NEW PERSPECTIVE

I'm on the plane toward home, and leaving home. It's bittersweet as Luxembourgish chocolate, of which I've had my fill. "You must come back soon, monsieur," said the gentleman of the couple who run a head-spinning Luxembourg City gourmet shop, on my last day. "We have 100 percent coming in."

"One hundred percent cacao?" I said. "Is that even possible with chocolate?"

"No. But they do it." He lowered his voice to a near-whisper. "It is not too sharp, I promise you. Please come try."

Such was the welcome I received all over my sweet little second country and its vast German neighbor, with soccer and a new passport as my ins. As I departed the Hotel Grand Cravat, the elegant, excellent Albanian manager mentioned his immigration to the country, and how lucky I was that I didn't have to wait for naturalization. "Yes," I said, "but I'm not moving here, or coming to work. I'm retired."

"You will spend more and more time," he said. "It is my country now and it will be yours. Here you will be, as we say, doheem." I've learned enough Luxembourgish to know that means, at home. The passport is more than a novelty.

On the last day in the new-old country I meandered Luxembourg City with no itinerary, poking into shops and down side streets, trying to grasp that the world now considers me to be of this place. The line of the passport that gets me is "Nationalité: Luxembourgeoise." Mildly daunting too, as I've been cautioned that because of international law forbidding a nation from offering protection and aid to foreign citizens in their country, while I am within Luxembourg's borders the US authorities basically don't consider me American - I'm Luxembourg's responsibility. Not a big deal in a country as small and safe and wealthy as Luxembourg, but American dual citizens of other countries have had headaches with this.

I also have to do some unexpectedly complex passport-juggling from here on, as the airlines prefer to see the nationality where you're headed and immigration and security prefer to see the nationality where you are. For coming back to the US today I was advised in Luxembourg to show the US passport at exit because I had shown it on the way in. But the sudden existence of the extra nationality seemed to set off something records-wise at Frankfurt Airport, because I was "random" security-checked to the nines, albeit warmly - the new jacket of my new German soccer club lit up faces and drew exclamations from the small room full of German border security officials near my gate.

The final soccer match on Sunday in Mainz between Mainz 05 and Eintracht Frankfurt ended in a 1-1 draw on the field but was a rout in my heart. From the departure on the morning train I was reminded of all the reasons Mainz's city and club had grabbed me at the first match the weekend before, reasons the glamour of Eintracht at midweek had chased. The train carried me down the beautiful Rhine Gorge past Oberdiebach, a village near Mainz where multiple-great grandparents of mine lived for centuries. I was more of this place than of Frankfurt, which despite its proximity is on a different river in a different German state. Checking into my hotel room, as had happened the week before, I found alongside the Gideon Bible a Buddhist Dharma book, in German and English - Mainz, for reasons I have yet to discover, is thick with Buddhist centers, a delight for a Zen practitioner like me.

Leaving for the match, the stadium shuttles at the train station across from my hotel were mobbed with black-and-white-scarfed Eintracht fans. Having studied the transit system the weekend before I ran for a city tram instead, imagining Mainz fans would be drowned out in their own stadium by the big-city hordes. But despite their numbers - as a veteran of stadium reporting I would estimate at least one-fourth of the 33,000 spots were Eintracht territory, probably not one-third - there seemed to be little animosity between the sides and a lot of good-natured ribbing, a stark contrast to the profanities and middle fingers from Stuttgart fans I witnessed sitting for a half in the Hertha Berlin section. "Full, full, you have to walk!" shouted the Mainzers in my tram as Eintracht supporters tried to cram in. "Do you want to see the match in an empty stadium?" a Frankfurter shouted back, drawing laughter from all. In the stadium, the Eintracht fans made enough of a racket, but the Mainz fans and their wall of sound from the ultra section easily surpassed them. By halftime I was cheering reflexively and all-out for Mainz, and by the time I arrived at the post-match hangout I'd adopted the week before, a venerable bar called Zur Andau, I was clad in new Mainz gear.

At Zur Andau I got a beer-soaked final send-off from an amalgam of Mainz and Eintracht fans. The question of whether I could support Eintracht as my "second club" sparked a hot debate. Older fans, being from an era when Mainz was a small club and rarely played Eintracht, seemed to think it was fine, that there was no longstanding rivalry between the two neighboring teams, which was how it had appeared at the stadium. This seemed to horrify younger fans, who complained that this was the problem with Mainz since becoming a bigger club: too friendly with everyone, no one's enemy. I ventured how impressed I was with Eintracht Frankfurt's wooded Waldstadion, and a young woman in a Mainz shirt yelled, "Don't go in that forest! They pee in there!"

Now it is time to be happily home with house and husband, who is next on the list for a Luxembourg passport, a couple of years from now, relieved I'm sure to have been without a travel permit for a 12-day trip with five soccer matches in it. One club should be enough from here on. And two countries.

