Archive Page 19

The Foreigner at the Party

Published October 11, 2010 Albania , Culture Shock , Dance , Dirty Tricks , Eastern Europe , Italy , Places , Rome , Subculture 7 Comments
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Tirana and Rome don’t have much in common—except that it’s absurdly easy to stand out as a tourist.

They come at it from different angles—Rome because there’s so many goddamn tourists (really, do Americans realize that there’s other countries in the world?), and Tirana because there’s so few goddamn tourists (really, do people realize how amazing it is?). But the effect is the same either way: you aren’t ever, ever going to blend in.

Some travelers get bummed out by this, and do everything within their power to fool themselves (and themselves only), acquiring affected accents and scarves for the local football team. But I say fuck it—no one’s gonna buy it anyway. So you may as well just dance.

Friday night felt like a riot in Tirana: chanting crowds, police sirens, streets shut off, smoke billowing and fireworks flashing. It wasn’t a riot, just the Albania-Bosnia football match. The insane energy of it all is a little anxiety-provoking for an American—if it were Oakland, someone would have gotten shot.

Our little clan from the hostel walked through the raucous roads; some had picked up Albanian flags along the way, but it wasn’t any use. We were varied races and ethnicities, all speaking English, and the stares we ellicted became almost laughable, necks craning and feet stopping cold.

“Hello, hello,” shouted a voice from a drunken crowd, as though to point out that we were different and didn’t belong.

Everyone got quiet and a little uncomfortable. I gave a stupidly exaggerated wave. “Howdy!” I exclaimed in a Southern accent. “How y’all doin’?”

And we all had a laugh.

We didn’t end up getting into the stadium. It’s my absolute fate with football—I’ve never managed to actually see a match. So we marched across town to a bar to watch it on TV, amusing everyone with our mispronounciation of “Shqipëri,” the Albanian name for Albania. One of the waiters was so amused he bought everyone at our table—fourteen of us—a round of drinks. Sometimes it pays to stand out.

After the match we went to another bar, an underground spot near the Opera House, walls covered in the photos of the artists that used to hang out there (as well as a healthy layer of cigarette smoke). A DJ was playing drum and bass from his glowing white laptop and everyone was dancing, arms raising to graze the low ceiling.

Again, we were the only foreigners. But the good news is, the language of dance is universal.

So universal, in fact, that everyone was shacking up, disappearing from the dark room in hand-holding couples. At one am, it was just me and the gay Dutch dude left. “We’re dropping like flies!” I screamed over the music.

He kissed me on the cheek.

Saturday took me back to Rome, throat sore and heart heavy, sad and actually a little ill to be leaving. I met up with my couchsurfing host in the evening; we got in the car and drove. And drove and drove, into the damp-smelling dark, street lights thinning and stars appearing. A friend of his was having a birthday party at his parents’ country home.

My first clue that I was somewhere I seriously didn’t belong should have been “country home.” Or the red-candle-lit driveway, that rambled on for half a block. It was dark, so I couldn’t see the house I walking into, but I could sense its presence—something large and sturdy and stately.

We walked into a huge living room, exposed wooden beams and tasteful vases. The crowd was art-opening-hip, wine glasses and expensive haircuts. There was a DJ. There was actual porchetta—a whole pig—being sliced by a little old lady in an apron.

I was in Toms and (again) a Talk Is Poison shirt. I still stank from Tirana’s cigarette smoke, dirty hair stuffed under a beanie. Even in the States, I’d stand out in a party like this.

But I didn’t get any snotty vibes from anyone, so I shrugged and grabbed a plate. I couldn’t really talk to anyone, but I smiled a lot, and people smiled back. No one seemed to mind me too much. It was one of those isn’t-it-funny-where-travel-takes-you moments: if you’d ever asked me, “Hey, do you think you’ll ever end up at a super posh party in a villa outside of Rome?”, I’d have answered, “no.”

After the pig was picked apart, the lights went down and the dance songs started cranking. Good time stuff: “Surfin USA,” “Girl’s Just Wanna Have Fun,” some old rock n roll hits and a couple Italian songs to round it out.

And I danced again. It didn’t matter that I was dirty and foreign and didn’t belong. There was a good time to be had, and sometimes, in the midst of a really good party, the only thing the really “belongs,” so to speak, is fun—the boom of the bass and the way your shoulder dips to the beat.

