Category: Malta and Italy August 2017

Smoking hot at Etna

August 9, 2017

Heat has followed us this whole trip; it’s been in the upper 90s every day.  Rome, after all, has been hotter than New Delhi.

But I awoke to a new “heat” this morning—we’re docked off Mount Etna, the largest and most active volcano in Europe.

Some of the most famous volcanos are in Italy, part of the “belt of fire” that extends east from here into Turkey.  Etna is probably the best known certainly since Vesuvius, which in 79 AD buried Pompeii.  We’ll see that in a few days, too. There’s also a potentially devastating explosion waiting to happen in Naples from a “young volcano.”

The trip took us to 6000 of the 11,000 feet (and to temperate temperatures, thankfully). The mountain is obviously the highest thing around, and rises from sea level.

We stopped at the site of an explosion in the mid 19^th century, I believe, which left a variety of cones (big cones are caldera, usually where the explosion collapsed the area).  Our guide told us that the cone explodes gas and ash, and the lava flows come from fissures; usually the fissures are a one-time phenomenon. Sometimes the cone will throw larger stones, called bombs. He showed us a variety of the rocks, from the dust and ash to the lava.

We drove later to a lava flow, dating from the early 1990s.  He explained how the lava flow perpetuates itself; as the upper layer cools and solidifies the lower layers stay warm (over 2500 degrees) and flow underneath, eventually breaking through and resuming their flow until eventually cooling and generally stopping.  In the case of this particular lava flow, the nearby US Air Force base sent in helicopters with bombs to alter the path (kind of like setting counter fires).  It’s on youtube, and I do have to say that seeing the explosions and flows (we had a talk afterwards on the boat with visuals) are pretty spectacular.  We’ll have other chances—the island of Stromboli, and later, Vesuvius and the Pompeii ruins.

The boat talk was by a government agent who’s part of the monitoring of “momma Etna,” which once had the traditional cone shape I associate with volcanoes (Fujiyama anyone?), but in the 20^th century has gotten new craters—including “big mouth” (a more colorful name than South East) and the eruption of new craters has continued in 20^th century—even in the past year, new craters have emerged,  a phenomenon never observed this quickly anywhere else in the world.  He said explosions can be violent, with fragments of ash and gas which are blown downwind and ash covers everything.  I remember when St. Helens blew in the 80s, we had to wipe off ash from our cars.  Here in Italy, he said, cleanup is slow. Dust can spread and make visibility difficult, roads slippery, and air bad to breathe.  Lots of “hills” we saw were baby craters at lower elevations.  A 1669 eruption reached 10 km, down to the sea.

When we asked him about living in a volcanic area, he noted that only one of the modern explosions threatened a city on the slope, and the slow progress of lava took 5 weeks to reach the village, allowing everyone to move anything they wanted—except their houses.  Interestingly, there’s no volcano insurance available in Italy, though there are some government funds.

He said the “heat of pyroclastic (look that up in your dictionary) flows killed people in Pompeii,” not the explosion, which is a product of the water vapor buildup from the intense heat.  Other gases include carbon dioxide and sulphur oxide, which can leave a residue of yellow on the top of the mountain, looking at first glance like snow.

In all, it might have been smoking hot, but it was a pretty cool experience!

August 8, 2017

I had a pupi day in Siracusa (read and see why).

We’ve sailed nearly a hundred miles north to 37 degrees north of the equator, to the port of Siracusa in Sicily (translated Syracuse, though the one in New York is the Orangemen; here, the city uniform is green).

If I were to single out one thing we’ve seen as symbolic of Siracusa, it would probably be the church, since it incorporates many of the historical trends that explain this island.  The original site housed a   Greek temple, and the enormous Doric columns serve duty today as pillars for the church.  The city was founded by colonist from Corinth (in Greece) and is a reminder (for me) that Greece was a civilization, rather than an empire.  Unlike Rome (which copied a lot of Greek customs, changing the names of the gods, but not their duties—the temple of Athena here, partly reconstructed, became the temple of Minerva when the Roman rulers replaced the Greeks), Greece seems to me best understood as a series of related cities ranging from Asia Minor into the western Mediterranean, Siracusa being a case in point.

In addition to incorporating the columns into the church, subsequent Norman conquerors incorporated crenelated tops into the building.  And of course, later Italian (and Spanish) rulers built more traditional items into the architecture.  An earthquake in the 1690s resulted in a magnificent baroque renewal, making the façade a delightful expression of that architectural style.

Another church on the square has a Caravaggio (I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot of him; his work in Malta was from his short stint as a knight. He apparently got into a scuffle and was kicked out of Malta, fleeing to Siracusa long enough to create another masterpiece). The church is on the spot where Santa Lucia was martyred–she was a 21 year old brutally killed for being a Christian.

We had a free afternoon, so after bringing Carolyn back to the boat, I took the on-and-off bus, determined to see what else I could in the city.  Although it has been in the upper 90s (35 or so to Europeans who measure in Celsius), I was determined to see the outdoor architectural ruins and the archaeological museum.  The museum was a real treat, with a surprising amount of locally-found artifacts from mostly the Greco-Roman period (that was, after all, over a thousand years!), but the ticket taker urged me to hurry to the coin collection, which was closing in half an hour. I’m glad I paid heed, since the coins took the entire first floor, and served as a substitute introduction to history of the island. Every ruler issued coins with his picture on it, from the tyrant Dionisius to Victor Emmanuel (who was the first king of reunified Italy in the mid 19^th century).  It would have been fun had I had several days to try to put together the various tribes who conquered the island—including the Arabs (who probably converted the temple of Apollo to a mosque, only to have the Normans repurpose it to a church). Half an hour was scarcely sufficient to get acquainted with the history of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and the other predecessors of the Sicily of today.  Perhaps I’ll have a chance in the next few days as we cruise up to the Straits of Messina.

