Chic and Awe: ancient jewellery and lifestyle; modern highs and goofs

There's ugliness in the world, and there's beauty and achievement that inspires real awe. I'm concentrating on the latter today with a post about jewellery and ancient toiletries, an amazing statue and its restorers, reaching for the stars and what the crazy algorithm has been up to. 

 

Stunning jewellery and beauty kits from ancient times 

I went to Rome to see Villa Giulia in the lovely Borghese Gardens, which houses the Etruscan Museum. The Etruscans lived in west-central Italy and 28-27 centuries ago they were at the height of their wealth and culture. This museum proves it with some amazing and exquisite works of art and above all - at least for this TGirl's interests - lots of beautiful items of female toiletry and jewellery. 

This decorated bronze casket is a cista for keeping your beauty kit in - makeup, perfume, combs, brushes, mirrors and the like.

 

Decorated bronze mirrors. You can polish the smooth rear side to a high shine.

 

There's none of the shower gel and exfoliating scrub that we put up with these days. Etruscan household staff would rub the ladies with oil and exfoliate their skin with one of these bronze strigils till it was smooth and glowing. Ah, when bathtime was a pampering ceremony, not an afterthought!

 

I've done what I can to take good photos of jewellery through glass cases with lights reflecting off but here is a breakdown of distinct fashion phases: 

(1) Iron Age (8th C BC), statement pieces with metal pendants and big rocks (maybe an heirloom from Grandma Flintstone).

(2) "Oriental style" (7th C BC), very different and heavily influenced by Phoenician (Syrian/Lebanese) trade.

(3) The "Archaic" phase (6th C BC), much more delicate and pretty with very detailed goldwork.

 

There's nothing to see from the 5th Century BC because of the economic collapse occasioned largely by Persian expansionist pressures on the West. The tragedy of US foreign policy this past century is the American failure to understand that other nations have long histories. The 2500 year old rivalry and mistrust between the West and Persia/Iran is a wound best left unprobed. (Meh, who's listening?)

(4) The "classical" phase (4th-2nd Cs BC). Someone was evidently interested in stars and moons.

 

(5) The "Hellenising" phase, i.e. Greek influence with its colourful stones.

 

(6) The Romans, who absorbed the neighbouring Etruscans into their own state, really knew a thing or two about jewellery.

 

(7) For contrast and comparison, they also have a medieval jewellery section.

 

(8) There were then many cases full of imitations of these ancient pieces made in the last 500 years. No one knows when humans first started to decorate their bodies (humans? lots of animals do it, too) but it's a lot of fun and I was spellbound by all this pretty stuff.

 

Awed by a statue

In January I went to Genoa and stood in awe of one of the world's most famous musical instruments (last item here). In this museum there is a wonderful statue of a couple reclining on a couch, the Sarcophagus of the Spouses. They both have braided hair but she wears a soft hat and pointed shoes, he is barefoot and bare chested. I would love to have her ankle-length dress.

This terracotta piece is over 2500 years old and I cannot put in words just how alive they look, how happy they seem together and how beautiful the craftsmanship is. I first saw this 30 years ago and bought a poster of it which hung in my kitchen for many years. 

This time it was being restored, hence the Wiki picture above rather than my own, but you could visit the restoration rooms and, although the statue had been disassembled, you could get right up close as the restorers cleaned its sections and chatted about it. I was so impressed by the schoolkids' there because of their fascination and the intelligent questions they asked. I am just spellbound by this beautiful artwork and was thrilled to be allowed this close to it.

 

The lower halves of their bodies have been restored already and put back in the museum. The memory plays odd tricks, though. I could have sworn she had heels on her shoes but they are flat. 

 

 

I did remember her shoelaces correctly, though. And the pleats of her dress.

 

One restorer was saying how much she'd love it if a modern shoe manufacturer would make shoes like this now. I so envied the restorers their job. 

Caption: 

"Be happy," they said. 

"Throw your hands in the air like you just don't care," they said. 

