Flying The Flag On Holiday

Mark and I have just returned from a wonderful week in Rapallo, a coastal town not far from Genoa in Liguria. It's a lovely old town full of beautifully painted buildings in the tromp d'oeil style so typical of that area. It's also Not The Pretty One, supposedly. At least, not in comparison to its neighbours Santa Marguerita Ligure and Portofino - which as Mark pointed out, tells you how thoroughly spoilt the Italians are for beauty, if they can regard a gem like Rapalla as the "meh" town of the region.

Rapallo in the early evening

 
 I have lots to say about the food and the beauty and the food and the people and also in particular, the food, but it's something else that I want to write about today. 

As anyone living in the UK will know from the news, there are the flags of St George popping up all over the place in England. Not just flags attached to lampposts but naff spray-painted red crosses onto mini roundabouts in the road, and any other available white surface. It's either declaration of pride and love of England or a dog whistle to show non-white or non-English people that they aren't welcome, depending on your news source.

So I was surprised to see the flag of St George flying absolutely all over the place in the Genoese region. And it's for an absolutely brilliant reason - It's not our flag anyway.

We have to go back to the middle ages. There's England, trading in the Mediterranean far from home. We had no reputation to speak of. No one was intimidated by us; our traders, merchants, pilgrims and vessels are all easy targets for any pirates, bandits or opportunists who see easy pickings. England was getting her butt kicked in the Mediterranean arena, and it was expensive. What she needed was an ally - help from someone too fearsome to be messed with who'd offer England protection.

This is where Genoa, The Republic Of The Magnificents, came in. Genoa was extremely powerful, wealthy and well-armed. It had colonies across the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea. The city was a major power from 1099 through to the 1700s, first through might and then through banking. It was Venice's main rival as a trading power and had a formidable reputation.

For a 'substantial' annual fee, Genoa allowed England to fly the Genoese flag of St George, knowing that anyone seeing that flag will not want to incur the wrath of the republic known as La Dominante and La Superba. (Italian republics really went in for nicknames. Just look at The Eternal City and La Serenissima)

For literally hundreds of years England paid Genoa for the right to fly their flag. Hundreds of years .From Richard the Lionheart to the mid 18th century. We only stopped paying when Austria invaded Genoa. The mayor of Genoa in 2018 jokingly requested 247 years of back rent for the flag the English now think of as theirs.

I love this. When Tommy 'Not a racist, honest, guvnor' Robinson had his march in London the other week and there were countless images of people wearing the St George's cross flag as a cape, I like knowing that it's the flag of somewhere else. That we had to pay protection money to use the flag because our own name didn't count for much. When they talk about pride in their country while flying a cross of St George, I don't think 'borrowed muscle' is the pride they mean. 

That brought me to another public item on display - signs. I like signs in new places. I did see something else displayed in Liguria that delighted me - a handwritten sign, emphatically underlined and over punctuated, outside a street-side pizzeria in the tourist town of Santa Marguerita.

It was everything in one pithy sentence - the cultural difference between the Brits and the Italians, how common it was that this misunderstanding occurred, and just how frustrated both British tourists and Italian waiting staff found the behaviour of the other side. 

Line Has No Value

Line Has No Value is almost a declaration of war to a country with a penchant for queueing. There is nothing a Brit won't turn into a queue given the opportunity. When a bunch of people are waiting for something, we don't just rush in like some pack of savages, we form an orderly queue and shoot daggers from our eye while harumphing should someone attempt to push in. (This doesn't apply when getting on the Tube in London for some reason.)
 

The number of patiently queuing potential diners getting huffy that they aren't being seated, and the sheer impossibility of actually speaking to someone to request un tavolo when you could indicate your wish without having to exchange a word...  You know it has to be substantial if a sign written in Sharpie with two underlining and four exclamation points needs cellotaping over your cafe name.

I bloody love the Italians. And not just for their food. But mostly.

 

Hail, Caesar!

That Hadrian was a top bloke.