 

 

THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE FOR MY HEART

I've seen a lot of soccer here in Europe, including four matches in four different cities in five nights early in the trip, which was a blast and as idiotic in practice as it was in theory. I inherited my devotion to soccer from my Italian mother. My earliest soccer memory is watching the 1970 World Cup final between Italy and Brazil when I was 10, on ABC's Wide World of Sports, wondering what Mom could be getting so upset about, though when Italy scored she was the happiest I'd ever seen her, dancing around the kitchen, so I figured it had to be worth some attention. 

Aside from my love of watching the games, sports became a belonging mechanism for a boy who didn't belong too well. By knowing more about it than the straight kids, I could fit in. Soccer became doubly important in my mother's family's small Italian hill town as a topic shield against having to make idle talk in the nightly passegiata about who I was dating, and when I would get married, and why I wasn't married, and my poor mother waiting for her grandchildren, why was I not thinking about her?

All the soccer matches on this trip are about more than soccer. Yes, retirement allows me to live this sort of fan's fantasy. But as a sudden citizen of a previously foreign country, I'm once again thrown into unfamiliar territory as an outsider, and looking for a way to fit in. When you enter a European pub on a weekend and soccer is on TV, all you need is for the badge of your favorite club to be visible, and interaction will occur, across any barrier of language, race, gender, sexuality or culture. You will find your place.

What I need is that favorite club, in or near my new country. And I need it extra badly at this moment, because my former favorite European soccer club has been transformed from a bunch of underdog street toughs into the richest and most detestable soccer club on earth. I tried to stick with Newcastle United, to rationalize away the source of their new success, but my heart just fell out of love. As a non-native of the city and country I wasn't bound to it. The wins were more numerous but less satisfying. And Brexit had taken me out of citizenship there to boot.

So I started researching Luxembourgish soccer and following the German Bundesliga, and I mean, hard. I've watched so much German soccer this year I'm dreaming in German and I don't even understand the words. When the passport trip to Luxembourg began to loom, I punched up a map and began plotting a way to get to the closest clubs by train in the week while my passport would be processing, and while my only somewhat sports-loving husband was left home waiting for a US green card and unable to travel internationally. It would be soccer speed-dating. I intended to wed one of those clubs as my Luxembourgish-European own.

I started with four candidates, all playing at home across five nights as games stack up ahead of the World Cup break. The five-night tour worked to eliminate two of the four clubs from consideration.

Racing-Union, the Luxembourg league club in central Luxembourg City, are fun to watch and deliver amazing hand-grilled mettwurst and Thüringer, but draw barely enough fans to fill a pub, much less serve as a social mechanism within one. I'll keep going back but as a casual fan.

VfB Stuttgart provided a large, welcoming crowd and a suitably stirring atmosphere in a surprisingly pretty city for an auto industry capital. But the stadium and organization are a visible mess, befitting the club's league standing near relegation down to the second division. A large portion of the stadium was under reconstruction, so I figured I was in the spare, depressing part next to come, but no, I was told I was in one of the parts already done. Women were placed in separate lines to get in, which I understand has been standard practice at some German stadiums - why, I have no idea, but the elder German couple in front of me was NOT HAPPY to be pulled apart. Lines for concessions were unsegregated but hair-raisingly slow; a beer server complained in front of me that the taps weren't pouring fast enough, which a Milwaukeean simply cannot abide. Through an accident of circumstance I held both home and guest tickets and sat one half in each place. At Stuttgart as is standard in Europe, visiting fans in recognizable gear are held in a fenced, protected area of the seats and concourse, because European soccer fans can get a little, shall we say, testy. The away section felt like a prison camp and I wish that were hyperbole. Successive hordes of away fans had trashed the place with stickers and graffiti and scuffs and scratches and there seemed to be no will to fix any of it. The restrooms were straight out of a post-apocalyptic novel. Thanks, but no.

That left the two German Bundesliga clubs within easiest reach of Luxembourg, Mainz 05 and Eintracht Frankfurt, 30 minutes from each other on a shared transit system, and each less than 20 minutes on the Deutsche Bahn from Frankfurt Airport, an 8-hour non-stop flight from Chicago and a short plane hop or beautiful train ride from there to Luxembourg.