And that's how I lost my job as a museum restorer!

 

Anyway, I found it enthralling and beautiful. You may like to compare this visit to my recent trip to the Museum of Perfume in Grasse, France. 

And is it a wonder that in the 18th Century Josiah Wedgewood named his pottery in Staffordshire, England, Etruria after the land of the Etruscans where all the ancient art that he modelled his pieces on was found? 

 

Modern awe

I watched the blast-off of the Artemis II rocket the other evening. On CBS they and NASA made all the right noises about human destiny. progress and achievement, etc., so that made it seem so much like the exciting old days of the space race again. Yes, we know it's about rivalry and exploitation really, but we need dream fulfilment, too. It was delightful to listen to Harrison Schmitt, the last man to have walked on the moon, still lively and sparkle-eyed at 90, talk about spaceflight missions old and new. (You know, the old guard of space pioneers are uniquely fascinating, like Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11, whom I heard talk at my school in the '80s, or Alexei Leonov, the first man to spacewalk, who gave an enthralling talk at the Science Museum in London during the incredible Cosmonauts exhibition in 2015). 

Much as I detest the squalling brat currently in charge in the USA, this is a great achievement. When I was little we really thought our future lay in the stars; now I'm a little jaded and confess that I'm not sure the stars deserve to suffer our visits! But let's see what comes of it.

 

Modern oopsies

At the end of February I invited people to suggest a caption for this funny looking cactus I saw outside the Grimaldi Castle / Picasso Museum in Antibes, France.

 

The inimitable Lynn Jones of Yet Another Trans Girl Blog fame did more than that and made the cactus more expressive.

Thank you, Lynn. Your prize of a bag of best succulent potting compost is on its way. (By which I mean it's intended for potting succulents, not that it itself is succulent, just to be clear. But you're free to eat it if you want.)

This image is now the Official Whacky Cactus Hilarity Award (or OWCHA! for short) for thorny issues that crop up in unintended, misunderstood or unexpected ways. 

And this week the award goes to the Almighty Algorithm that suggested a charming video made last year by Iranian Tours inviting me to visit the delights of Kharg Island. The main sights in this lesser-known holiday destination being oil pipelines, a date plantation and a few tombs. I hear it's lovely at this time of year. Maybe I should hurry and book before the proportion of pipelines to tombs changes.

 

Easter 

Wishing you a nice easter weekend. If you have an easter bonnet, do wear it with a pretty spring frock. But if you have a bunny costume, it's time to pop that on instead. Enjoy the chocolate. Diet starts Tuesday.

Sue x 

The unhinged show

 Do you feel the world is stepping off a cliff edge?

"Défi" by Nicolas Lavarenne, Antibes

Or the invaders from outer space have landed.

"Invader" by Invader, Antibes

Maybe you think it's better, instead of swimming against the tide, just to stick your head in the sand and hope it goes away.

"La Palme" by Thierry Trivès, Cannes

Or just keep trying to find answers via social media.

"Blind" by David David, Antibes

Whatever you do, it's hard to avoid seeming to step on a banana skin.

"Stupida sfortuna", stencil by Fulminacci, Sanremo

I'm carrying on with my plans. I'm in Milan this weekend partly to see how my sick relative is doing (OK, as it happens; could be better, could be a lot worse) and also to vote in a national referendum. Call me old-fashioned but I continue to find importance in democracy. 

And I wonder if the whacky artists above aren't actually more grounded than our oh-so-competent, peace-prize deserving leaders. But, of course, it's the artists who are mad.

Next week I will be going to Rome, which I haven't visited in 20 years. You can't see Rome in a week so, as ever in a place with more history and culture per square metre than possibly anywhere else, I have planned an itinerary of preferred sights. But I hope to post some worthwhile items of trans interest when I'm back. 

 

Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris's death was announced yesterday. He actually died 20 years ago ... but Death was too scared to tell him.

The passing of this star should see the near infinite Chuck Norris jokes (see above) fading away. 

