Here’s the first set of pictures of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. I don’t think I’ve seen something this intricate at this scale. I’d probably not be saying this if Taj Mahal wasn’t a distant childhood memory but whenever I visit next, I know what the Taj will be up against:

There was something about the marble of the cathedral’s floor that caused me to stare at it mesmerised:

The figures in the fresco painted on the dome, sometimes create a head-spinning illusion of being 3-dimensional figurines looking down on you:

Whenever I see an old couple now, The Beatles’ ‘When I am 64’ starts looping in my head even if the couple in question is decidedly older:

My most enduring memory of the Cathedral is that of its walls bathed in sunlight…

…and these bicycles parked outside

Vatican City features prominently in every school quiz book as the smallest country in the world. The word ‘country’ conjures up all kinds of imagery in your head – borders, security guards and checkposts. In reality, it’s hard to tell where Italy ends and Vatican City begins.

The Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome is just a kilometer or so away from the Vatican (so much for the separation of Church and State).

When you are approaching the Vatican from the Castle of St. Angelo, you run into a small flea market selling souvenirs, old books, LPs and B&W stills featuring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck from Roman Holiday. ‘Paradise’ from Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto blared from a shopkeeper’s stereo as I browsed through LPs of Mozart’s symphonies, operas, and piano concertos. I wonder how many people these days get to experience the paradise that springs into existence each time the gramophone needle touches one of those LPs.

When we entered the Vatican City precincts, a large crowd of immacualately dressed people was leaving the Vatican. As we reached St. Peter’s Square, the reason for the mass exodus dawned upon us on seeing the rows of empty chairs – the Pope’s Sunday mass had just finished.

Still, there were plenty of people queuing up to enter St. Peter’s Basilica. The queue was long enough to make us postpone our visit and go looking for lunch instead. We found a pizza shop in a small street doing brisk business – a sure sign that hot, delicious pizzas awaited us. Pizzas in street shops in Rome are sold in rectangular slices by weight (pizza al taglio). There were lots of vegetarian toppings to choose from – some a little unusual. What the wife took for pineapple turned out to be potato.

We spent some more time walking around the Vatican. It’s a funny sensation to be walking in a country that was just an answer to a trivia question for you until a few hours ago. It’s also easy to forget that people live here with the same mundane problems as ours – the Sunday load of laundry for instance:

Having bookmarked the pizza place for another visit, we left for the Spanish Steps. I kept seeing something interesting even in the commonplace buildings:

The Spanish Steps were overrun with tourists, so we walked to the obelisk in the square at the base of the steps and sat there for a few minutes.

There were a plenty of interesting buildings around.

Many luxury brands have showrooms in the streets around the Spanish Steps. We were visiting a country deep in the financial crisis. Their prime minister, Silivio Berlusconi, had resigned the day before and the government had just passed austerity measures to save hundreds of billions of Euros. But it looked like business as usual here. I guess history isn’t as dramatic when you are living it.

The old, ‘grungy’ façades of the showrooms are a perfect foil to the glittering, expensive products selling inside. The Diors, the Pradas, the Cartiers, the Louis Vittons were all here. Our relationship with luxury products is limited to parodying the brand names. For example, Bulgari becomes Burglary. It’s not a case of grapes being sour, it’s just that we prefer mangoes. Have spare money, will travel.

It was finally time to tackle the Spanish Steps and enjoy the view of the world along the way (and from the top).

By some quirk of fortune, we found ourselves at the Colosseum on every single day of our stay in Rome. Entry to the Colosseum closes at 3:30 PM and so we never got to go in till the very last day.

The Colosseo Metro station was undergoing repairs. Had it been any other Metro station, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed. But this station being next to a thousands of year old monument, the rubble seemed full of poignant irony.

The wife had singled out a nice dinner place while browsing a tourist guide at a bookstore at the Termini Station. We spent the evening looking for it. At one spot, as the wife raced ahead looking for street names to orient us on the map, I found myself standing across the road from the Ferrari store. A man stood at the stores’ door while his partner stood in the middle of the road to take his picture:

The food at the restaurant justified the effort it took us to find it. There was something special about the vegetables in Italy – especially the tomatoes. They seemed so full of flavour that for the first time in Europe, we found vegetarianism worth the trouble.