I visited Mainz first and was so taken by the city and the stadium and the fans I nearly cancelled the rest of the soccer and went back to Luxembourg to relax, which my beaten body is still angry I didn't do. Being a town of only about 200,000, Mainz is a small city for a soccer club in a league as massive as the Bundesliga, much less a club that stood in the top half of the standings as I arrived. The club has risen to that level by shrewd management recognized throughout Germany. Eleven years ago Mainz 05 opened a sweet new stadium at the edge of town, without a lot of frills - German stadiums are more utilitarian than their US cousins - but comfortable, easily reachable by the typically excellent German transit, a breeze to navigate with roomy stands and concourses, and the best sight lines I've seen in any arena for any sport, period, with a single large deck on all sides tight to the pitch and a rake so steep I think it would violate US building codes. "Not a bad seat in the house" is a cliché but it applies at MEWA Arena. My seat was about three-fourths of the way to the top and it was as good a view as TV. The snappy, aggressively spicy feuerwurst I consumed in a concourse pub area with large-screen TV before the match would make Milwaukee restauranteurs weep with inadequacy, and with a half-liter of beer it cost less than $9 US. The fans were friendly, happy and loud - the chanting ultra fans filled one entire stand behind one goal and made a wall of sound and spectacle I imagine would be the most impressive in Germany if their club was as big as the traditional German powers.

Mainz, the city, is quaint and historic and compact, easily seen by foot or public tram, but also buzzy, a party town, a national capital of the annual carnival season - think Madison with Tudor architecture and schnitzel. For a Wisconsin kid, a Packer fan, this felt like an absolute natural, even though the club would be an obscure choice for an American. Mainz dominated play in the match but gave up goals on nearly all of the few chances they allowed, losing 3-0. Nonetheless I left MEWA Arena dripping with the club's Badger-red gear.

Then came Eintracht Frankfurt, on the last of the five nights. I had good fortune when a local urged me to take the S-Bahn, the superb subway/rail system, to the stadium rather than taxi or other forms of transit, because it would provide the best game experience. The S-Bahn was packed with Eintracht fans clad in black and white (like Newcastle), a contented and outwardly affluent bunch in this world center of finance, noticeable numbers of them gay in all senses of the word. The Stadium stop was in a wooded area with no stadium in sight. Fortunately I had a crowd to follow. They led me down a thickly forested path interrupted at intervals by food trucks and sausage stands and miniature pubs and sitting areas in clearings for leisurely and charming food and drink. We marched a fair distance down the path with no sign of a stadium or match even as the crowd became excited and began to chant and sing. Suddenly behind the trees the stadium loomed, lit in the accent red of Eintracht's colors, as if a vast spaceship had landed in this otherwise remote, unpopulated area. No wonder the stadium, sponsored as Deutsche Bank Park, was still known among fans by its historic name, the Waldstadion, the Forest Stadium. I would learn after the match that the stadium was located in the Stadtwald, the City Forest, a nature preserve and one of the world's most spectacular urban parks. It was as thrilling an entry to a sports event as I'd ever experienced. 

Unfortunately there was only one gate from path to stadium and it was understandably mobbed. Immediately I knew I hadn't arrived early enough to take this route into the stadium, and other inexperienced fans were exclaiming the same in various languages. I cleared security and ran for a souvenir stand to purchase a black-and-white scarf and hat; the seller, noting my American accent and apparent unfamiliarity with the place, inquired if I was new. I answered "ja" and she handed over the goods saying, in English, "Now you are one of us."

I reached my section just in time for the opening spectacle of fans singing the Eintracht anthem and roaring the arrival of their team. The game had long been sold out but I'd scored a single ticket at not too far over face value from an online broker. It was available for a reason. The section had apparently been converted from standing to sitting without expansion of the ledges, leaving almost no room to walk in front of the seats into my spot at the center of a long row. I nearly tumbled over into the forward row several times, with fans in the section catching me and pulling me back with hardly a break in their conversation or beer sipping - it seemed to be standard procedure in this area. I collapsed into my seat with a measure of exhaustion, next to a group of enthusiastic young fans several of whom had more than fan-ship in common with me, if you know what I mean.

Eintracht scored twice in the opening minutes and the fans in our cramped section were literally falling over each other in euphoria. It was amazing but also daunting for this old claustrophobe. At halftime with Eintracht in control of the match I retreated to the concourse, grabbed a beer and pretzel, and alighted at a standing counter with a view down the tunnel at the goal where Eintracht would be shooting in the second half, intending to wait out the rest of the match there and try a different area of the stadium next time. A couple of minutes into the second half a steward noticed and graciously beckoned me to a standing ledge inside the section entrance where I could view the entire pitch along with various other claustrophobes with whom I became friendly. It turned out to be a great vantage point with the bonus of immediate concession and restroom access - if I return alone I may buy another cheap single and stand there again.

Celebrating the victory on the S-Bahn out of the woods and back to the city I knew I'd toured myself into a quandary. I was in love with two teams: the sweet, fun small-town maiden, and the beautiful, glamorous doyenne with a mansion in the woods. What's more, they live close to one another, and don't like each other, at all. There would be no way for me to sneak around on one without the other finding out.

Now the soccer tour was over and I was headed back to Luxembourg to pick up my new passport and become a European for real, more confused about choosing a team than when I started. I awoke the next morning in my Frankfurt hotel without more clarity. In the recap of the match online, though, there was a revelation: Eintracht's next match was Sunday at Mainz. The two were about to have it out for my affections on the pitch. With 10,000 Eintracht fans rumored to be headed to Mainz's new and optimistically oversized stadium. I would still be in Europe.