Tirana, Tirana, The One I’ve Been Waiting For

Published October 8, 2010 Albania , Budget , Eastern Europe , Independent , Music , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Subculture , Tirana 8 Comments
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If Tirana were a boy, it’d be the boy I’ve been waiting to meet.

You rumble across the border, furious windshield wiper and donkeys in the dirt road, hills dripping lush green. You dash from the taxi to the minibus, puddle-footed and soaking-hooded, grab the last seat as a man climbs into the trunk compartment.

You rattle like this through the rainstorm, through a landscape of sheeps and shacks, the smooth round dome of abandoned bunkers, half-built buildings with sleeping bulldozers stuck in the mud, the carcasses of stipped-down cars piled in empty lots. The minibus driver turns on some kind of Albanian butt rock, and you silently thank him for knowing the exact right soundtrack for your entrance into the country.

I’d meant to travel around a bit in Albania, see a UNESCO town or two, climb in a bunker, poke around some old Ottoman castle. Which still all sounds awesome. But four hours in Tirana, and I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere.

There’s only one other city I’ve walked into and felt this feeling, this long “yeeeesss” coming from some place between my ribs, near my gut, a forgotten organ of intuition. Some places just fit, and you just fit them, and Tirana is one of them.

It’s got a certain electric insanity, that infectious energy, without being a total free-for-all. It’s just dirty enough, has just enough street dogs and decrepit buildings, just enough business men, the click of just enough three-inch heels, attached to smooth legs and slim skirts. It’s like meeting a boy with just enough of “the dark side,” as Luke would say—not a total depraved junkie, but not squeaky clean and wholesome either: a chipped tooth and an ancient wound.

So I walked Tirana’s streets, its run-down markets and posh cafes, past Mercedes Benzes negoitating potholes, 10-years-old smoking cigarettes, old women roasting chestnuts, old men selling gum and lighters, gypsies sitting cross-legged with outstetched palms, the blare of the horns and the hum of the engines and the swoon of the city.

Within a few hours of staggering into the frenetic swarm of this city, I’d fallen in with the artsy, alternative crowd, finding myself at a rock show in a tiny, smokey bar in an otherwise-shuttered mall. The next night was K’tu Ka Art, a weekly show featuring local live music acts. It felt a lot like being at a small show at home, until I had it explained to me.

Apparently, bands in Albania work like this: they play cover songs. God-awful, Top 40, English-language cover songs. A band will book at a certain bar for a year. And every Friday and Saturday, people will go to same bar and hear the same band play the same cover songs.

“Bloody boring as hell,” Ghenti surmised, an indie-rocker dude in a Sonic Youth shirt and a Kurt Cobain sweater. He’d moved to Brighton when he was 16, but came back to Albania every year for a few weeks. So last year he started organizing weekly showcases of local bands, who played their own songs, singing in Albanian.

It’s a small group of people, maybe 30 or so, that are into that scene right now, into something different from the imported cool. And after two nights, I seem to know all of them. Yesterday, I walked around town and kept bumping into people I knew. It’s a funny feeling of belonging, of fitting into a place you just met. (“I feel like I’ve known you for years.”)

Tirana’s also an insanely safe and insanely cheap city. I can’t manage to spend more than $40 a day, and I can’t manage to feel uncomfortable walking its streets, even at 2am. (“Heaven must have sent you from above…”) The people are startlingly friendly, and I haven’t received any street harrassment—just a lot of stares for being the one tattooed girl in the whole city (more on that in another post).

The only drawback of the city, I told Robo, is that I smoke too much. It’s too easy and too cheap ($1.50 for a pack). It was the K’tu Ka Art afterparty, in a basement bar playing a soundtrack of “Vogue,” “Highway to Hell,” and “I Love Rock N Roll.”

“No, I think it’s a good thing,” Robo replied, yelling over the music.

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“It means you’re having fun.”

“Yeah, I’ll try telling my mom that,” I smiled, leaning in to the flicker of his lighter.

He leaned back, regarded me there: sitting at the bar, happy as could be with my can of Coke, singing along to cheesy hits with Tirana’s tiny clan of rock n roll kids.

He patted me on the shoulder. “You should be an advertisement for ‘Come to Albania.'”

I threw my head back and laughed.

