March 18, 2011
Bologna to Vienna

Arising early in anticipation of a 10:05 a.m. train to Mestre Station in Venice, there is time to go for a quick walk through the Piazza Maggiore and have a coffee. I pass Gelateria Neptuno, where the black cherry ice cream and the zuppa inglese flavors are even better than the whisky-flavored gelato I had in Rome or the pistachio in Florence.

Bologna abounds in cafes, each one boasting its unique way of making coffee drinks, some like "Caffe Terza" serving their product in elegant cups with special syrups available to create variations on a theme, others, providing simpler, cheaper, classic coffees: austere espressos, cappuccinos or macchiatos capped with perfect blasts of milky foam.

Bologna is known for its food, and deservedly. The pizza is crusted thinly and pizza makers might be artisans: I have a slice of pizza with potatoes and cheese, and one with zucchini the first night I arrive. On subsequent nights I dine at "Mariposa", an inexpensive restaurant whose one waitress wears a t-shirt that says "Make Food Not War". The tortellini stuffed with pumpkin and flavored with salvia in a pork and beef ragu is my last meal there my last night.

The train to Mestre is an express, modern, well-appointed, immaculate. Unfortunately, although I went to the Bologna station on Friday with Manuel, whose Italian at the highest grade of the uniform system with which Europe now measures fluency (one sign of successful European intergration); the clerk at the station fails to stamp the Eurail pass I presented to purchase my trip reservations. When the pleasant, blue-eyed conductor who looks at my ticket for Mestre spies the omission, he mumbles negatively, and I have the impression that I am going to be charged a separate first class ticket from Bologna to Mestre. I protest at the unfairness of being charged for the omission of the clerk to whom I presented the ticket in accordance with the instructions, and he lets me keep my reserved seat, although he advises that I have the ticket stamped at Mestre.

With only twenty-one minutes to get to the bus to Villach in Austria, my next stop, I spy the line at the ticket counter in Mestre with alarm. The line moves more quickly than I anticipated, and the clerk at the counter stamps my ticket, telling me that the Villach bus leaves across the street in front of the Hotel Plaza. The bus soon arrives, a double decker. The driver looks at my Eurail pass and my reservation and indicates that I ought to go upstairs. We stop in Udine and Vicenza: we are in Friuli, heading for the Austrian border.

The bus carries numerous Austrian passengers, as well as Slovakian, and even a large African man, who takes his seat next to me. Behind me are a mother and her two thee-year old boys, who scream, cry and kick the back of my chair. The smell is not the most pleasant. At Udine, a middle-aged Austrian woman, smiling ingratiatingly as Austrians often do, tells me to move from my seat. My ticket said seating was random, so I refuse to budge and reply that I have a first class ticket. The woman smiles again and says "First class is downstairs", but I am not moving. Perhaps the downstairs is full, so nothing doing. At this, there is lots of chatter in German around me, and eventually Udo, the driver, comes upstairs. He speaks some English, so I tell him that he told me to come upstairs, and that I have a first class Eurail pass. He tells me "No", that I have a second class reservation for the bus, and that I have an assigned seat in the back. I tell him that if it is open, I will move there. He says "No, forget about it." He goes back down the stairs and shortly, we are under way again, next stop Villach, Before that, passports will be checked at the border.

***

We are due to arrive in Villach at 2:50 p.m. An hour before the mountains surge up and we pass several dry river beds and a large stream whose teal green waters flow clearly and cold. The area is industrialized, with a gravel factories and other industrial buildings lined up alongside the dry river beds and near railroad bridges for transport of the stones. The temperature has dropped five degrees centigrade according to the digital thermometer inside the bus, and mist covers the top of the mountains, although forsythia and cherry blossoms are in bloom everywhere. Tall-spired village churches are visible in the near distance. We are near Resia, wherever that is.

The trees on the mountains are not like those in Tuscany, or Bologna. There farmers grow their crops on flatland, the monotonous landscape broken up by copses of slender birches. Here evergreens are the predominant treecover and skies are moody. A one-street town semi-circles an especially large cement factory, and smaller hamlets stand side-by-side with highways. We pass no farms, except abandoned ones. We go through several tunnels not especially wide for two lane passageways. Near Vilano there is another industrial complex, another almost dried-up river bed, and a village with a church and a bridge over the stream, nestled in the side of the mountain. We are passing La Foresta and the mountains rise higher. Power lines surround the train tracks: we are in Fella Est, where the sight of the "Autogrill" convenience store next to the gas station is strangely comforting because I stopped in one with Manuel on the road from Rome to Florence. There is no tourism here, although there are a few elementary slopes created for sledding starting not far from the bottom of the rises.

A few minutes later the sun, glinting off a series of higher slopes directly in front of us, emerges. We are an altitude of eight hundred meters. There is snow in the gutters: we are in the viciinity of Camporosso. The mountain passes are snowbound: we are approaching the Austrian border at Vilach. The temperature is now ten degrees Centigrade.

We arrive at the Austrian border, but the police are uninterested in checking the passports of bus riders, busying themselves instead with cars. We are waved through and enter Austria. It seems unkind to state it, but at once the roads look more well-maintained. As we approach Vilach, it is obvious that it is a good-sized town firmly in the stream of global commerce: there is an H&M, an Agip, an Interspar along with other "big box" stores. As we approach the center, it is clear that Vilach is well-organized, prettily circled by mountains. Near the Faaker See and the Ossien See, two lakes, it is not without points of interest.