I'm headed to Mainz right now on the train, ticket in pocket, clad in a neutral Luxembourg national team shirt, hoping one more match will make the decision. More to come.

WHY LUXEMBOURG MATTERS (TO ME)

Years ago I used this blog platform to vent about opera; it still gets some traffic even though the last opera post is a decade old. Later I used it briefly as an Italian vacation blog. Now I'm in Europe again and reviving the blog to talk a little about my unexpected new nationality as a citizen of Luxembourg, a citizen who got his Luxembourg passport yesterday.

I'm not prone to fits of emotion, but I had one when the passport dropped into my hands. I'd dreamed for years about becoming an Italian citizen in the legacy of my mother. But in the post-war time of her immigration to the US, she had to renounce her birth citizenship to become American. As far as Italy was concerned, that renunciation was permanent and unforgivable, and I was not born to an Italian at all. That made acquisition of Italian citizenship impossible without some years of living in Italy, or, as some in Italy suggested, faking a residence there and "getting to know” ($$$) the right people, which I wasn't keen on.

Ironic, then, that I would discover later in life that my father unknowingly had been a European citizen all along. Mom was the American, Dad was the European! I can hear the two of them cackling about it somewhere. I've been telling people Luxembourg has liberalized its laws temporarily to repatriate descendants of its emigrants to America, which is true. But I was reminded at the passport agency that the temporary law doesn't apply to me. Like my father and his brother and my cousins, I have always been a Luxembourg citizen, by and since birth, because Luxembourg nationality is transferred from father to child regardless of where and when it happens, and the definitive ancestors of my Luxembourg lineage, including the one who came to the US and the one I was born to, are fathers, i.e., male. (Send your sexism complaints to the Luxembourg parliament.) In Luxembourg I'm considered not a naturalized but a native citizen. What happened yesterday was acquisition of the final documents to prove the citizenship and accrue its benefits.

What benefits, you ask? Many of you, family and friends, have been asking. 

To start with the practical stuff, I can now go through the usually less-swamped EU citizen line at European airport checkpoints. (Piss off, Britain.) In Europe I can stay as long as I like, rather than a maximum of 90 out of every 180 days. In nearly all other countries I can enter visa-free, because Luxembourg threatens no one, making its passport rated tops in the world for easy travel. If I'm offered employment in Europe, such as a temporary teaching appointment, I can take it without need of a work permit. I could even move to Europe, where I could more easily and affordably access public services like health care through national systems or cheaper private insurance. 

As with many things in life, though, the more important benefits are the less tangible and less immediate.

With a course in the Luxembourgish language and a few months in Luxembourg, this citizenship could be passed on to my husband, who is 30 years from retirement and would have more direct use of it. Already speaking English and a major European language and being a citizen of two of the three major North American countries as well as all of Europe, his opportunity would be vast. Luxembourg may be the most valuable inheritance I could leave him.

I'm proud to be an American despite all the problems the country faces. I think many of us in the United States lose perspective about the wealth and opportunity our nation enjoys. Spending time in Latin America has helped me maintain that perspective; among my friends in Mexico are refugees from places with real troubles, who see Mexico as a haven and the United States as a glittering dream. Still, a second citizenship in a country without deep political division and entrenched racial and sexual hatred is a source of comfort. It pains me when Americans who have given up on America tell me "now you have a place to flee." But to say a similar thought isn't anywhere in my mind would be a lie. January 6 gave us all a new and frightening idea of what's possible in this land. The people who ran riot in our Capitol would like to outlaw my sexuality and my marriage and my way of life, and if that flag ever falls to them…I’d still be American, but I’d be gone.

On a brighter note, there’s a thrill in the way my lost Luxembourgish heritage has been brought to life in ways I hadn’t imagined. When my cousin and I first visited Luxembourg in May to file our ancestral records, we were surprised at how we recognized the culture, the food, the wine, the faces, the voices, even though our family had lost its conscious knowledge of this birthplace. Locals in Luxembourg City will speak to me in French or Luxembourgish not realizing I’m from the US and still primarily a tourist, which is a remarkable experience for an American in Europe; somehow my dumbass siren does not go off here. A sprinkle of halting Luxembourgish from my mouth in a traditional Luxembourgish restaurant drew cheers from strangers on this trip, and when in Germany for the number fifteen I erringly used the Luxembourgish “fofzeng” instead of the German “fünfzehn,” the barkeep said, “Ah, Luxembourg?”