My Own Private Ulcinj

Published October 4, 2010 Eastern Europe , Montenegro , Places 5 Comments
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A beachtown in October is a haunted thing. Umbrellas folded and lounge chairs stacked, soda machines unplugged and a chilled air of desolation—packed up and shut down, another season over, as the clouds thicken and the waters dull.

Ulcinj is as mangy and lazy as a street dog. It has the restless wind of a border town, which in a way it is. Thirty-some minutes from the Albanian border, the town’s population is 80% Albanian, 80% Muslim. I didn’t realize what a sharp difference that would be until I got here, heard the ghostly adhans echoing from minarets, passed old women with white scarves over their heads, saw the men sitting crosslegged at cafe tables. And garbage—garbage everywhere, skinny stray cats stalking through the mess.

There are no gleaming ads for Montenegro tourism, no English restaurant menus, no cruise ship docks. The former pirates’ cove is run-down and dirty, filled with the buzz of flies and the smoke of kebab shops, bazars of cheap jewlery and beach blankets.

“It’s political,” the man who runs the guesthouse tells me. “The investment, it goes up to Budva, Bar, Kotor. Ulcinj is…” He brushes his hands in a dismissive manner.

“Is what?”

“Too close to Albania.”

“They don’t like Albania much in Montenegro, do they?” When any of the people I’d struck up conversation with had asked me where I was headed next, they’d shake their heads sadly. “Albania!” the chef at the Sveti Stefan hotel had exclaimed, clutching his heart. “Oh, is better you go back to America!” (This, of course, has the opposite effect on me—I want to go more now, to see why Montenegrins don’t like it.)

“No, no,” the Ulcinj guesthouse keeper sighs. “Is long history. But Ulcinj, tourism now is…” he makes a downward motion with his hand, like a line chart dropped, or an airplane crashing.

Maybe that’s why it felt especially desolate as I walked around today. The weather changed today—late summer is gone and autumn has arrived, clouds and cool air, the fitfulness of something escaping. Most of the shops were closed, the streets near the coast empty. I wandered through the old town, a ghost town of stone and trash, laundry lines and the soft sound of voices floating out of windows—my own private Ulcinj. It wasn’t just that the season had ended; there was a weightier sense of abandonment, disrepair.

Swoon

A man with the face of a Swoon woodcut pauses as he passes me. He doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, and he starts chatting with me, as Montenegrin men will do, not letting the language barrier get in his way. It’s always a sincere and entirely unsleezy exchange; they want to know where I’m from, if I like their country.

I can’t follow much of what he’s telling me, so instead I watch the deep lines in his face, an impossible etching of sun and time. He is a fisherman and his doctor, no, his daughter, lives in Tirana. He hasn’t seen her in 5 years—he counts them on his fingers, slowly, tenderly. He gives me a big smile, front teeth missing and the others just thin little slits. He pats me on the shoulder, says “thank you,” though I’m not sure why. “Hvala,” I reply, my one word of Montenegrin.

I wander out of the stone arch of the old town, and wonder if he was a ghost.

I walk along the coast, and it’s an endless string on rocky coves, rubbish falling from the cliffs like weeds or rocks. The cement sun decks are all fenced off, locked up, an amusement park at night. I continue, go deeper, through a sponge of dead leaves and dirt, picturing the sun, the gleam of tan bodies—imagining being here, walking, with someone I love, picnic packed and towel-clutching. But, no, I’m alone, with the grey and the wind.

Maybe the guesthouse keeper is right—maybe in 5, 10 years, Ulcinj tourism will come back, go up again, the hopeful angle of his climbing hand. But for now, for today, it’s a spooky little place to spend a day.

Sveti Stefan, Forbidden Island

Published October 3, 2010 Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Eastern Europe , Montenegro , Places 6 Comments
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In a little cove on the Montenegro coast, cleaved between staggers of rock and water clear as glass, I’ve discovered what is simultaneously the most beautiful and depressing place I’ve never been: Sveti Stefan.

A little jumble of terracotta roofs, grey stone buildings that look like they were carved right out the rock, a couple trees poking through, all sitting plump and pretty and perfect in that glittering, glittering water: what could be more picturesque?

So you take pictures. Lots of them. You see the other vacationers—Eastern Europeans and a handful of Italians—doing the same. You’ll go over, have a stroll, feel the old cobbled stones through your soles, soak in the Old World ambiance before you work on that sunburn you’ve been itching for.