Our program director, a Florentine, gave us a few extra treats today.  One was an introduction to a Granite (shaved flavored ice), but one of the cultural attractions of Sicily is a kind of puppet show, and there is a puppet maker and museum, that he took some of us to visit.  We saw the puppets being made, talked with the cast, and saw a play in Italian which pitted good and evil.  When asked if they could come to the United States, the puppeteer quipped that he “can’t bring the Moors.”

Incidentally, puppet in Italian is pupi, pronounced just like you think.  My 10 year old grandson would probably giggle.

It was a pupi day.

7 August 2017

It seems appropriate that Carolyn and I started this trip to Europe in Malta, because our last trip here was four years ago, when we ended in Rhodes, since one of Rhodes’ claims to fame was in January 1523, when the island fell to Suleiman the Magnificent, who allowed the Knights of St. John to leave the island,while keeping their weapons, relics, etc.

Ironically, the Knights ultimately wound up in Malta, contributing to at least two things most associated with Malta: the Maltese Cross and the Maltese Falcon.  The Maltese Falcon, perhaps most associated with Dashiell Hammett and Humphrey Bogart, was really part of the history of the Knights and Malta.  After wandering around the Mediterranean, seeking territory—anything from Rome to the other properties of King Charles V of Spain, including, at the time Tunis and Algiers, where the Knights helped Charles in his battles against the Turks, the order reluctantly settled on Malta; the price was one hunting falcon a year, hence, the real Maltese Falcon.

Of course, the Knights brought with them the 8-pointed cross of the Order, and their pugnacious disposition to both defend the faith  and, incidentally, to do hospital work; the Order started providing medical assistance to the Crusaders and pilgrims to the Holy Land as part of the Crusades.  The militant medicine men carved quite a niche in the Mediterranean as a self- financed international organization that fed on warfare and (depending on your point of view) piracy, seizing Muslim ships, selling the captives into slavery and confiscating the cargo (a mirror image of what the Turks were doing).

One of the pivotal military points in the battle between Islam (and especially Suleiman) and the West, occurred in 1565, when Suleiman, then an old man, mustered nearly 50,000 of his finest soldiers and determined to put an end to the predators on Malta. The last straw, according to one of the books I read (but not mentioned by our guides), was the Knight’s seizure of one of the personal ships of Suleiman carrying cargo gathered by the harem, including his favorite wife, for sale in Venice.

The western victory marked the apogee of the Ottoman empire.  Combined with the loss of the Turkish navy in the battle of Lepanto (to which the Knights contributed ships and men) in 1571, the turn of the Turkish tide had begun.

Thus began about a 250-year rule by the Knights of the island of Malta.  As you might imagine from the narrative, living in this neighborhood required fortification of the harbor, and one of the distinctive features of Malta even today is the incredible array of fortresses guarding the Grand Harbor in the town named for the grand master during the siege, Valletta.  In the period of their rule, perhaps the most stunning building—as you might imagine—is the cathedral of St. John, a magnificent baroque construction distinguished with Caravaggio’s only signed (and largest) painting, the beheading of John the Baptist.

The Knight’s rule came to an end in 1798 when Napoleon landed and conquered the island, ending the rule of the Order, abolishing slavery, and confiscating church property (to help pay for his futile campaign in Egypt, which included the destruction of the French navy at Aboukir Bay).  The conquest led to an uprising, which invited Britain to help overturn the French, and at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Britain acquired Malta as a colony; it remained so until 1964, when it became independent.  In 2004 it entered the EU as the smallest and least populated country, with about 450000 citizens.

Between the Knights and the British, the island acquired a lot of palaces—the president’s palace, across from the hotel we stayed at, was built by one of the Knights, then became residence of the British governor, and now houses the President of the Republic of Malta. While English was until recently one of the official languages, Maltese (the language of the people) predominates.  It has roots in Arabic, as does the country before the 13^th century.  Indeed, the town of Mdina, another walled city that was the capital of the country, is a medieval fort on a hill; the Knights, being sea goers, sought a city with a harbor, and built Valletta and the other cities on the coast.

The location—“a north African desert with a European civilization “—at the crossroads between East and West and Europe and Africa has made it a potentially important trade entrepot  or naval base.  For the British, it was the headquarters of the Mediterranean Fleet, important in the 19^th century with the development of the Suez Canal, the route to India, and the effort to keep the Russians contained in the Black Sea—not to mention the need for coaling stations.

That location prompted what the Maltese call the “second great siege”—during the second world war.  With the entrance of Italy in 1940 into the war, Malta began to get bombarded the next day.  Astride supply lines to North Africa, it intercepted Axis supplies and thus was subject to bombardment and blockade.  The island is limestone, which meant a lot of air raid shelters, some of which were built below existing early Christian and Jewish catacombs.  One of the catacombs was a cave where St. Paul was supposedly incarcerated after being shipwrecked on the island and converted folks to Christianity, making Malta (in the Maltese telling) one of the earliest Christian countries (a claim that has to discount almost a thousand years of Arab and other occupation, however; there were several ethnic cleansings).

The Daze comes partly from the beauty of the sea (the land this time of year is hot and dry), and the visit to Hagad Qim, reputedly the oldest free-standing stone building in the world.  Archaeologists think it was a temple, around 4000 BC, with arrangements rather like Stonehedge or Cahokia, with holes for the equinox and solstice.  There were also some interesting statues found, now housed in the archaeology museum, including the “Venus de Malta.”  I saw it.

I wonder, as we are about to sail for Sicily, if the ancients would have been ready to predict the solar eclipse later this month. I wouldn’t be surprised…