It helps in all this that Luxembourg has a rather un-European appreciation for America, derived in part from the Battle of the Bulge having been fought on Luxembourg soil, and from American support post-war for preservation of Luxembourg and aid via the Marshall Plan. General Patton asked to be buried here with his fallen Bulge troops, in what is now an American military cemetery with land use granted tax-free in perpetuity by the Luxembourg government. Luxembourgers know Wisconsin, too, because so many like my great-great-grandfather fled to its similar landscape and climate when poverty struck Luxembourg two centuries ago. A restaurant owner this trip told me she would like to see the Wisconsin villages called Luxemburg and Belgium someday. A bar on the central plaza of the University of Luxembourg’s flagship city of Esch is named Little Madison. The American ambassador is the former Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, a once-colleague of mine in the Wisconsin State Legislature whom my cousin and I sat with for coffee in an embassy reception room replete with Battle of the Bulge artifacts.

I’m already becoming a Luxembourg nationalist when visiting neighboring countries, which happens a lot, because in Luxembourg you’re never more than 18 miles from an international border. Iron ore was struck here in the late 1800s, transforming Luxembourg from an obscure agricultural country into one of the world’s several wealthiest nations. The iron has been exhausted and the steel mills are closed, but the service industries that flocked in the wake of the iron strike, especially finance, have kept the economy hot and brought incredible perks to the citizens. I’m irritable in Germany and France about their lack of Luxembourg-style luxuries like free public transit and free public restrooms and retrofitted elevators and escalators everywhere. I insanely overpacked for this trip and the many steps and stairs of old Germany nearly broke me on my little soccer tour this past week. In my Frankfurt hotel I was directed up a flight of stairs, over a footbridge and down another flight of stairs to get to a tiny elevator that landed me a half-flight of stairs above my room. Get me back to my country!

Now with passport and ID in hand it’s nearly time to go home to my original country, after one more soccer match tomorrow in Mainz, a short train hop from my departure airport in Frankfurt. Mom, I got your citizenship back. Wish you were here to celebrate it.

 

 

ITALIANS KNOW WHAT'S IMPORTANT

My hotel has a historical marker, which in a city founded 38 centuries ago is no small thing. Water gets into the ancient building when it rains and certain corners smell damp even when it's dry. My room is on the top floor and the ceiling has a rain hole no one could miss. Why not fix it? I don't know.

But I didn't care about the rain hole when I peeked in at the complimentary breakfast yesterday to find this:

Which you can eat here:

So to remain affordable I'm hoping the hotel keeps putting its profits into the breakfast and patio and leaves the rain holes so the British tourists can keep complaining about the damp smell on Yelp and scaring everyone away. Italians know what's important.

I'd like to tell you that after breakfast I jumped the Metro and did a whirlwind tour of the city, saw the ruins, shopped the Tridente, gawked at the Vatican. Sorry. I just loafed around Monti. That's why they call it vacation, as in, vacating the need to run around. For an hour after breakfast I sat at a table in the piazza, sipped espresso, and watched the "street opera" - lovers quarreling in public, Italy's national pastime. At the same time I was reading a book by the Italian cultural critic Beppe Severgnini. "If the French and Germans were to shut their eyes and think of Italy, they wouldn't see the Colosseum," he writes. "They'd see a guy talking to himself in the street with one hand over his ear. Like that one over there. Observe how he tells the world about his love life..." On cue a guy in the piazza puts a hand over his ear and starts shouting at his significant other through his cell phone. I plan to pass the book to Hal for all he needs to know about Italy before I drag him here to live. Which I'm thinking should occur, I don't know, next month. The rest of you can borrow it before you visit.

OK, so I did see one famous tourist sight yesterday. Wandering around I turned a corner that gave a different view of the piazza than before. I'm thinking, gee, that building at the end of the street is in rough shape. Then I realize, whoa, that's the effing Colosseum. It was right there all the time. I walked down and it's not as close as it looks - it's a rather large structure. Still I'm amazed at how relatively few tourists I see around Monti given the throngs circling a few blocks away.

A Monti attraction I'd read about in guidebooks and on food sites is the sandwich shop Gaudeo. Similarly to the Colosseum I ran across it by accident just before lunch. Given its renown I was expecting something eight times its size. I was the first customer at noon and the only one in the place as I ate, though I imagine later it got busy, as Romans keep a strict schedule of lunch at 12:30. I had the Novellara, next to the Sorbolo. No pepperjack cheese or ranch dressing, no "works" - just shaved mortadella on a fresh baked roll with a light drizzle of truffle oil. Not the cloying truffle-flavored oil of America, mind you. Oil that'd spent several months since truffle season with actual truffles floating in it. It was like being taken to Shangri-La on a pork tram. A funeral dirge version of the Subway five-dollar footlong song played in my head as I trudged away.

