The Meridian Passage of the Sun at Bergamo

 

At exactly Latitude 48° 42’ 11” North, Longitude 9° 39’ 16” East, you are in the portico of the Palazzo della Ragione (The Palace of Reason) in Pergamo. At your feet is a masterwork of the Age of Reason. You are standing on a compass rose where the Latitude and Longitude has been carved into the stone. Heading due north along the meridian is a long white line of marble set into grey flagstones. It is marked with days and months of the year. It extends about ten metres into the shadows under the building.  The line is capped at each end by the summer and winter solstices, when the Sun is at its most northerly and southerly points in the sky giving us our seasons.

What you are looking at under the shuffling feet of uninterested tourists, is the analemmatic sundial of Bergamo. It was created by the mathematician Giovanni Albrici in 1798 to provide a standard for setting the city’s clocks. It is a remarkable and precise scientific instrument.

In Pergamo on 5 April 2025, sidereal or true noon falls at 1:25pm by your watch. As the time approaches, a small circle of sunlight, beamed through a hole in a metal plate high in the arch, moves slowly eastward towards the meridian line. The circle of light crosses a thin black line right by the 5 April mark at the moment the Sun reaches its zenith. At that instant, the observer knows that it is true noon and knows the date — no mean feat in 1798.

Why did this happen at 1:25pm on your watch rather than 12:00 pm? The answer lies in the fact that the human contrivances of time and longitude are interchangeable. At 15° East, noon happens one hour earlier than it does at the Greenwich Meridian. So, at 9° 39’ 16” East, noon comes a little over half an hour earlier: 11:25 am. Adding an hour for a time zone change and another for Daylight Saving Time gets you to 1:25pm.

What the row of dates along the line measures is the declination of the Sun; that is its apparent rise and fall in the sky at noon as the Earth, with its 23° tilt wobbles its way round its orbit. It is also marked by an elegant, elongated figure of eight engraved in black and interwoven with the meridian line in Albrici’s design. It is this black line that the disc of light crossed at noon.  It is called the Analemma and has been known since ancient times.

Mariners carry out the same calculation in reverse. They know the date and a nautical almanac gives them the declination. They watch the sun through a sextant and as it reaches its highest point, they note its angle above the horizon. By subtracting that from 90° and making a clever adjustment for declination, they have their exact latitude.

Although guides point out Albrici’s analemmatic sundial to their tourists, few take any interest beyond noticing the zodiacal symbols that indicate the progress of the Earth round its solar orbit. Today, you are the only keen observer of the meridian passage of the Sun.

Beneath the arches of the Palace of Reason, we have lost our connection to the Age of Reason.

I travelled with the excellent Great Rail Journeys

Sulzano Station — Sunday

 

There is birdsong and, I think, the chirp of cicadas. There is just one track and one platform at Sulzano railway station by Lake Iseo in Lombardy. It is Sunday afternoon. There is no ticket barrier, no ticket office and, blessedly, I can hear the birdsong because there are no announcements. Small groups of people are on the platform, mostly families after a day out. They may be returning home to one of the small towns or villages along the single-track route. It runs from the alpine town of Edolo in the north 60 miles to the city of Brescia in the south. If the next train is southbound, it will come from the left. A couple of 100 metres beyond the ends of the platform on level crossings that will indicate that a train is approaching.

There is something special about a country railway station. It is familiar to its users. They know the trains and need not bother with a timetable. If they are not tourists, they probably know each other — Sulzano is a small town. The station at Sulzano is a quiet, sunny, informal place for travellers.

At each end of the line the line, the driver will get out and trudge the length of the three-carriage train and set off back up or down the line. For the waiting passengers, there are no such limits. From the southern terminus at Brescia, they can catch a train east to Verona, Venice and Trieste. It will only take them an hour from Brescia to get to Milan, from where they can get a train south to Palermo in Sicily or north to Munich and onwards into eastern and northern Europe.

As Marcel Proust wrote, “The most intoxicating romance in the lover’s library — the railway timetable.”

A bell rings. The northern level crossing closes to cars and the streamlined nose of the dark green diesel train appears, small at first, growing larger. When it stops, about 10 people get off and the same number get on. The train departs. There is silence again and yes, I can hear cicadas.

I travelled with the excellent  Great Rail Journeys

Podgorica, Montenegro: The Smell Of Freedom

 

Cue Hotel, Podgorica (from the hotel website)

It was unmistakable. As I stepped into the stylishly modern lobby of the Cue Hotel in Podgorica, my nose twitched at the sophisticated fragrance of cigar smoke.

I turned to see a cigar lounge complete with leather Chesterfields, ashtrays and a splendid humidor displaying true Havana cigars, some the size of torpedoes, right down to delicate cheroots. It was right there open to the lobby and evidently well used. The smell was of quiet enjoyment, hedonism and but more than that, the smell of freedom.