Moe importantly, I hope there might be a reduction in machismo after the passing of its most obvious icon. 

Sue x 

Celebrity quest, the sacred feminine and food news

More from my recent trip to Provence, focusing on Cannes.
 
Celeb culture

Lizzy the Lesbian Lobster, who now travels with me, likes LGBT history and during our recent trip to Southern France she was keen to spot a few monuments to queer or possibly queer celebrities. Like the home (now a hotel) of American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda at Juan-les-Pins in the mid-1920s. I regard Fitzgerald as a very fine writer and I'm just about to start his novel Tender Is the Night. 

He wasn't necessarily bi but I'd call him 'sexually anxious', in much the same way that he was anxious about his social status in the Jazz Age that he describes so well. Some have read hints of his being homosexual in his writing, others merely that he was desperate not to be perceived as gay or bi or less than masculine. It doesn't matter to me; what is upsetting is that he should have had to live in a society where he could end up so preoccupied with how people saw his sexuality and how he could fear that he was in so may ways an outsider. A salute from Lizzy, therefore, for outsiders who struggle, here at the former Fitzgerald home.

And if the Jazz Age interests you, how about this amazing curvaceous villa on the Cap d'Antibes, about a mile from the Fitzgeralds', called Villa Aujourd'hui (Wiki article here).

Aujourd'hui is the French for Today, which was the name of the first owner's other home in Palm Beach. She sold it to Jack Warner of Warner Bros who entertained all sorts of Hollywood stars there. You can see over the bay to Cannes from this house and that's where we find much of today's Hollywood aristocracy hanging out at the film festival. Their handprints are outside the tourist office. Jodie Foster gets the Lizzy the Lobster LGBT award.

Cannes is not really my sort of place. Too much ostentatious wealth, designer shops and celeb culture. But I did appreciate the innumerable blue chairs that the public can arrange at will on the three mile long leafy promenade.

The famous Carlton Hotel, below:

 

Having just visited Grasse, the French perfume capital, I couldn't help being reminded of the famous 1990 advertisement for Chanel's L'Égoïste which was set in a mock-up of it (L'Égoïste ad). 

But one really great discovery in Cannes that I recommend is the Malmaison Contemporary Art Centre on the promenade. As I wandered past, I was in two minds about going in to see the current exhibition, but the work of Carole Benzaken was actually pretty nice in an excellent display space and, best of all, there is a pleasant rooftop bar, the Café Olympe, with a terrace that looks out over the promenade and the beach to the Cap d'Antibes and the Lérins islands. It's worth paying the low entry fee of €6.50 just to go to the café even if you don't look at the art.

Away from the luxury stuff, the old town of Cannes is like many along this coast, a steep hilltop village overlooking the sea. Now the shops in its main streets are restaurants selling overpriced pizza and burgers so has lost some charm. 

But at the top there's an old church, a castle and a tiny but enchanted public open space, the Square du Caroubier, with a carob tree and olive trees, palms and cycads, rosemary and lavender and other fragrant plants. The benches, walls, even the rubbish bin are covered in patterned tiles in collaboration with the Malmaison Centre.

 

Such a tranquil, fragrant spot. 

 

The Sacred Feminine 

In the castle at the very top of the hill is one of the oldest anthropology museums, which had a special exhibition of ancient images of women carved in stone, Démones et Déesses (Demons and Goddesses). I call it the sacred feminine, but no conclusions were drawn by the curators: are these stone-age statuettes (so often called "Venuses") cult objects? toys? something sinister? or have people simply always liked images of naked women with big boobies and obvious genitalia? It has to be said that France is probably the only place in the world where you can happily take your family to an exhibition of outsize genitalia without inhibitions. The twin domes of the Carlton Hotel above are a tribute to the breasts of local socialite La Belle Otero, after all! 