I was down most of the afternoon with a nagging sore throat I think I picked up in the plane. I took a post-lunch nap long even by Italian standards, but even that didn't completely soothe the pain. So I decided to apply some gelato. Gelato joints are on every corner in Italy these days and 95 percent are junk tourist traps. One way to recognize a good one is by how little attention it calls to itself, as if the Italians are trying to keep it secret. Witness Fatamorgana, in the tiny Piazza dei Zingari uphill from the main square in Monti, an outpost of a more central location of Fatamorgana that's a pilgrimage spot for gelato lovers. When the doors are closed you can't tell anything is there at all - in fact, I spent a quizzical half-hour looking for it earlier in the day, not realizing it hadn't opened yet.

Gelato itself should be quiet too. It's supposed to be dense, which makes it expensive to the wallet and unimpressive to the eye. In a tourist trap they whip the gelato until it cascades over the top of its bin, and they add eye-catching colors not found in nature. In a place like Fatamorgana, the gelato almost hides. Until you taste it. I had the pear-and-gorgonzola, which tasted so much like pears and gorgonzola cheese, so un-sweet, I wondered if it needed to be gelato at all. But actual pears sprinkled with actual gorgonzola wouldn't be as cool or refreshing or portable or Italian.

I poked into some shops before dinner. Monti has good shopping, especially vintage. In this vintage sportswear shop many of the emblems are Italian knockoffs of American sports culture, like gym shorts that say MASSACHUSETS CRICKET, spelled that way, around crossed baseball bats. I heard an Italian customer ask about the Duke jacket at upper right. "No, no," he was told. "Not a real place. Imaginary." As a prank on my Newcastle United co-blogger Matt, a Duke grad, I opted not to dispute the information.

Now that's a flower cart.

I could go on and on about dinner. Suffice to say I got a tip in the piazza that a chef from Umbria, my family's region north of here, was doing excellent Umbrian cuisine in Monti. I hadn't ever heard of Umbrian cuisine; I've always thought of Umbrian and Tuscan food as classically Italian, just as people of those regions tend not to speak with strong regional accents. The menu at this little place read like it was ripped out of my family's cookbook, if there was such a thing.

The plate of gnocchi with meat ragu I savored at my sidewalk table was so much like my mother's it choked me up. Literally. One of the best restaurant meals of my life, and a great transition to the real thing as I prepare to take the train up to see my family today.

A VILLAGE CALLED ROME

My opera blog has been dormant for a while, mainly because I haven't been seeing enough opera to sustain it. I find myself now in the native land of opera, Italy, taking advantage of a last-minute airfare bargain to bring a small portion of my mother's remains to her native Umbria. Walking around Rome on my first night in the country I had the idea of using the opera blog as a travel journal that family, friends and whomever else can visit as they care to, rather than being held hostage by endless pictures and stories when I'm back. You're welcome.

My Italian family's relationship with Rome is utilitarian. Trains between the capital and the station near their home in Umbria are ever faster and more frequent, down to as little as 45 minutes now centro to centro, 21 times a day each way, from 5:45 in the morning to nearly midnight. Rome is a place to shop and do business and eat out, usually at McDonald's, seeing as the Italian food at home is better than any restaurant. To my relatives, Rome is "downtown."

This trip I decided to spend a couple of days in Rome on my own to get over my jet and language lag before heading to the high country. In the practical spirit I picked a budget hotel a few blocks from the central train station in a modest neighborhood called Monti. By this time hardly an inch of the city has escaped the poetic treatment from American and British tourists, and Monti is no exception, including this 2011 profile in the New York Times.

But no newspaper piece could prepare me for what I found. In short: Screw the Piazza Navona. Who knew Rome was in Italy?

After a recovery nap from a more-brutal-than-usual transatlantic flight I walk out in search of the nearest piazza suitable for espresso-sipping. Before long I'm almost asphyxiated from the quaintness. A woman out taking a cigarette - even Italians don't smoke inside anymore, apparently - sees me doubling back from what appears to be a dead end and knows what I'm looking for. "No, keep going," she says, "there are steps, around the corner."

"Steps"? Holy shit. I pick my way down the slope and at the bottom I find the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, the central square of the neighborhood.

I

I settle in on the bar patio with a doppio, double espresso, which Italians call "coffee" sort of the way Tibetans might call Mt. Everest "the hill." Above is the view from my table. It's 5 p.m. and everyone is there - grandma and grandpa on a bench, kids kicking a soccer ball against a 400-year-old wall, students from a nearby art school slugging bottles of beer. I chuckle thinking about the "open container" laws back home and what little purpose they serve. Give me this simple, dignified fountain over Trevi and its hordes any day. The scene reminds me of Montefranco, my family's Umbrian village, except transplanted to the seat of modern civilization.

Above is the Via Panisperna, essentially Monti's Main Street, leading up to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of Rome's landmark churches at the neighborhood's highest point. Many of Rome's most famous sights, including the Colosseum and the Forum, are only a few blocks outside Monti. Yet I see almost no tourists around here, and the locals seem charmed rather than annoyed by my grammatically rocky Italian.

What do you do when a bike won't run anymore? In Monti you make it into a window box.

