Bibendum & Me

We were the American cousins, so every summer when I was a child we migrated back to Europe. Aunt Vicky’s house in Geneva served as the base from which we would travel to wherever the adults had decided to rent a house by the beach, invariably Mediterranean and usually in Italy. The best times of my childhood were the week or two each year, when, free of Micheline, my vicious French governess, my mother, father and I, accompanied by our Guide Michelin, would drive from Geneva to Capri or Mallorca or wherever the rented house was. We’d swerve off on whatever worthwhile detours Bibendum, the tire man, suggested, whether for a must see, must eat or you’ll regret it forever if you don’t sleep at this hotel. In those days, Michelin, despite its red ubiquity, served as a guide to tempt the average tourist off the beaten path in search of various pleasures, to point him to the authentic travel experience. Mum, Dad and Bibendum took me to amazing places, whether to savor an elemental risotto with truffles, sleep in a converted 14th century abbey, or be given the gift of a visit to the mind-blowing Lascaux caves, which now are closed, very likely forever. These watershed moments have remained as vivid in memory as when first experienced.

I was eight when we visited the Sistine Chapel. Back then, you had to dress to visit a church, and females not wearing long sleeves, skirts and head coverings were denied entry. My mother always carried the lace mantillas we’d previously acquired in Spain for the purpose, and I know that wearing them and dressing for the experience only heightened it. The Chapel was closed when we arrived, but Dad’s fluent Italian and a few thousand lire, opened the doors. As you know, the place is vast, and back then, in ‘59, the ceiling had not yet been cleaned or restored.

We lay down on the marble benches displayed about the room, moving from one to another, at one with the cool marble, at one with the astonishing and teeming ceiling, alone with the beauty –transported by it—seeing it each for the first time but simultaneously aware that we weren’t the first and that anybody who was anybody had been there before. Earlier that day we’d seen Keats’s and Shelley’s graves at the Protestant cemetery. They had been there. Napoleon, my mother’s favorite historical figure, stopped by whenever he visited his sister Pauline Borghese, whose palazzo we also visited. Somehow these added to the experience. It was my virgin viewing, but it was augmented by the fact that it had been viewed before by other people who, dwarfed by Michelangelo’s achingly gorgeous art had shared the same feelings of awe, humility and capillary twitching excitement. It was my first time, and it was heightened by the impasto of all those others’ first times, one on top of the other.

In 2004, I took my children to Italy for their first time. Our strategically chosen hotel was steps from the Vatican, and there we hastened after a very early breakfast, intending to pop into the Sistine Chapel, and avoid the crowds. There was already a line, however, and extremely long, to get in. It would take a good two hours just to snake to the doors of the Sistine Chapel, and then we would enter the sanctum sanctorum accompanied by hordes, and be whisked out again in no time. No lying on cool marble benches. There was a heat wave that summer, the Yen was strong, and the queue was made up of hundreds of Japanese tourists, trimmed like Christmas trees with digital equipment for every need. They all wore hi-tech fly-fishing vests with hooks and carabiners attached to hold water bottles, maps, fans, cell phones –whatever the up-to-the-minute traveler might require—and were crowned in air conditioned pith helmets with battery-operated fans. I had viewed these items in a catalogue of high-end useless and costly devices and wondered who the hell would ever in a million years buy these things. Well, here was who. Every single one of them.

Still smarting from the indignity and disappointment of introducing the kids to the Mona Lisa at the Louvre the previous year, I made a command decision not to inflict the Sistine Chapel on them. The vision of standing packed side by side like anchovies, or koi, looking up at the brilliantly polychromed ceiling with hordes of tourists of any nationality in fly fishing vests and pith helmets was too painful to contemplate. I felt hideously guilty at the time for depriving my children, when in Rome, of an indisputable must-see, the Real Thing in anyone’s book. But I wanted them to savor the Sistine Chapel in a similarly private and real way as I had on my first visit. This was now clearly an impossibility, and I wasn’t going to make them stand in the blazing sun for hours only to be tourist sheep quickly herded through the Chapel and then disgorged into a street filled with stands selling Sistine Chapel shot glasses, umbrella, tea towels.

We never liked Disney World.