“You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You spend all your time talking, not working. You’re an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”
Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises.
In Bordeaux we discovered an Italian restaurant and deli called Peppone on Rue Lafaurie du Monbadon. You know authenticity when you smell it and Peppone is the real deal with its fruit cakes and paper wrapped cookies and Italian ingredients simply presented in cases of wood and glass and marble. The deli sells egg yolky homemade pastas which are definitely something to write home about.
Peppone’s Restaurant has two floors and sidewalk dining in good weather and doesn’t take reservations so there is often a line of waiting customers. They also have a wine concept that I will steal for my future restaurant, Fibonacci, which will never exist except in fanciful daydreams. In addition to thin crust pizzas and traditional pastas and salads from their busy kitchen, Peppone has a wine cave. You descend a spiral staircase (right out of Fibonacci’s playbook) and wander between various well-lit stone walled rooms where cases of wines are displayed and described and you bring the bottle of your choice back up to your table. This is much more fun than selecting a bottle off a list or deferring to the sommelier or partaking in the latest American trend of serving red wine from a steel can on tap, which defies common sense, of which my wife will attest I have very little.
Inside the wine cave at Peppone, Bordeaux.
We had arrived in Bordeaux just before Christmas for the chest x-ray and interview part of our year-long non-lucrative visa application. It was rainy and cold but even so the city was beautiful (with the exception of its unnerving traffic jams outside of the center). The merchandizing in the shops was extremely alluring, even for amateur shoppers such as ourselves. I found a French mens brand called Emile Lafaurie that offers great design and quality for the money and the trees in the public parks were strung with Christmas lights that put on a dazzling show.
The French government is screening all long-term visitors in order to thwart a tuberculosis epidemic and there were quite a few applicants from many geopolitical regions being similarly examined during our time slot, which included walking a number of blocks to and from a public clinic for the x-ray. France, it seems, has an immigration policy more accommodating to refugees fleeing “Shithole Countries.” There seemed to be more than just doctors, lawyers, models, game show hosts and the best and brightest from Scandinavian and Asian nations.
Having jumped through the hoops with the authorities, we were now free to roam the Schengen Region and drank a glass of champagne to celebrate (how could it have been warm and why did we not complain?) then watched the Original Version of the movie “Wonder” about a child who is unusual both in appearance and intelligence and the victim of intense bullying but who ultimately prevails. Reading subtitles in a familiar language adds a satisfying dimension to movie watching.
We drove the short commute in bumper to bumper traffic from Bordeaux to St. Emilion, one of the first wine producing regions to receive UNESCO world heritage status. St. Emilion is built of stone with a gothic cathedral built on top of the ancient one which was carved into a cliff and vineyards radiating out from the old city walls in all directions. Our hosts, Collin and Ian, refurbished a chateau built literally into a rock outcrop. Every meal was like a multi-star Michelin experience, with starters and main dishes and deserts and a cheese course and wine pairings for each. Walking around St. Emilion I learned the town has 60 wine shops and a full-time population of 210.
Sunset over Saint Emilion.
After our junket to Egypt for Christmas and New Year’s, we spent a week of warm and clear days in Barcelona. The first week of January is a holiday in many parts of Europe, as they celebrate The Epiphany, when the Magi followed the wandering star to the manger in Jerusalem bearing gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. We rented a flat near the beach with a view of the sea that necessitated long walks and exploring the bus and metro systems. Traditionally a neighborhood for fishermen and the working class, Poble Nou has been transformed by renovation and residential construction, perhaps because of its proximity to the Olympic Village which housed the 1992 Summer Games. The neighborhood came alive every evening and especially for a parade on January 5 with floats carrying the kings and the kids riding along joyfully pelting bystanders with fistfuls of hard candies.
View from the Lugares Beach hotel, Poble Nou, Barcelona.
Our first tourist stop was the Picasso Museum. My admiration for Pablo Picasso’s work goes way back to a study abroad program in Europe in 1979, driving across the state of Pennsylvania with my late college roommate Skip McKallip in my green Volkswagen Super Beetle to see a major retrospective at the MOMA in New York in 1981, and watching Henri Georges Clouzot’s “The Mystery of Picasso” in which the artist paints 20 ingeniously filmed canvases in a mind blowing display of his artistic process.
By most accounts, you probably would not have wanted to be Picasso’s wife or lover or family member or perhaps even his friend for that matter. We heard through the Grapevine that his son recently licensed his signature to a car company just to spite him. (“He didn’t need the money,” it was explained.) Some argue that he was more salesman than genius as was recently noted in “Final Portrait,” an interminable Stanley Tucci film about the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti where next to nothing happens but we learn that Picasso was a thief and Surrealism a dead end. To my untrained eye, everyone was stealing from everyone else. If Guernica was the dead end, I would say it was a worthy rabbit hole. But maybe Guernica was Cubist. There were definitely no melting watches.