Prehistoric "Venus" from Greenland, carved in walrus ivory

Tearful siren. Sirens were half-woman, half-bird, from ancient Greece. Hybrid creatures were seen as tormentors of mankind and the story of Ulysses hearing siren song but not being devoured by them is famous enough. Condemned to be not fully woman may account for her weeping. I know how she feels!

I'm not sure the exhibition did my dysphoria much good but, anyway, it was interesting with some precious items. If you prefer something decent and wholesome that will bring you down to earth, here is a royal male personage decently clad in decorated Y-fronts from 6th-Century B.C. Cyprus. Princes in their underpants! Whatever next?

 

 

And as a last word on enthnography, here's one of those Polynesian carvings that, when I was young, was deemed by the likes of Erich von Däniken and others to be proof of alien visitation.

Now the Cold War is over there seem to be far fewer UFOs in the sky, and now the hippies have moved into software engineering, we seem to hear less about aliens, too. Bring back the nutters! ...What? No, I mean harmless ones!

More weird statuary next week as an antidote to current nuttiness. If that makes sense.
 

Foodie news

Well, that's enough on celebrity sexuality and divine bodies. More important than all that is the fact that, although the food where I live in NW Italy is excellent and is that all-healthy Mediterranean diet, there's not actually a lot of variation. In France, however, not only do you have good food, you also have greater regional variety and many foreign restaurants. Personally, I prefer to be adventurous and try new foods, so I avoid chain restaurants. Besides, chains are not as cheap as they claim. A small, local, family-run business is worth supporting,  especially as they take pride in what they do.

On my trip to Provence, therefore, I visited an Indian restaurant (which you never find in Italy) and enjoyed a curry; a Thai restaurant, where I enjoyed a stir-fry; and a US-style restaurant for a quality burger and chocolate brownie. 

As for French regional cuisine, I enjoyed pancakes from Brittany, a savoury one with cheese, smoky bacon and mushrooms to start with, and a sweet one with Nutella and whipped cream (they have a whipped cream machine there that provides endless cream, like in some fairy tale). It makes a change to drink cider or apple juice with your meal. I also found a Corsican restaurant where they had Corsican beef on black bread ... black not because it was rye bread; no, it was black from squid ink, and that made it quite squishy! The pudding was a pinsa, which is like pizza bread but topped with chocolate sauce and hazelnuts and it was HUGE but really delicious. 

Top marks, though, to the Bistrot de Grand Mère right at the top of the hill in Cannes that served me a three-course Normandy-style lunch that for quality, quantity and price was unbeatable: a huge piece of pork terrine with crusty baguette and salad; a big, packed bowl of roast guinea fowl with onions, mushrooms, vegetables and cream sauce; and finally a double sized chocolate mousse. I go nuts for French chocolate mousse (especially if it's double size). The small spoon to eat it with was cheekily shaped like a shovel! I spotted this place after that disappointing line of overpriced pizzas in the road up to old Cannes from the swanky end of town and it met my needs perfectly. It pays to look around and not settle for the nearest.

Another good French experience was at the Café des Musées in Grasse where just two waiting staff worked with an efficiency and a charm that was super professional. The roast pork tenderloin with veg there was really good and the chocolate mousse (essential, see above) was perfect. 

When I got home after ignoring my slimming regime so thoroughly, I found I had barely put on weight. I must've walked it all off!

Sue x 

Lady? maid? or creepy old man?

 More on my recent visit to Genoa, including palaces, big dresses, food and music. But this is a trans blog so I don't just post holiday snaps: there's a lot on lovely clothes and female roles, too.

Genoa was once capital of a republic run by wealthy merchants and bankers, with a far reach. Genoese merchants traded all over the Mediterranean and the Near East, the bankers lent money to kings and emperors. And all these rich families - such as the Dorias, the Spinolas, the Grimaldis (who are still rulers of Monaco) - built themselves fine palaces, mainly in the 16th century, and filled them with stuff. There were more than 100 such residences in the city centre. These are the Rolli Palaces, so called because their owners were put on a roll and had to take it in turns to host visiting foreign dignitaries, ambassadors and the like in their fancy homes. 