Only you can’t. You can’t actually go in Sveti Stefan. On the narrow isthmus leading up to the island—made of sand and reinforced with a stone-wall walkway—there’s a sign telling you you can’t. And a security guard, to remind you. And another one at the end of the isthmus (you can see him down there, pacing dutifully).

This is because the entire town is a resort. The entire town.

I hadn’t actually grasped that part in the guidebook: “an old fishing village that was nationalized in the 1950s and turned into a resort…” The resort was closed, but scheduled to reopen; in the meantime, a township had sprung up onshore, keeping the beaches alive with the gentle buzz of non-corporate tourism. All of which promised to change the moment the resort reopened—so go while you can, I read between the lines.

I envisioned a monstrous, skeletal structure with workcrews hanging from cranes, somewhere off to the side of an idyllic pebble beach—an eyesore, but something you could turn your back to. I did not picture the entire island, the remains of a 15th-century village, privatized and closed off to the public.

It’s like a modern-day version of a Forbidden Island. But instead of pirates burying the booty, it’s luxury travel mongols.

Awkward photo Boris insisted on taking

Sitting in the sand, under one of the umbrellas Boris the hotel worker graciously has let you set up camp beneath (hey, it’s October, officially low-season), you feel a little like a grubby kid with their nose pressed up to the glass of some fancy restaurant. It’s a pathetic feeling of alienation—you mean I can’t even walk in there?—that surprises you.

You watch a small boatload of people disembark. The gentle breeze carries their posh British accents over your way; you watch them climb the steps in a wave of white scarves and sun hats. They’re greeted by some resort offical and whisked off down the isthmus, a bagpipe player gloriously leading the way. You pick some pebbles off your leg and feel more dejected.

There’s a story there, and you know it. You imagine some 60 years ago, a traditional, working-class town filled with fishermen and their families. You imagine the boats going out in the morning, the nets coming back full in the afternoon; you picture the women in aprons calling from the windows at their children, running down narrow lanes. You picture them all forcibly removed from their homes, uprooted and unearthed after 500 years, and not able to return home. Because wealthy people wanted to work on their sunburns.

Such displacement happens in the world, yes, but usually in the name of war, religion, apartheid. But tourism?

You wander over to the shady terrace of a fancy cafe for an overpriced espresso. It’s killing you—the story, the story hiding in there, that you can see but can’t get into—so you ask the guy serving you your coffee. He gives you the Disney version. Afterall, he works for the resort.

The town’s population had been dwindling, and, in the 50s, the government bought out the last remaining families—15 or 16, who were given “nice pieces of land” in exchange. The town was then turned into a resort—“the only town resort in the world,” he says with a puff of pride—and saw the likes of Hollywood celebrities and European royalty. Then, “alas,” during the wars of the 90s, the resort fell into disrepair.

But “thankfully,” a German company interveened and purchased the resort. They made a series of exhaustive, tasteful renovations that manage to “retain the Mediterranean charm.” (“It’s really very excellent.”) The resort will officially reopen and accept guests sometime within a year—the British people I saw were probably on a promotional tour.

“Are there ever any other kind of tours? Like for the public?”

“No, no. It is closed. It’s not so nice—you pay to come to a place and have tourists outside your window all day.”

I nod slowly, thinking of a comment I heard once about why private schools should have tuition: “otherwise all the poor people would come rushing in.”

“But, maybe, I don’t know,” the espresso server continues, “you are here for awhile,” shrugs, “maybe I can work some magic, get you a tour.” He sneaks a sidelong glance.

The writer in me wants to press. The feminist in me wants to puke.

I sit there, instead, and watch the island, the steeple from the old church peeking up above the roofs and the green of its remaining trees. I watch the water nod in white glimmers and think, “Yes, yes, there’s a story there.” If I could just get in, if I could just walk among its buildings, sit on its stones, I might be able to get it, a hint of it—hear what is left, the melancholy echoes that have remained.

For a moment I wonder what is worse: that it be preserved, turned into a storybook land that’s accessible to only the fabulously wealthy, where they can indulge their sun-strewn fantasies of a simple life in a long-gone simple world. Or that it turn into a theme-park, another Venice—a soulless caricature of itself. Because, let’s be honest: in this day and age, there’s no way a place as pretty as this would escape the clutches of tourism.

But then I come to my senses. An entire island privitized. You’ve got to be kidding me.