I heard Trevi Fountain before I saw it. It wasn’t the trickle of a fountain that I heard, it was the roar of a waterfall. That should’ve prepared me for the scale of what I was about to see but it didn’t. My jaw dropped at the sight of the 4-storey building they call a mere fountain.

Hundreds of coins were lying on the fountain’s floor. According to local legend, throwing a coin into the Trevi fountain is supposed to bring you back to Rome. We didn’t throw any, but we’ll probably return to throw one in.

Our next stop was the Pantheon. On the way we came across a structure that looked suspiciously like it, but it wasn’t the real thing.

We also came across a closed shop that specialised in pendulum clocks. Christiaan Huygens would have been delighted. If you stare at the picture for a minute, you can actually hear the clocks tick in your head.

From the outside, the Pantheon looks simple and very time-worn. We never got to go inside as it was closed that morning to the general public for a private ceremony. A choir was singing inside and strains of beautiful music drifted out. And so we got to see Pantheon aurally.

It was a sunny but cold morning and by now we were craving a cappuccino. We decided to walk to Piazza Navona and sit for some time in one of the many street cafes there. Rome is the sort of city that makes you feel that you could spend a lifetime there and you still wouldn’t have seen anything. There was something interesting waiting to be discovered at every turn.

After walking around Piazza Navona admiring the various fountains there, we finally sat down for a cappuccino.

My mind had obviously been picking up a lot of religious iconography consciously and subconsciously. That’s the only way I can explain why I saw cassocks, chausubles and priests in the folded umbrellas of the café.

Although we were carrying a printout of the map showing the route from Tiburtina station to our hotel, it took us a while to get to our hotel. I guess that bit of rear-view mirror wisdom, with a little change, can be applied to maps too – routes on maps are longer than they appear. It was just half past five in the evening, but this being November, the sun was already setting. The top floors of an apartment building close to our hotel caught the last of its golden-orange rays. The cluster of delicate, quaint TV antennas on the building’s roof reminded me a lot of India of my childhood (I am sure that the rundown/ramshackle footpaths did their bit too).

We were eager to make the most of whatever little was left of the day. We dumped our suitcase at our hotel and walked back to Tiburtina station. From here we caught the metro to the Colosseum. You see the Colosseum the moment you step out of the station. For a building of that size to be merely standing there after thousands of years is nothing short of a miracle. It’s beautifully lit up at night – a sight that’ll stay with me for a very long time.

We picked a detailed map of Rome from a souvenir shop close to the Colosseum. Emboldened by our latest possession, we spent close to an hour wandering around the Colosseum but only managed to find another Metro station for a ride back to the hotel. While I tried to sleep, the wife studied the map and chalked out our route for the next day. I could tell that there’d be no purposeless dawdling the next day.

Czech Airlines’ ads had imagery that felt a bit odd for an airline ad. A commercial flight in which you get to experience zero gravity cannot be a very happy a one:

The in-flight sales catalog had a section dedicated to cigarettes. Dire warnings were plastered in big lettering. If this is the extent of their concern for smokers’ health, I wonder why they bother selling it on the flight anyway?

As our flight entered the Netherlands, we could see green fields with endless rows of windmills wind turbines through the clouds. They are quite a sight from that height:

I wish one could stop a flight mid-air, roll down the windows, and compose that perfect shot. Perhaps this is what the aforementioned Czech Airlines ad was trying to tell me?

We wanted to visit the observation tower at the Petřín hill. By the time we checked out of our hotel, caught a tram and reached the hill, it was already noon. Bells tolled at the cathedral on the otherwise quiet hill and as we started walking towards the tower, their distant echo could be heard.

There were parks on the hill and benches under shady trees. We saw a local climb one of the pear trees there and throw pears on the grassy ground below for his partner to collect. The wife approached the couple, asked if she could pick some of them and returned with four juicy specimens of the fruit. By this time we had realized that we wouldn’t have time to make it all the way to the tower so we just grabbed one of the benches and munched on the pears.