Look, I know, smoking is a filthy malodorous habit. It is bad for smokers and all those around them. There are a million reasons not just to ban it but to abolish it altogether. Yet it is another freedom lost — its odour to be replaced by the sweet, cloying, artificial pong of vapes – until they ban those to be superseded by who knows what new horror?

I do not know what the laws are in Montenegro. People seemed not to smoke in public indoor spaces except for the Cue Hotel cigar lounge, but they certainly smoke at outside tables. That evening, I watched four men at an outside table of the Cue. A bottle of wine rested in an ice bucket. All four men sat back in the evening light smoking fragrant cigars. I could see that the conversation was calm and sporadic. Just four men enjoying a proper smoke and companionship.

Montenegro is applying to join the European Union. It will adopt new values that will extinguish such blatant hedonism. It is their choice and they will have much to gain but something will be lost.

I was travelling with the excellent PTG Tours

On the Origin of Holy Relics

 Over the years, I have travelled with Adrienne to many countries in the Levant and the Balkans.  I have been struck by the numbers of churches dedicated to St George.  Many of them are guardians of bones; precious and plentiful relics of the saint. St. George is the patron saint of England an many other countries and causes.  This prompted me to write a piece of short fiction from the point of view of his famous adversary, the dragon.  I hope you like it.

Postcard from St. George's Church, Adaba, Jordan

On The Origin Of Holy Relics

With just one roar, I made my toast, seared my bacon and heated my coffee. Life’s good when I can generate that much dragon fuel in a night. Talking of knights, what is going on? Every day for the last fortnight there’s been another one of the blighters. They all look the same: horse, lance, chain mail, white tabard, red cross. Every man jack of them calls himself Saint George.

I can’t remember half of them. There was one, patron saint of Portugal. I saw him off and when I say I saw him off I mean that, having given him a good grilling, I sawed off his leg and ate it. I sold the leg bones. I have a trusty man in Aleppo.  He can get me a good price for relics of St George.

On Thursday, it was another George claiming to be the patron saint of Lithuania. He was easy. Sold off a jawbone and an arm.

Then there was the one with the fancy saddle. Said he was patron saint of saddle makers. Sold off his Ischial Tuberosity — that’s bum bones for the uneducated — talk about saddle sore. Mind you, I didn’t get much of a price for them. They don’t make for a dignified relic.

And the George who said he was the patron saint of syphilis? I just incinerated him. Best to be on the safe side.