Many are along a single street, packed together, in as much as you can pack palaces together! 

Via Garibaldi, Genoa, formerly Via Nuova, with some of the Rolli palaces. This style of architecture had a huge influence on the rest of Europe in the 16th - 18th centuries.

  

Most of these are now banks, the Chamber of Commerce, the City Hall and so on. 

Half a dozen can now be visited daily, but at certain times of year they hold "Rolli Days", that is weekends when 42 palaces can be visited, mostly for free. You'll never see them all over a Rolli Day weekend so booking is complicated and you have to pick which you want to visit and the time you'll be there. I stuck to those on daily view, which are impressive enough and form a large complex of art galleries, which I won't go into in detail about except that they have plenty of works from the Flemish, Dutch, German, Spanish and French schools as well as Italian paintings, and some incredible ceilings. Rubens lived in Genoa for a while and a lot of his work is here.

"Venus and Mars: and allegory of intemperance" by Peter Paul Rubens. Doesn't this just sum up an evening in a trans club so well? 

The website is here: Rolli Palaces 

 

Hall of Mirrors, Palazzo Spinola

Palazzo Bianchi had a temporary exhibition of Victorian dresses, which I confess I lingered over.

 

Heliotrope or mint? So hard to choose.

 

Mind you, I'm not sure I'd want to live with one of these dollies staring at me, however fun they might be to dress!

Just a few items on view that provoked thought. 

The Victorian dresses were all for grand ladies. By contrast, here is one of Pieter Aertsen's famous paintings of maids (this one's from 1559; I had no idea it was here). 

Wrongly called "the Cook" (because cooks were men), scullery maids like this had a certain, erm, reputation and artworks again and again drop little hints: the open oyster shells, the glazed pot on its side, the chamber pot and its stool right in the kitchen, and the many plucked birds rammed on a spit. She looks at you out of the corner of her eye, inviting you to understand the message! There's so much of this sly, saucy, jokey stuff from the 16th to 18th centuries here. Pills to purge melancholy, they would have called them. So, you saucy trans maids, your real-world sisters have a long history!

This by Veronese (supposedly) troubled me with all this Epstein stuff going on. Susannah and the Elders is a story from the apocryphal parts of the book of Daniel in the Bible, where Susannah is spied on my two high-ranking men when she's taking a bath. They make advances, she rebuffs them, they falsely accuse her of adultery and she faces execution, but the truth wins out in the end. The leering stone satyr behind her looks, purely coincidentally yet very aptly, like Rolf Harris, a dirty old man of our own era. Creepy, victim-blaming men go back a long way.

Anyway, there's nicer stuff, too. Here for Lynn and other dog lovers is a nice pair of doggies looking as friendly and curious as when they were painted nearly 500 years ago: 

And for Michelle and other bunny lovers, here's a family of rabbits by Albert Cuyp (1620-91):

 

Food 

That's enough high art (or sly art) for now. I'm an omnivore and I eat pretty much anything and when I go away I like to try local dishes. I understand the appeal of chain restaurants where you know what you're going to get and how much you're going to pay for it but I am curious, I prefer to be adventurous and I like to support small businesses in preference to multinationals. So I tried a variety of local dishes in small eateries. I've linked to the restaurants but only one has a bit of English on its website.

This was the most curious thing I had:

 

It's cannoli biscuits, which are hollow like brandy snaps and are usually a dessert filled with cream or mascarpone cheese with nuts and candied fruit. Here, however, they are filled with a cod and ricotta cheese mix, topped with caramelised onions that look like anchovies, with tomato sauces made from three different colours of tomatoes, and pistachio nuts. It's the fashion these days to have contrasting textures and tastes in the same dish and this was a mixture of hard, sweet biscuit and nuts with soft, savoury filling and toppings. Not unpleasant but a bit unusual.