I lick the last bit of froth from my espresso and watch my pretty, pretty island, sitting forbidden in its lonely paradise. And I think: if I could afford it, would I stay there?

Probably.

Kotor Fragments

Published October 2, 2010 Eastern Europe , Montenegro , Places , Poetry , Subculture 1 Comment
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View from the bus
Little town tumbling—orange roofs and white walls, a piercing spire poking through. They huddle there, like that, against the flat glass of water and the great grey of the mountains, rising up, behind their shoulders, like a fanged phantom in an old movie.

Looking up
An opposite feeling from looking down from a great height—an inverted vertigo—but still something you feel in your throat: a mild choking, the sense of great force, the immensity of rock, a gravity that could crush you, take you, toss you up and swallow you whole—but instead just makes you utter one long “fuuuuck.”

Boy by the bay
Little tough guy, maybe 7 or 8, comes buzzing up on his bicycle. Buzzing because the plastic crate fastened to the handlebars has sagged down and is rubbing against the front wheel. He looks at me as he passes, nods at my arm, then stops—skids his worn sneakers on cement—and circles back.

He juts his chin at my right arm, an international gesture for “show me your tattoos.” I roll up my sleeve and he smiles. He juts his chin at my other arm, and I repeat.

He gives me a broad grin—one molded yellow tooth—and extends his arm in a thumbs up. I smile back with my gleaming row of American white. He nods again, then pushes off, pedals away, is gone.

Tanya
Something of a little girl still in her, something in the smile and the slouch, that behind the grim skin and grey smile, under the coat-hanger bathrobe and shuffle of slippers, seems vulnerable—breakable but not broken.

Abandoned hotel
Broken glass and shattered tile, ruins of an old hotel—an exquisite home for the ravens.

Kotor
I like this place better by morning—the umbrellas folded and the stones still wet, the sun a soft thing, haloing from behind the mountains’ immense back. I like the footsteps, the sound of voices, the rattle of stroller wheels. I like the cats in the doorways and the pigeons staring, staring from their stoop between green shutters.

Filling the Fame

Published September 30, 2010 Grottaglie , Italy , Places , Street Art , Subculture , Western Europe 3 Comments
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The hunger, that is.

Okay, so let’s make a deal. I won’t torture you all with never-ending posts about Grottaglie/Fame Festival/one of the best travel experiences of my life IF you all check out my coverage of the festival on the following links:

Hi-Fructose Basic summary with some pics

Hi-Fructose My interview with Fame organizer Angelo Milano.

Huffington Post More narrative coverage of the event, my favorite of the write-ups I’ve done so far.

Since I have no way of actually enforcing this deal, so we’ll work on the honor system. Okay? Okay.

(And, yes, I’ve been a busy girl. Loving my Netbook, and loving free wifi!)

Dubrovnik, I Don’t Hate You

Published September 29, 2010 Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Eastern Europe , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Sola 3 Comments
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Amid the souvenoir shops, currency exchange offices and endless umbrellas of the tourist restaurants of Dubrovnik’s Old Town, I realized that something in me had changed.

It wasn’t a sudden, burning-bush kind of change, but slower, more subtle. It’s something that’s been changing in me, I suspect, for some time, without me noticing it—a transformation, unfolding gently, quietly, while I wasn’t looking. And it took Dubrovnik to make me aware of it: I no longer hate tourists.

And more than that, I no longer despise hard-partying backpackers, 20-year-olds that sleep all day and drink/cruise for girls all night on mom and dad’s bill. In short, my disapproval of how other people travel, when it isn’t my way of traveling, has dissipated.

I endured the torturous, fluorescent, overly air-conditioned ferry ride from Bari, Italy, in search of sunnier—and cheaper—shores. Well, um, Croatia ain’t it, I’ve discovered. And especially not Dubrovnik.

Yes, really.

My guidebook gushed about the splendor of the city. After I slept off the sleepless ferry ride, I curled up next to my $4 americano and watched the scene parade by: tour groups led by umbrella thrusting guides; middle-aged folks clutching their Rick Steves’; lots and lots of English. Later, at my hostel, I listened to the play-by-play recounting of the previous night’s drunken antics, and who’d made out with the hottest girl (it was Mark, the kid with the Justin Bieber hair).

And the remarkable thing was, I was okay with it all.