At 7:30 I'm hungry and on Via Panisperna I come across a restaurant I've read about, La Carbonara, dating back to 1906 and famous for its pasta alla carbonara in a bacon, egg and parmesan sauce. The dining room at back is rocking. A young hostess informs an American couple and me it will be at least an hour for a table. The couple leaves but I say I'll wait, spying an open seat in the bar. The bartender rustles me a glass of nice Spanish white and a complimentary bowl of olives. Ten minutes later the hostess arrives at my side with a possibly ironic wink: A table has opened for you, signore. I imagine such luck occurs to visitors who speak a little Italian and aren't in a hurry.

In Wisconsin the Fifth Quarter is a marching band celebration after football games. In Italy the fifth quarter - il quinto quarto - is the leftovers from butchering, the organ and variety meats, which I adore. Turns out La Carbonara is famous for quinto quarto. Unfortunately they've run out of the pasta with lamb tripe and heart, but the oxtail in spicy tomato sauce that comes after my carbonara just about spills me off my chair. "Let me confess," the hostess says, seeing my enjoyment as she passes my table. "I eat that in back almost every night."

In the afternoon I'd happened into a grotto-like vintage bookstore that doubles as a wine bar and gallery. I told the art students running the Libreria Caffé Bohemien I'd stop back late at night, and had no issue keeping the promise. Pretending to read a message on my phone I caught two young lovers in the act through a door to the anteroom.

The piazza was still hopping at midnight. Not sure when Italians sleep, but I had to, reluctantly.

HOW TO BECOME A WAGNERIAN

The opera season is over for me at the Lyric in Chicago, having been at opening night of the final run, Peter Sellars' beautiful, haunting, but too often plodding new production of Handel's understandably neglected "Hercules." It was not my favorite year at the Lyric or in opera generally. Some of the Lyric shows simply fell flat, especially the two openers I saw in a two-night marathon, a rote "Carmen" and a turgid "Macbeth."

But part of it was my fault. I've become too familiar with my favorite Italian classics to get chills from anything but an unusually fine or innovative performance. As an opera lover I feel a growth spurt coming on. There's no other explanation for a season in which my favorite show turned out to be, of all things...

Wagner.

If you know opera and me at all, you know I have the markings of a quintessential Wagner hater. I like my opera with two gin-and-tonics. I like to hum the hit melodies on the way home. I complain all the time about acts and shows being too long. I trumpet emotion over taste and heart over intellect. I yell bravo and brava when performers are carried off the score into flights of non-composed fancy by a mad scene gone AWOL. I derive a keen and morbid satisfaction from the deaths of major characters. In short, I am vulgar.

But I've been exposed to opera, sometimes against my will, since the cradle. After 50 years of it I wouldn't say my taste is becoming less vulgar. But I'd say my vulgarity is maturing, in a way that puts Wagner firmly into the repertory for the next act of my life.

People wonder how Wagnerians reconcile their love of the music with their disgust at the composer. I don't think reconciliation is the point. Drama is the point.

Watching Lyric's phenomenal "Lohengrin" a couple of weeks back, I got my first Wagnerian spine-tingles - not just from the performance, but from the utter morality of a masterwork by a man who was, by all accounts, a monster. Wagner exhibited the symptoms not of mere immorality, but of a chillingly recognizable über-morality easily twisted on the rigid letter of its law. In life, that made a mess. In opera, that made magic.

Opera is about contradiction. We don't need art for anything that makes sense in real life. Wagner may not strum the heartstrings like Verdi or Puccini. But if you listen carefully, in Wagner's relentlessly gorgeous music - eat your heart out, Mozart - you can hear a plaintive cry. If only I were a character and not a man. If only I could write me instead of be me. I would be Tristan. I would be Lohengrin. I would be a hero.

ONLY IN OPERA: A WESTERN WHERE NO ONE DIES

"The Girl of the Golden West" (a.k.a. "Debbie Get Your Gun") closes tonight at the Lyric in Chicago. I saw it the night it opened and it was one of the bigger surprises I've had as an operagoer. I hadn't been familiar with the music, and hearing it so beautifully and convincingly sung in this production, it's clear music isn't why this opera is considered only a minor masterwork. The ballads in particular are heart-melting.

But after the deliciously dark foreshadowing of the middle act - what's a worse sign for a relationship than winning your man from a sheriff in a poker game? - my heart was congealed to lukewarm by the tossed-off preachy-peachy ending Puccini and his librettists sadly kept intact from the David Belasco play. In fact, the ending was the reason Puccini chose the play - after the demises of Mimi, Tosca and Butterfly, he wanted something more upbeat. Aaugh. Is there anything worse in art than upbeat?

This has been the most enjoyable outing of a mixed season so far at the Lyric. In the end, though, it serves as yet another example of why the opera repertory needs fresh blood, and why companies like the Lyric are turning outside the repertory to challenge their patrons. Audiences have matured; the operas haven't. "Show Boat" may be entry-level when it comes to music, but as a work of drama, it makes "Girl of the Golden West" feel like Disney entertainment.  