Not satisfied with building ace stuff in Rome like the Pantheon - a building so perfect it made me come over all emotional -  he schleps himself to the furthest northern reach of empire and builds ace stuff here too. The jury's still out about whether introducing hipsters to the empire by making beards fashionable was a good or a bad thing, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

As I said in my last post, Hadrian's Wall is something I've wanted to see since I was back in Highland being taught History by Mr Regan. Jim Regan was a wonderful teacher. I've never met anyone here in the UK who was taught history in such a fantastic manner - from prehistory to WW1, hopping countries and continents to look where the most interesting stuff was happening. I learnt to think about how one event led to another and ideas spread from place to place rather than knowing a list of dates and battle names. Mr Regan inspired me to want to see these remarkable places we were hearing about.  I'll always be grateful to him for bringing so much history to life for me.

So, off Mark and I went first thing on Saturday morning for points North.

For my pals not from the UK:
 I live in Leeds, Yorkshire.  Hadrian's Wall is about 125 miles away roughly due North, about 2 and a half hours drive. On the map below, if you follow down the east coast from Hadrian's Wall to a downward pointing snag on the coastline ( the River Humber estuary) Leeds is inland from that. Not an unmanageable distance but quite a long way for a day trip.

We grabbed our breakfasts of choice - toasted cheese bread with marmite from Haley and Clifford for me, a McDonalds sausage McMuffin for Himself. I definitely win at breakfast - and made for Gateshead to pay homage to the Big Man, the Angel of the North.

He's a good looking fella, the Angel. I'm immensely fond of him.

Something I hadn't seen before were young trees planted nearby with decorations, stuffed toys, artificial flowers and memorabilia hanging off them.  They appeared to be shrines or memorials to people - a sort of Christmas tree to the dead.  Is this now A Thing?
Most unexpected.

Driving past the Sage and over river Tyne on the bridge those nice people from Springwatch tell me is a major nesting site for kittiwakes, we cut through Newcastle and headed out to drive alongside the Wall for as much of the journey as we could.

My ridiculously fit and active cousin Gaz O'Connor once ran the entire length of the wall in 13 hours 42 minutes.  Gaz is three weeks older than me and a world apart. He's amazing, and he mystifies me completely. A fun run is a contradiction in terms in my experience. I chose the more indolent option and navigated while Mark drove. I love maps.

We explored the Roman fort and village at Vindolanda, and the museum there. My lovely internet mates Sarah and Katie agreed with WI mate Morticia that it we should definitely visit it. I love having recommendations from mates, it makes trips more exciting somehow.

Amongst the remarkable discoveries in the excavated site there was a mystery. A body of a child had been found under the floor of a room in the barracks. It was against Roman law to bury people in forts or towns; the mausoleums were just outside. Whoever hid the body of that 11 year old girl didn't want her found, poor love.

Vindolanda is most famous for the Roman 'postcards,' the wooden tablets with letters, pleas and a birthday party invitation written on them.  There are photographs, translations and fragments in the museum, but the main collection is with the British Museum. However, the other finds there were also amazing.  The domestic details, the shoes, the child's sock and woman's hairnet are incredible. such small, human touches. I loved the betrothal pendant with two heads kissing on one side and clasped hands on the reverse. The carefully painted glasswork was crazy - two pieces of the same piece found 20 years apart.

One fascinating aspect of Vindolanda was a result of their reconstruction.  In the mid 1970s they built a reconstruction of both the earthworks and timber wall and tower and the stone wall and tower.  In the 40 years since, the earthworks have settled so much the height of that wall is now two metres lower than its stone counterpart.  No wonder they rebuilt in stone!

We had a lovely lunch sitting out in the roman style garden of the museum. Daring little chaffinches, tits and robins were darting from a nearby bush to pinch crumbs from under the tables. There were martin nests at the top of window lintels and a great many swallows zigzagged across catching insects.  It was a delightful way to spend a warm afternoon.

Driving on to Steel Rigg we had a short stroll to the Wall itself. It's a lovely thing. It snakes up and down the hills, sometimes disappearing where stones have been taken and used for other things over the centuries, sometimes rising up from the farmland abruptly.  Steel Rigg is absolutely beautiful, and I had my Wish You Were Here moment.

I am a tactile soul at heart, so I climbed over to the Wall to feel the warmth of the stones. I was there, I touched it, I saw the stonework follow the contours of the landscape and I thought of the men who built it and the men and women it was designed to keep out.

I only wish Mr Regan had been with me.