Now it could be that I’m getting older. It could be that I’m more well-traveled, and settling into myself. But I think it’s got more to do with something else, with this personal journey I’ve been on lately, entirely unrelated to travel. It’s got to do with taking care of yourself, with stopping using other people as a way of not looking at your own shit; it’s got to do with lovingly detatching from sick people. It’s potent shit, and it’s changing everything. Including, apparently, the way I travel.

No one likes to think of themself as a judgy a-hole, but hey, we all got our faults. In previous years, Dubrovnik would have evoked all my self-righteous better-than-thou-ness: too expensive, too touristy, too too. And it’s true that I’m not really into the scene here; I definitely dig the more obscure, the more offbeat and bizarre.

But it isn’t awful—it’s not theme-park-ish and you don’t get that resentment vibe from the locals. And it is beautiful: smooth stone streets gleaming white; sheets of ancient walls; passageways that lead to startling, sparkling vistas of aqua-clear water that really does live up to the hype.

And I’m letting myself enjoy that without judging it.

As I’ve learned to focus more on accepting myself, I’ve discovered a curious by-product: I’m better able to accept others, better able to let them be themselves, whatever that entails. And this doesn’t just come, apparently, with emotionally unavailable active alcoholics; it apparently also comes with accepting other travelers.

When you’re constantly measuring yourself against other people, when you’re constantly using other people to determine your worth and what exactly it is you are, there isn’t a lot of room left to just be okay, to just sit with yourself and be okay. And I’m learning to do that. I’m learning to go swim off the deck of a jokey tourist bar with a couple dudes I don’t have much in common with, learning to lay out in the Adriatic sun of a destination I’m not nuts about, and let that be okay.

I don’t think I’ll ever be into the big huge tourists destinations. I’ll probably always love the less obvious, the little-off; I’ll probably always love digging around, getting the dirt of a destination under my nails. That’s just what I’m into. It’s not any better or any worse than what anyone else is into. (Including getting black-out drunk and hooking up with random girls.)

Even now, with the chatter from the hostel’s common room filtering up the stairs, through the cracks under the door, over to my glowing light on this rickety bunk, even now it’s okay. Tomorrow I’ll take off for Montenegro, in search of something a little more me.

But Dubrovnik, I gotta say, it was a pretty good day. And I don’t hate you.

Grottaglie Or Bust!: Fame Fest ’10

Published September 27, 2010 Abandoned Places , Budget , Grottaglie , Independent , Italy , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Sola , Street Art , Subculture , Western Europe 1 Comment
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Siesta-dazed and still covered in little bits of glitter, I’m holed up in my hotel room in Grottaglie. Laptop on my lap, balcony door open a crack, listening to the moan of the fan, I don’t know where to start.

I could spend the next two months writing about this weekend, here in this random little Puglian town, wedged between plastic-tarp-covered vineyards and industrial, cloud-coughing skylines. It’s at times like these when you realize just how insufficient your own words are—how close they can sometimes come to capturing this thing, this thing you’re always circling and chasing, but that ultimately always goes “fluttering through your nets,” as Virginia Woolf said.

This weekend has been a little of everything I love in travel: discovering killer art, adventuring around abandoned buildings and ancient caves, eating great food, meeting awesome people. I came here for the opening of Fame Festival, a DIY street art event put on by the one-man-powerhouse/party Angelo Milano, that is slowly transforming the forgotten little town of Grottaglie. I’d been following the build-up on various art blogs, and it seemed like a pretty damn good excuse to go on an adventure.

There’s about 100 different angles to write about this from, and I’m sure I’ll be torturing everyone with posts for months on end. So instead of giving the 3000-word play-by-play (you’re welcome), I’ll give you the highlights. And some pictures.

Fame Festival
“Success, celebrity” in English, “hunger, starvation” in Italian, Fame Festival is the blood, sweat and glitter (more on that later) of one dude, Angelo Milano. Three years ago, he started inviting international artists to his little hometown for short residencies. The artists produced prints at his studio, Studio Cromie, produced ceramics using the town’s ancient ceramics studios, and threw up street art pieces all over the city. The festival has grown, gained a fair amount of notoriety, and a small crew of artists/collectors/enthusiasts/fanatics make the mission down to Grottaglie for a complete and total adventure.