The bus stops across the street from the railway station and Udo, hauls one piece of luggage after another into the hands of all those departing. (The bus will continue to Klagenfurt.) I tip him a Euro for handing me my bag --it's hard work, and I want to show my appreciation for his not making me move to my assigned seat. I hoist my backpack on and grab my two hand parcels -the smaller knapsack and a disposable bag with food for the journey, and make my way into the Hauptbahnhof. The train is already at the station and I find my first class compartment easily.

I enter the car only to catch sight of a sunburned man perhaps in his sixties who waves me in loudly. I bet he is drunk: I am correct. He is sitting in the single seat immediately in front of me. Once I sit down, he turns around and tries to engage me in conversation. "Ich sprache kein Deutsch. Lassen mich allein." I reply. It does not matter that I am not speaking correctly, it would make no difference. "Franzosich? Englisch?" he enquires craftily. He gets up and moves towards me, at which point I say "Polizei --jetzt". He holds his hands out towards me and mumbles "Want ppp-puss-y", but he walks away.

A few minutes later, a young woman wearing a raincoat over a dress, but also carrying a backpack, enters the car. The man walks over to her and again, tries to make conversation. She speaks to him sharply as she places her knapsack next to mine. Our eyes meet in agreement about the situation, she gestures to me to keep an eye on her knapsack and goes out to smoke a cigarette. Mr. Excitement is still mumbling out loud, now from another seat in the car. I leave the car and knock on the plexiglas door of the conductor's office. He speaks English, so I explain the situation fully. He and another conductor return to the car with me. The man does not have a ticket for the first class car, so they order him to leave, which he does, muttering under his breath all the while. The train sets out, and one of the conductors, amiably greets his passengers with "Gruss Gott" --"God Bless"-- the traditional Austrian hello, as he punches their tickets.

The train is well-appointed, but showing its age. Still, it is a good change after the bus with its smell and compressed seating. The train has picture windows, and I have plenty of room to spread out. The landscapes passing by outside the windows are agricultural, with plenty of whitewashed barns with slate roofs, as in Switzerland and Germany. "Impress" and "Fundermax" warehouses are part of the landscape, but their facades are graffiti-free and clean. Standing next to more traditional houses using various roof materials - tin, slate, industrial terra cotta-- are small apartment complexes of seven stories and two apartments each with terraces, whitewashed spanking white. We are near St. Veit an der Glan. In another valley, a tall, onion-domed church dominates a large cluster of farmhouses. In a more industrial area further on, Treibach-Althofen, freshly-cut lumber, unstripped of the bark, is neatly stacked in several large piles for placing in nearby boxcars later.

Three hours from Vienna, the journey east is going smoothly. Upon arrival I must go to the ticket window to buy a reservation for the 10:22 a.m. train to Frankfurt to avoid having to return there later in the week. After that, I can take a taxi to the Konig von Ungarn, the hotel I stayed in for a night in 1992, when I cut short my visit to Budapest with a group from the Council on Foreign Relations to play hooky with a presidential speechwriter who had already booked there and encouraged me to join him.

Der Konig von Ungarn (The King Of Hungary) is at 10 Schulerstrasse in the Innere Stadt, the city center. On its site Mozart wrote "The Magic Flute". Not that Vienna ever thanked him for it at the time: "The Magic Flute" had its premiere not in Vienna, but in Prague. Vienna has a reputation for being unkind to composers nurtured there: Mozart, Schubert, Mahler --it was only after their deaths that Vienna embraced them. Yet in despite of Vienna's neglect of its most famous and beloved genius, images of Mozart can be found everywhere in the center city --in the form of children's toys, marzipan, chocolates and trinkets, in all manner of shops catering to the tourist trade.

Der Konig von Ungarn is near the Stefansdom, the church dedicated to Saint Stephen that is the city's most famous. It is also near the Albertina, which houses the drawings collection of Grand Duke Albert, a nineteenth century relative of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, Franz Josef II. The collection is centered around drawings by Dutch artists of the sixteenth century: Rembrandt, Ruysdael, Cuyp, and others. It was not open the day I visited Vienna in 1992, Museums close on Mondays, but even during the week I am here the Albertina might still be closed: it does not have a permanent collection on display, and I have been told it opens only when there is an exhibition.

I would also like to go to the Dorotheum, Vienna's best-known auction house. As a veteran of Galeries Drouot in Paris, an experience more like a livestock auction than what the large British auction houses put on, I am keen to see what a Viennese fine art auction would be like: blue-eyed dowagers elegantly dressed bidding on KPM porcelain from Berlin made in the 1920s; or on the rarest red Bottger porcelain from the 18th century (when the Chinese methods of production were first successfully imitated in Dresden)? Or edgy, thin men in all in black, bidding on Kokoschkas? To know, I will have to go.

Other than that, my only other commitments are to watch the Lippanzaners put through their paces at the Spanish Riding School Tuesday morning at ten a.m., and Wednesday night, to hear Tannhauser with Peter Seiffert in the title role. Also on Wednesday, a friend has arranged for me to have breakfast with his friends, Doris and Imre. Doris is Austrian, Imre is Hungarian. They know my Swiss friend Max through RAIDAG, the skating group for ice dancing established at the end of the Second World War to promote the new sport of ballroom dancing on skates among enthusiasts from countries who had been bitter enemies only a few years before.

And I would like to try tafelspitz, an Austrian speciality made of boiled beef. On my train journey I was given a copy of "Kurier" a newspaper which happened to publish listings of Vienna's top restaurants, taken from the Viennese equivalent of the Zagat Guide that started in the United States. Surely I can find decent tafelspitz in one of the restaurants on the lists.