On Monday May 27th, we drove from Trieste to Castello Bevilacqua on the far side of the Euganean Hills west of Venice. Our goal was to see the countryside and to enjoy local foods, of course, but also to see some fabulous Byzantine art and history in Aquilea and Medieval art by the wild artistic pioneer Giotto in Padua.
I had gotten plenty of coffee at two different caffes in Trieste, so I was ready to make tracks. We made a quick drive by the park at the Castello di Miramare, but we couldn’t see much from the parking area and, while beautiful, it's of limited historic and artistic interest so we motored on to Aquilea and Grado.
The drive to Aquilea was just a little over an hour. There we visited the incomparable Byzantine Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta and its huge collection of Roman mosaics and Byzantine frescoes. This was amazing!
The Basilica was beautiful and serene, not overrun with tourists while we were there, and it has an excellent bookstore. By the second century, Aquilea was one of the great cities of the world, with a population over 100,000, and the basilica was built and flourished under Constantine's Eastern Roman Empire. The structure was completely razed by Attila the Hun in 452 AD, but the mosaic floors were protected under the rubble.
The mosaics depict a mix of geometric figures and animals, all beautifully crafted, some of them whimsical. There are hundreds of images protected under plexiglass that you can see from raised walkways. The Celtic-looking Solomon's know shown here is reproduced many times as a recurring motif between panels showing animals of land and sea, and occasionally a human. There are two forms of this knot, a simpler one with a long vertical and a long horizontal loop entwined, and this more complex one with the addition of a square loop intricately woven in. The complex web with the colors going from dark to light reflect life, death, and spirituality.
From Aquilea we drove a short distance to Grado on the coast for lunch at Savial: Lorna had Spaghetti alla Busara, Melissa had ye olde Insalata Caprese and some vegetarian pasta dish made special for her, and I had the Boreto alla Graisana, a hyperlocal fisherman’s dish with polenta that I had only recently learned about in Venice, so that was lucky! The Boreto is a cucina povera dish similar to the Portuguese Cataplana, a common, simple preparation for whatever the fisherman was unable to sell at the market that day. It includes fresh fish, olive oil, garlic, salt, black pepper and vinegar, but never ever tomatoes. It is always served with polenta.
Grado reminded me of an enchanting cross between Provincetown and the Jersey Shore.
We spent too much time exploring Grado, and it was still a two hour drive to Padua to see the Scrovegni Chapel. We arrived just in time for the last tour of the day. I been fascinated with the idea of seeing the Scrovegni Chapel ever since reading about it in Marcel Proust's classic In Search of Lost Time. The interior was painted by Giotto in the very early 1300s, and it revolutionized religious painting. Giotto's wild imagination (see his idea of Hell at the top of this page) and his realistic portrayals of people and animals set a new standard and established imagination as a valuable component of painting, which had been strictly formulaic in the centuries since the fall of Rome.
When we departed Padua it was past 7:00 and we still had about 90 minutes of driving, which would bring us just to sundown. We drove up into the rugged Euganean Hills past vineyards and fields of poppies, to the home of the great poet Petrarch at Arquà Petrarca. The vineyards were beautiful, but the fields of poppies in bloom were breathtaking. It is worth noting that these red poppies are for culinary use, they are not the white central Asian variety that are used to produce opiate drugs.
The Colli Euganei, or Euganean Hills were another thing that I had heard about off and on for years but that had jumped back into my imagination on reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills. That had inspired me to add this extra few miles to the itinerary and while looking for it on Google Maps, I saw a link for the castello. Naturally I clicked on it and now we'd be spending a night in this amazing place, all as a result of a serendipitous chain of reading and researching places for this vacation.
Just about sundown we arrived at the gloriously, crazily beautiful 14th century Castello Bevilacqua for supper and sleep. The castle is foursquare with four-story towers at the corners and an enclosed courtyard. The rooms are in the towers, on two upper floors, and there's a dining room, breakfast room, front desk and other essentials on the ground floor. Each room is uniquely and lavishly decorated according to a theme; we stayed in the Cardinal Bonifacio room, and the decor included an absolute glut of ecclesiastical antiques and artifacts. The ceilings were high so it felt spacious, not cluttered.
The rooms in adjacent towers on the same level were connected by common areas with their own themes and with comfortable modern furniture set out for relaxing. In addition to the furniture and the various artifacts there were some oddball items that seemed to just heighten the sense of glorious chaos. For a while I was writing my notes at a table with two typewriters, beside me was a stuffed peacock, and looking over my shoulder was a carved wooden life-size African statue of a warrior! Where did it all come from? I wondered, but only idly - I was having too much fun just being in the experience after a long day of exploring.
Our dinner was incredible, but fortunately not as idiosyncratic as the setting was. We started with a local wine, the Vignalta Colli Euganei Rosso “Gemola”, a Merlot/Cabernet Franc blend, and an amuse bouche of potato pakora with citrus sauce. We shared a cheese board, and then I had Mazzancolle shrimp on rainbow spring veggies and scallops in sweet pea puree, Lorna had the red mullet, Melissa had a wonderful linguini with seasonal dandelion pesto served in a most curious fashion shown here. The two women shared a Mascarpone-and-chocolate dessert.
We slept soundly and arose ready for another busy day.