Sometimes memories of things completely unrelated to the place that you are visiting linger the longest. One such memory that’s still with me is of an old man walking past us with a loud radio. The song on his radio was familiar – Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire – but in a language I didn’t understand (given where we were, it must be Czech).

On our walk from the hill to the nearest tram station we came across some fascinating buildings…

…street cafés…

…and other interesting things.

We stood for a few minutes staring at this ornate gate of the German embassy:

At the tram stop we turned around for one look back at the streets we had been walking through.

All along our stay in Prague, the light had either been too dull or too harsh. On the tram ride back to the hotel I saw Charles Bridge illuminated by the most perfect light that a photographer could ask for. Pity it wasn’t our first day here!

When we entered the house we now call our home in Amsterdam for the first time, a faint smell of Jasmine had lingered about in the air. I formed a strong association between that smell and this house. We don’t know for how long the house was on the market, but whatever the duration, it spent a lot of time staying completely shut. As we moved in, other smells begin to fight with the Jasmine frgrance sticks’ totalitarian rule. Aroma of Indian spices and curries mingled with smells of floor cleaner. The faint smells of our soaps hobnobbed with the equally understated smells of our deodorants. Within two months, that distinctive ‘Amsterdam home’ smell had been replaced with the smell of nothing and everything at once. The wife still found the Jasmine smell overwhelming and replaced the Jasmine-scented fragrence sticks with Rose. It didn’t change anything for me and Rose smell never quite took hold like Jasmine did.

From her recent trip to India, the wife brought along a small supply of Mysore Sandal soap. The scent of sandalwood oil in these soaps is mild and pleasant but it never leaves the bathroom.

We were in Rome for a short vacation and for the first time in over six months the house was locked for five days at a stretch. When we came back yesterday, it is that smell of sandal from the half-used soap that had taken over the house. I like it but I know that it doesn’t stand a chance against our cacophony of odours, aromas and smells…

PS The obligatory postcard from Rome:

A few days after arriving in Amsterdam, the wife had taken a free New Europe walking tour and had quite enjoyed the experience. Since the organization offered a walking tour of Prague too, we thought we’d give it a try. The tour starts from the Old Town Square at 11:00 AM. That gave us a destination in the morning, but the route was of our own choosing.

When we reached the town square, the tour hadn’t yet started. We used the time to sample “Tredlnik” – a traditional Slovak preparation of dough grilled on coal and topped with sugar.

While we found it somewhat flat and underwhelming (being brought up on Indian sweets does that to you I guess), it did manage to attract big honeybees.

The walking tour is a great way to collect nuggets of myth, legend and history. It covers fair bit of ground in 2-3 hours and we mentally bookmarked places we wanted to return to later.

Now there was something about Prague that I haven’t been able to put my finger on. Throughout the tour I kept feeling a sense of loss. Stories of self-immolation by students to protest against invasion by Soviet Union don’t lighten the air much either. The melancholia becomes almost oppressive when you are walking through the Jewish Quarters. Outside the Jewish Quarters, when our guide drew our attention to the distant installation of a metronome (which swayed gently in the air as if keeping time to a sad adagio) that stands where a statue of Stalin once stood, I felt as if I would never know happiness again.

[If you've read Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, then you'd understand when I say that it felt like being in a kingdom ruled by one of the Forsaken]

The walking tour ended near Rudolfinum, which I kept referring to as Prague’s Concertgebouw

Since we very close to Charles Bridge, we decided to go across and visit Prague Castle.

Prague Castle is a surreal world of gardens, chapels and palaces. The long shadows of spires and gargoyles and the evening light add a touch of eeriness to everything.

After walking for close to an hour, we were quite glad to emerge at the open terrace of the castle. The view of the city from here is absolutely breathtaking.

It was now time to retrace our steps and visit the places we had bookmarked during our tour. We reached the Old Town Square for another look at the Astronomical Clock. Every hour the two windows above the clock open and small figurines of apostles appear in them. The otherwise stationary figures that decorate the clock also start to move. Our guide had warned us in the morning that it’s all a bit overrated. Still, every hour the crowd begins to swell near the tower, and all the eyes are on the clockwork in anticipation of something magical. Random passersby asked me why everyone was here and after learning about the clockwork, joined the crowd. As the hour struck, the clockwork did its prescribed routine and it was all over by the time everyone had snapped a couple of decent pictures. But before the buzz could fizzle out, the latest addition to the clock – a human trumpeter atop the tower – played a delightful little tune on his trumpet by leaning out of the balcony once in each direction. The tune echoed in the square below. Everyone cheered loudly and broke into applause. It is this memory that will stay with me for a long time.