Still we wandered the canyonesque and often septic perfumed streets of Barcelona’s charming Old Town to the museum housed in a restored villa. You can see with your own eyes that by the age of 18, Picasso was well on his way to mastering social realism. The son of an art teacher, he was unafraid to address sophisticated narrative themes in large formats. His early education and work ethic and youthful arrogance coalesced in the remarkable work “Science and Charity” which depicted the death bed of an indigent woman and is now being restored before your very eyes.
“Science and Charity,” painted by Picasso at age 18 (web version).
With the bomb of European modernism about to explode around the turn of the 20th Century in nearly every sector of fine art and architecture and society and culture with epicenters in Barcelona and Paris, the conditions were ripe for Picasso to break from realism and never look back. My only wish was that the museum had more paintings from his Blue and Rose Periods, when he was depicting social outcasts like carnies, acrobats, and gypsies in realistic fashion yet developing revolutionary stylistic techniques. The collection of his paintings from the 1950s based on “Las Meninas” of Diego Velasquez, showed an artist late in life, driven by a fast work approach, obsessed with theme and variation and apparently, still commenting on the Spanish political situation. This was perhaps Picasso’s late round knockout flurry to stay on top of a crowded field of great 20th century European painters.
We later met Yelena, a professor and guide with Barcelona Architectural Walking Tours. Dark hair, wool tweed winter coat, blue sneakers, and a printed presentation under her arm, Yelena delivered a three hour lecture that transformed the way we saw the city. It became impossible to look at Barcelona’s tall residential buildings and wide walking Ramblas and open spaces without this newfound perspective.
As she walked us past many turn of the 20th century residential buildings, Yelena explained how her city’s architecture can’t be separated from the social and economic and political influences of its time. Barcelona’s leaders had carefully plotted an aggressive expansion in the 1850s, informed by international design competitions and outside experts to address the growth being transformed by industrialization and an emerging middle class. A functional grid was eventually chosen (rather than say, the radial ring system of Paris). Long diagonal boulevards created functional connectivity. Blocks were designed with open interior spaces so that all residents would enjoy gardens and fresh air and sunlight. It didn’t always work out that way.
Wealthy Barcelona families financed a new generation of residential buildings. There were commercial spaces on the bottom floor, a larger principal floor where the owners lived, and upper floors of decreasing height and decoration and status for renters and servants. Among the many talented architects vying for commissions was Antoni Gaudí, Barcelona’s patron saint of the built environment. Part architect, part sculptor, devout Cathoic, and nature lover, Gaudí brought a fluid, organic, insanely creative approach to building design. Barcelona has henceforth been “Gaudí Land.”
Residential building designed by Antoni Gaudí in the early 1900s.
Yelena’s diagrams and maps detailed different parts of the city’s evolution: from Roman outpost to medieval walled city, to the industrial expansion, the arrival of art nouveau and the modernists, renovations under Franco and various events like World Expos and the Olympics that spurred new directions.
We were not prepared, however, for our emotional reaction upon entering Gaudí’s Cathedral de la Sagrada Familia, which became his life’s work and, 130 years after he began, is still under construction. We found a truly a liberating, light, joyful openness and the merging of urban and organic forms along with heavy and sometimes foreboding sculptural figures. Looking up into the stone branches of the support beams and white and gold flowerlike ceiling domes and warm colored stain glass gave me chills. I felt I was somewhere between an upside down coral reef or marble forest or surreal space station. I was stunned and somehow without words.
Interior of Antoni Gaudí’s Catedral de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona.
On one of our walks we stopped in the Museu del Disseny. It’s focus is on design, from fashion to graphics to everyday household things. There was a special exhibit of the work of Austrian architect Adolf Loos, who was one of the fathers of modernism movement at the turn of the 20th century. In an essay titled “Ornament and Crime” Loos argued, among other things, that designing less ornamentation into buildings and furniture would mean less labor, and therefore, a better life for craftsmen. Europe was changing. Opulence was being stripped away. New mediums and technologies were emerging, function superseding form, rebellion in the air, drums of global conflict beating not far in the distance. And of course, there was Picasso and Gaudí.
On the second floor of the Museu del Disseny where they have a permanent collection of modern everyday things we came across the combination sink toilet. This brilliant design used the gray water of the bathroom sink to fill the tank of the toilet. Why had I not thought of this before?
The gray water of the sink fills the flush tank … an elegant solution.