Angelo welcomes you with all the enthusiasm and graciousness in the world, arranging hotel rooms and rides from the airport. On the evening of the preview, he takes the gang load of visitors back to his grandmother’s house, where his dad shakes your hand and his mom cooks a huge traditional Italian dinner. The opening party is complete with DJs, Puglian wine and a diverse mix of locals and art lovers; you then trek across town to Studio Cromie, where Angelo goes ape shit on the dance “floor,” dumping about 8 bags of glitter on everyone and generally having about as much fun as humanly possible.

You see everyone stagger around town with glitter stuck in their hair the next day. You’re given, on preview night, a map of the city marked with all the street art pieces, and you wander around, ticking off the 60+ list and snapping photos. It’s like a treasure hunt.

Coolest part: adventuring around an abandoned monastery filled with art.

Grottaglie
The town itself is awesome. Not in a knock-your-socks off way, but in a slow, subtle way that sneaks up on you. It’s got an old town, complete with winding roads and a couple UNESCO sites, as well as a new part, devoid of billboards and with only one corporate chain. The whole town siestas from 12-4. You can get dinner at a restaurant for 6 euros. Old women say, “Ciao, bella.” Teenagers hang out in cafes til 2am.

The city’s surrounded by ancient caves that were inhabited until just a few decades ago, when the Italian government kicked everyone out. You can go and poke around in them, see the remnants of old cooking areas, frescos peeling off the walls.

The Peeps, and The Adventure
So what kind of wingnuts travel all the way to bumfuck Puglia for an art festival? Awesome ones. I met so many fresh people, one of those this-is-why-I-travel experiences that you know is going to linger with you for a long time.

There’s also the adventure aspect. No guidebooks mention Grottaglie. The bus from Naples dropped me off on the side of the road; luckily I’d had the wherewithal to print out a Google map the night before. You traipse around the random town that epitomizes off-the-beaten-path, and it reminds you, again, why you travel.

Street Art
I’m no expert on street art, but I got to meet a lot of people who were. And it’s clear that we’re on the brink of something, something bigger than just the art world. Street art is a kind of dialouge with a city, and it’s changing cities. Street art as architecture, urban development, tourism—there’s a lot to discuss.

But right now, legs crossed on this hideous hotel bedspread, I’m feeling incredibly tired and incredibly grateful. I gave myself an extra day here, to hang out with the wifi and sleep, before I take off for Dubrovnik tomorrow. But even if I were going home tonight, it would have all been worth it. Fame Fest was one of the best parties I’ve ever gone to, and one of the best adventures a traveler could hope for.

See Naples, And Then…

Published September 23, 2010 Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Independent , Italy , Places , Sola , Sola 2 Comments
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Die, the saying goes. They’re not fucking around.

I’d really wanted to go to Naples when I was last in Italy. But my then-boyfriend read the LP description—chaotic, dirty, somewhat dangerous—and nixed the idea. He liked Copenhagen, Scandindavia—clean, calm, safe cities filled with bicycles and crisp air, low unemployment and Nordic blondes with pale beautiful skin.

He can have it. Give me Naples.

I got out of the Metro stop and walked the five blocks to my hostel. It took about that long to totally fall in love with the honking, swarming, spinning mess of it all, wedged with sharp shadows and bright sun between stories of faded facades that seem too tight, haphazard, overgrown. There seems no law or order to the flow of life on the street—cars and motorinos and pedestrians—but rather a kind of rhythm. Not a heartbeat, even and steady, but a wild palpitation, erratic and oxygen-deprived, that somehow keeps beating, keeps from careening.

It only seems like chaos. There’s something actually there, holding it all together.

I want it.

Give me traffic and noise. Give me trash piles and laundry lines. Give me jackhammers and roaring motorbikes. Give me a honk of warning but don’t slow down.

Give me scaffolding and shadows that swallow whole streets. Give me littered ruins surrounded by sidewalk. Give me a small dead bird flattened against the black stone of the street. Give me the smell of fish in open-air markets.

Give me gypsy beggars and business men; give me round bellies on white rocks, tanning in the sun. Give me a woman bathing in a baroque fountain. Give me stray dogs sleeping. Give me 1000 cigarette butts and worn skin on beautiful women. Give me immigrants selling purses; give me hustlers pawning cans of salt.

Give me graffiti. Lots and lots of graffiti.

Give me Naples—give me this city and its swarm, give me something inside my own soul.

Pigneto: The Rome For Outsiders, and Me

Published September 22, 2010 Independent , Italy , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Street Art , Subculture , Western Europe 9 Comments

Here’s a little rule of thumb I learned yesterday: if a neighborhood has a shitton of street art, it’s probably the neighborhood I wanna be in.