I regretted not having recorded the trumpeter, but as the wife kept saying, hundreds of others had recorded it and put it on YouTube:

We ended our day with a walk to the Museum through Wenceslas Square. It was mildly ironical to end the day surrounded by American Brand outlets that have sprouted in what was once the center of protests against Soviet oppression.

Public transport in Prague is a mix of buses, trams and the metro. Unlike Paris, where they’ll soon need to invent new colours for their Metro lines, Prague has just 3 lines and they are adequately served by primary colours (A – Red, B – Yellow, C – Green).

What Prague metro lacks in breadth, it more than makes up for in depth. Many stations are very deep underground.

The escalator rides seem to last an eternity and make your head spin. Such depths must take a toll on the escalators because we saw that about a third of them were out of order.

The concerned authorities would hang this placard in front of them forbidding you from getting onto them. Each time a train would pass it would circulate a dank draught through the station and make the placard dance fitfully for a few seconds.

[The wife is of the view that they were merely reserved for use during peak hours]

The stations were utilitarian but a few of them had an avant-garde decor comprising of dimpled golden and red/blue/green (depending on the station) plates:

The station names kept reminding me of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. Had the metro stations played Philip Glass on their public address system, I would have been greatly spooked.

Which brings me to the aural aspect of the public transport. The announcements in the Trams in Amsterdam are in a voice that is pleasant, polite but firm:

It’s like an old friend of your father counseling you about your prospects after college.

The voices I heard in public transport in Prague were feeble and lacked any authority. It was the voice your mother’s sister suggesting a home remedy for your cold.

I think traveling around the world assigning personas to public transport voices will be an interesting thing to do.

We had also forgotten the mental gymnastic of converting between currencies. This was our fourth country in Europe since coming to Amsterdam but the first one where the Euro is not accepted. I looked at it as a welcome opportunity for adding a few new coins to my collection.

I had thought that after Paris I might not ever find a city more beautiful. That idea had begun to seem naive by the time we reached the old town square.

We took a break at a small cafe at the square. Smoking in Europe seems a lot more pervasive than anywhere I’ve been to. Still, most cafes don’t allow smoking indoors. The rules in Prague or at least in this cafe were very different. Thick tobacco smoke lazily hung in air. May be it was the weather, may be it was the second-hand smoke but the place felt very surreal. It was as if we had walked into the set of a 90s hollywood spy-thriller involving Russia and the KGB. And I distinctly remember hearing Rober Miles’ Children here which reinforced that 90s feeling.

It was threatening to rain all afternoon and by the time we stepped out of the cafe, it was clear that in a few minutes it wouldn’t be a mere threat any longer. We made a dash to our hotel for picking the one umbrella we had brought with us and began our search for a shop where we could buy another. At last we found a small grocery shop run by a chinese man and his helper, which among other things, stocked umbrellas. I know neither Czech nor Chinese and English was not their strong point but an umbrella was somehow procured.

Our next stop was this bizarre TV tower. I had seen a picture of it on Wikipedia and wanted to see it for real.

It reminded me of one of my earliest interaction with a PC playing Bouncing Babies:

Had they installed tiny tracks and moved the babies up and down the tower somehow, it would’ve taken this idea to the next logical level of its morbidity.

The rain had picked up to the point of rendering our umbrellas somewhat useless. We sat in a bar munching hot fries and waited the rain out.

Prague in the evening, especially after a spell of heavy rain, feels like a dream (and not necessarily a happy one). The wet cobblestones shine like giant opals and embers in the light from the shops and the street lamps. I could imagine how unreal it would all look once fog would start setting in during winters.

After our dinner, we decided to end the day with a walk on the Charles Bridge. The sky in the distance was clear and it looked like a black blanket of clouds was being pulled from its face.