'SHOW BOAT': NOT ON BOARD

I'm big on democratizing opera, not just for opera, but for the world, which could use a lot more of what opera offers. By that I mean an emotional connection with the essential drama of life, as opposed to days filled with clicking and friending and liking and updating. So if putting on a musical can help people come to opera, I'm down with that.

But I'm not sure my beloved Lyric Opera of Chicago, or its new creative consultant, Renee Fleming, have picked the right musical in next season's recently announced "Show Boat." Nor am I sure the next musical on their radar, "Oklahoma!", is right either. I don't think either choice addresses what's keeping people from opera in the first place.

My non-operagoing friends think opera is musty - a bunch of old, overblown productions without any relevance to life today. Whereas new opera is all experimental, atonal, "not music." So I find myself wishing, if the Lyric is going to do musicals, that they'd pick something that wasn't written when new opera was still vital, and hasn't been done by every community theater in the country since. I find myself wishing they would pick a newer production to feed the audience's hunger for modern music with melody.

"Show Boat" and "Oklahoma!" are great theater - the advance publicity calls "Show Boat" operatic - and I won't be surprised if the Lyric hits them out of the park. But I fear the audience won't look much different than the one in the Civic Opera House on any other evening. Then, what has the Lyric gained? What has opera gained?

This will sound crazy, but if I could pick a musical for the Lyric, it would be "Avenue Q." But that's not operatic, right? Precisely the point. If a company could make a show like "Avenue Q" operatic - if it could raise a modern, relevant-to-today hit to the heights of Verdi, Wagner, Puccini - the opera skeptics might open their minds to those musty old composers too. And once those minds are open, look out. Opera will knock 'em silly.

That's how musicals can help save opera. And the world.

 

THE SEPARATION OF ART AND STATE

The British people have just awakened to the fact that they're paying Antonio Pappano more than four times as much to conduct the Royal Opera as they're paying their prime minister to conduct the nation. Stay tuned for more on the Outrage Channel.

As the son of a business owner I grew up a free-market acolyte. Then I went to work in my state's legislature and learned the hard necessity of regulation and taxation. Some states don't tax or regulate much, and their people enjoy freer lives. But they suffer a lower quality of life by most measurable standards - income, education, crime, even divorce rate. So I've become a decided political moderate. Any society must manage a natural tension between freedom and comfort. State involvement should be about balance, not ideology.

Art, though, is the highest form of expression. I think my country has it right that expression needs special protection from the state. Therefore art should have the most special protection of all. It belongs in the unfettered market of truth.

When art sells its soul to government, what is happening at the Royal Opera House becomes inevitable. Not that art has no public worth. On the contrary, art's public worth is incalculable. The moment we try to calculate it, we undervalue it. Only the objective, invisible hand of taste can put a fair price on the baton of Anthony Pappano. I fear Britain will lose its masterful conductor, unless the Royal Opera House can shoulder the Sisyphean rock of public resentment on top of the already heavy burden all opera companies face to survive in a largely unartistic world.

When society aims to oppress, artists are the first to be silenced. Mr. Pappano won't be sent to the Gulag. But the effect of his loss on Britain would be the same: one less first-rate artistic voice to ring its undeniable truth above the cacaphony of mere public discourse. That truth, in the end, is what scares the state - and delights the masses - about art. Government can offer only a finite illusion of support to a force that cannot be tamed to serve it. In the end, the bargain is Faustian, and art is damned to eternal mediocrity.

 

IS OPERA TOO LONG, OR ATTENTION TOO SHORT?

Commenters on the BBC Radio 3 message boards didn't take strong issue with the assertion here that the opera is too damn long, but implied the problem lies not with opera, but with us. Said one:

"The electronic media have totally transformed our expectations and demands, haven't they? I'm aware of this in myself: I sit in the opera house or theatre and want to adjust what I'm hearing: more volume, a touch less bass, widen the stereo image, alter the balance - all things that I can do easily, and do do habitually, at home. And surely if attention spans have become shorter, that's down to the same reason: with drama of all types available at the touch of a button, to be sampled, paused, rewound, abandoned, and revisited at the viewer's convenience, is it any wonder that some people, even those sympathetic to the genre, can struggle to enjoy a full-length opera in the theatre?"

Perhaps. But let's not be too hard on ourselves. When Carmen appeared in 1875, live performance was the only performance. When opera came around, audiences were eager to soak up hours on end. We are not so easily entertained now. One could say our attention span has been narrowed. One could also say our taste has been refined. It's not just a matter of pause and rewind. The greatest voices of all time, in their peak moments, await us in rows on our living room shelves. It's no wonder we find it harder to tolerate a dramatic lag in the opera house. Modern opera companies have a duty to adjust.