It’s funny coming back to a place; I never really do it. I was interested to experience the difference. Three years ago, Rome was hands down my favorite European city—probably because it was the most vivaciously chaotic of the cities I’d visited in Europe. Life was different then; for one, I was traveling with my then-boyfriend, who I’d break up with a month after returning home. Nuff said.

Rome didn’t seem so intense and frenetic this time around; it felt much more manageable. I landed with 8 hours of scattered sleep within the previous 48 hour period, and decided to power through the day in order to acclimate myself to the time difference (it worked).

I wandered through the city in a haze of memory, surprised by how my legs took me to all the familiar spots—muscle memory of a city. There was the Colosseum, aching in its magnificent crumble; there was this piazza and that piazza; there was the terrible Chinese restaurant I dragged us to in a vegan moment of tofu craving. It’s funny when a place has only existed in your mind, at one very specific time, funny to see it still going on, living and breathing, like going back into a dream that had kept on dreaming without you.

I remember my dad saying that Rome made him feel his own mortality, and I can definitely say that’s still true for me. There’s something about the ancient greatness, the ruins and remains of glory, that really serve to check you. Just in case, you know, you got to thinking your shit really mattered, there’s Rome to remind you how inconsequential it all is—how small, how much of one shining moment you are. All your joy and heartbreak, your own impending ruin—it will all come and go, and Rome will still be there. You’ll be lucky if your bones last as long as Rome’s.

That being said, Rome isn’t really about anything I’m about. It’s one of the world’s great cities, and has been for thousands of years, and I love it for that, but everything that I get stoked on—diversity, punk rock, hip hop, street art, tattoos, counterculture—Rome doesm’t give a shit about. Why should it? It had Julius Caesar; Rome doesn’t have time for trends.

Walking around center, you get to feeling like an absolute slob—an(other) American slob. Everyone has so much style and grace in Rome; how do their clothes fit so well? How do they all look so effortlessly chic and beautiful, and what the hell is wrong with you in your Toms and Talk Is Poison shirt?

And then you take a rickety street car down, along desolate tracks and amid rows of block buildings, into the rundown side of town, and you realize: that’s because all the Romans in the center are rich. Rich people of any culture look good, and are inherently alientating (to me at least). You get amid a neighborhood a little more like your own, and you realize there’s more to Roman life than tailored suits and killer shoes.

Pigneto is the Mission Dolores/Williamsburg of Rome—an old-school, traditional neighborhood first overtaken by immigrants, now overtaken by hipsters artist types otherwise entirely abscent from Rome. Along its shady streets, you see little old Italian men shuffling around; African, Chinese and Bangladeshi immigrants hanging out, free of their blankets of goods to sell; young Italian sitting in doorways smoking. I love dynamic cultural collisions like that; they’ve been known to bring much of the forementioned things I love. Including street art.

I’d headed out to Pigneto in the first place to meet up with Jessica Stewart, who runs the very kick-ass Rome Photo Blog, covering contemporary art, street art and other radom wonderful things around Rome. I had some time to kill before we met, so I roamed around and took photos.

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I met Jessica at Necci, a bar/restaurant that’s been around since the 1920s and was featured in an issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller last year. We sat at a table under a tree (which only kind of shielded us from the rain) and she told me about the neighborhood, about the art scene and ex-pat life in Rome.

“Rome is a very play-it-safe, stay-with-the-pack kind of city,” she told me. She spoke about the city’s slowness to accept street art in its galleries. “It’s a very traditional city. It’s hard to impress people in Rome—you know, when you’ve got the Colosseum right there, it’s hard to feel like you can do anything in comparison, or anything that matters.”

There were, she told me (and as she’s documented on her blog), a small handful of artists, living out in Pigneto and San Lorenzo, that were doing their own thing. And acceptance was growing, along with recognition.

“The one thing one of the artists said that was true,” she told me, our shoulders hunched under the branches and drizzle, faces half-lit from the barroom light, “is that, if you can make it in Rome, you can make it anywhere.”

It seemed true enough.

Lauren Quinn is a writer and traveler currently living in Hanoi. Lonely Girl Travels was a blog of her sola travels and expat living from 2009 to 2012. She resides elsewhere on the internet now.

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