In the same place, Locanda Spinola, I also had an amazing type pf pasta I've not had before, known as guitar strings, which are more like plump bootstraps, dyed black with squid ink and with a sauce of tomatoes, olives and chopped octopus, which I didn't photograph as I know some readers are sensitive to alien tentacular things. Really delicious, though, and hard to eat without flicking sauce everywhere. But I am a skilled pasta operator now so there was no mess.

I also tried another local speciality, pansoti, which are pasta parcels filled with borage and herbs and served with walnut sauce. Delicious but very filling. These were at the excellent Buca di San Matteo.

I had a bad experience last time I was in Genoa two years ago and the lunch I had in a famous and highly recommended place that the locals frequent was abominable. Well, not quite all of it: the Diet Coke was OK. So I was a bit dubious about a similar rough-and-ready looking trattoria, Il Fabbro, that also came highly recommended. But this place worked out more than all right. The tagliatelle pasta strips with beef ragù were excellent. It takes hours to make a proper ragù sauce and I think they'd put the work in. Vitello tonnato is thin slices of roast veal with tuna and mustard mayonnaise (which sounds odd but trust me, it works) and traditionally it comes with the veal hidden under the mayo but here the slices were beautifully arranged in a circle with a blob of thick home-made tuna-mustard-mayo on each ...and it tasted incredible. Excellent lunch, all for €26, so no complaints about the price either. Top marks here. 

When looking for a home in the region in 2019 I spent three days in Genoa and I really liked L'Opera restaurant. Sadly, it seems to have dropped its standards and is catering more for tourist tastes. When I got my pasta this time, the sauce had cream in it. Authentic Italian sauces never have cream in them. In fact, if you are served a creamy pasta sauce you should ask your waiter/waitress very nicely and politely if you could see one of the excellent pans they made it in. Follow them into the kitchen and take the proffered pan. Ideally, it will be a large, heavy one. Grip the handle firmly and apply the base of the pan squarely and repeatedly to the chef's head. If it's a good, resonant pan the sound should be quite pleasing, like a bell ringing on a coconut. 

Never put cream in Italian sauce, Luigi. You're not French.  

 

Talking of heady music ...

For all the fine art and holy relics about the town, in my view, the most precious thing in Genoa is in the City Hall, itself one of the Rolli palaces. 

The Paganini rooms contain memorabilia of history's greatest violinist, local boy Niccolò Paganini. Actually, he was possibly the greatest musician ever (save only the legendary Orpheus). There, in the last room, is the "Cannone", the Cannon, his favourite and most used violin, an object so famous and venerable that it has its own bodyguards and only the winners of the international Paganini Prize may play it. 

"Il Cannone", front and back. You can see where the great man's chin has worn away the varnish, the little nicks and scratches. Made by Guarneri in Cremona in 1743.

 

Prizewinning violinist Francesca Dego tells us about it, and how it feels to play it, physically and emotionally, in this five-minute video from her recording label:

I am not a musician but I was awed by this 300-year-old legendary instrument.

Its replica, the Sivori, made in Paris in 1834 at Paganini's request after he'd broken the Cannone (butterfingers!) is also there. You can select recordings of each instrument.

 

Many thanks to the maintenance staff who needed to do something but patiently waited for me to stop gawping before closing the room. 

If violins are not your thing, Paganini was also a leading guitarist, and here is a signed one of his.

Paganini's signature on the left

 

The Cannone was a stunning thing to find and if I'd seen nothing else it alone would have made the whole trip worthwhile. It's an awesome piece of still-living history.

Modern statue of Paganini outside the Carlo Felice Theatre, one of Italy's main opera houses

We certainly have a lot of top fiddlers in our era, too. Sadly, not the musical sort.

That'll do for this episode of Sue's Travels. Thanks for reading. Have a nice weekend. If you can, wear something pretty to beat the winter blues. And listen to music that uplifts you, from any great musician you admire. I think musicians, artists, writers, dressmakers and other creatives do more for the good of mankind than almost any other professional.

Sue x