My man in Aleppo passed me a special order today. Some geezer called Robert of Jerusalem wants a whole arm, shoulder and ribcage of St. George. He will pay a tidy price. I don’t need a fight. I can find that lot in the spare bones at the back of my cave. Some of them may even be human.  He won’t know the difference.

~~~

Seeing the World for the First Time

 

Geocarta Nautica Universale (Color) Public Domain

In 1523, in Spain, two men set about making a map of the world. They were well equipped for the task. One was Giovanni Vespucci, cartographer to the King of Spain and nephew of the great Amerigo. The other, Captain Juan Elcano, had returned the previous year after completing the first ever circumnavigation of the world. He had been second-in-command of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition. Magellan himself lost his life in the Spice Islands. The expedition had taken nearly three years and was a feat of navigation no less intrepid than the Apollo 8 mission that first rounded the far side of the moon.

I am in the dimly lit basement of the Royal Library at Turin, looking at the very map. It is exquisitely drawn and coloured on 12 sheets of cotton canvas. It is nearly twice as wide as my arm span. It looks a bit like a modern Mercator projection, but it is not. Mercator was only eleven years old. Navigators in the 16^th century knew that the Earth was round and had a fair idea of its circumference.   They knew of the Americas but not what lay beyond or whether they could get through or round them to Asia. They found the way and what did lie beyond was the Pacific Ocean taking up a third of the map, and demonstrated for the first time in history.

But what of the world that the map reveals? Europe, the Mediterranean and Black seas were well known and accurately drawn. North Cape and the Arctic Ocean had yet to be properly explored. The Caribbean and Central America, already discovered by Columbus, appear in detail. The rest of the eastern seaboard of North America is still unknown, except for a ghostly, detached sketch of Florida.

The east coast of South America for is shown in detail, right down to the first ever representation of Cape Horn. Magellan rounded the Horn, through what we now call the Magellan Strait. He did not know how close he had passed to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The great continent of Antarctica does not feature on the map. It was not the only continent that he would miss.

From Cape Horn, Magellan set off west to find Asia. The west coast of South America and almost the whole of North America are missing. But then, the map shows the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean stretching to the West. The idea of longitude had yet to be conceived. It was easy enough in those days to know how far north or south a ship was but east and west could not be accurately measured. Day after day, they had travelled westwards hoping they were on the right latitude to make landfall on the Spice Islands (the Moluccas). They were. The Moluccas are shown, as are the great islands of Java and Sumatra. China and eastern Asia are only roughly sketched in. India is shown in detail as is the Arabian Peninsula and Madagascar. They missed the continent of Australia. Africa is about right as the expedition, now under the command of Elcano rounded the continent. The mountains of the moon, legendary source of the Nile, and the Atlas Mountains appear as coloured sketches.

500 years on, this map is a gorgeous and spellbinding work of art. There is much missing but our minds fill in the gaps. I am looking at the world we know drawn for the first time.

I travelled with the excellent PTG Tours

Travelling with Ibn Battutah

Recently, my travelling companion has been the great Arab traveller and anecdotal historian, Ibn Battutah (IB). Not literally, he travelled in the 14^th century (1325 to 1354). The Travels of Ibn Battutah edited by Tim McIntosh-Smith in the beautiful Macmillan Collector’s Library edition fitted into my pocket and its silk ribbon marked my progress through its gilt-edged pages and IB’s 29-year journey

IB was a Qadi, a judge and expert in Islamic jurisprudence. He was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. IB set out from his home in Tangier towards Mecca but travelled north to the Volga, east to China and south as far as modern Tanzania, or so he says. IB is an unreliable narrator. He is known to exaggerate and he probably presented other travellers’ tales as his own.

IB was a learned and devout Muslim. He takes a puritanical view of licentiousness in others, though he expects it of infidels. Wherever he goes, he seeks out fellow Muslim scholars. He also seeks out wealthy rulers. For them he is not just a scholar and Qadi but a man with interesting tales to tell.

Given that we cannot necessarily rely on his stories, I grew interested in the logistics of his travels and what little he tells us about his personal relationships. At times, IB appears to travel alone and at others, he had a large retinue. He speaks occasionally of companions but never names them. Late in his travels, he does mention that one of his companions dies, which causes him some inconvenience.

I do not think he ever travelled light, which brings me to the question of how he financed his travels. He sets out with a supply of silver dirhams that would have been good tender throughout the Islamic world. On arrival in a new city, IB would seek out the Sultan. Sultans usually lavished gifts upon him. Sometimes it was coin but often less convertible items such as grain, live animals and fabrics. On occasions, he had to hire camels to transport his goods. I imagine he sold some gifts to raise cash.

IB’s attitude to slavery slowly shows itself. He never agonises over it. It is part of the way of his world.

IB travels through Turkey, a journey of some weeks. He says matter-of-factly that he travelled in an oxcart accompanied only by three slave girls. In a later episode, he is caused some inconvenience when a slave girl gets pregnant and gives birth. IB does not reveal who the father is.

At one point, he arranges a voyage to China in a junk. He insists that he must hire one of the merchants’ suites, a series of private rooms. He needs them so he can take with him his slave girls and wives (in that order). It is his habit never to travel without slave girls. The arrangements are made but, while IB is ashore making his final preparations, a storm blows up and the junk with all his possessions including slave girls and wives sails away, leaving him behind. He never sees them again.

IB finds himself in the Maldives, his fortunes restored. Here, we get the only insight into IB’s sex life. He writes that the inhabitants live on fish and the fruit of the coco palm which has ‘an amazing and unparalleled effect in sexual intercourse. I had myself there four wives and concubines as well. I used to visit them all every day and pass the night with the wife whose turn it was.’ He left after a year and a half, leaving the wives and concubines behind.

There is little mention of slaves as labourers; rather, they appear to be owned by sultans as status symbols. On several occasions, IB writes that he has given or been given a white slave girl as a gift.

I enjoyed having Ibn Battutah as the travelling companion in my pocket but I would not have wanted to travel with him.

The Armoury at the Musei Reali Torino

 Armoury Picture

A visit to the Royal Palace Museum in Turin. I am unmoved by Baroque palaces. Every grand room leads into another. The rooms are over-decorated stage sets of rooms. We pass through quickly. 

But oh, the Armoury. We step over a threshold from the magnificent but dull on to a chequered floor. We are pawns in a giant fantasy chessboard. This is not a functioning armoury but the best display of armour I have seen anywhere. A great Baroque painted ceiling flies over a long, broad gallery lit by tall windows. The eyes are taken down between lines of armoured and caparisoned, fully spurred and armoured knights on realistic-looking and armoured horses. Between the mounted knights are displays of more weapons and armour. Many are marvellously engraved, carved or covered with intricate marquetry. Never mind the history, spectacle itself is thing.

I was travelling with the excellent PTG Tours