Nice to be home

Leaving Bay of Naples

One of the nicest things about exploring far-away places is coming back home to Maine. A week and a half is about my limit for traveling. After ten days comes a point of diminishing returns after which the excitement of seeing new places is eclipsed by the desire for home and familiar routines. Perhaps if I were younger I would enjoy it longer but, like many, I couldn’t afford to travel then and was way too busy with work and family to get away.

This was my fourth trip to the Mediterranean and I can see why western civilization originated there. Compared to northern Europe where my barbarian ancestors came from, the living is relatively easy. It seldom snows except in the high mountains. In late April there was still snow in the Pyrenees and in the Alps, but it very seldom snows at sea level where we spent most of our time.

Lobsters? Barcelona market

The markets were full of fruits, vegetables, fish, and meat. They grow year-round in most areas, unlike here in northern New England where farmers must rush to plant, tend, and harvest as much as they can between frosts, and where too much rain, too little rain, a late frost, or an early frost can wipe out everything. Then farmers have to wait a whole year before gambling on it all again. In the old days of subsistence farms, that could mean the difference between eating or starving.

Our ship/city

My small town of Lovell has barely over a thousand people, but there were four thousand passengers on our enormous cruise ship, not to mention fourteen hundred crew. It was a floating city with several restaurants, theaters, bars, a casino, and I don’t know how many staterooms. It pulled into bigger cities each night where it tied up near other huge, floating city-ships. Local guides waited next to tour busses each morning to show us all around their native habitat as we walked down the ramps.

Walled town in Tuscany

Clearly those guides loved their homelands as much as I love Maine and their pride was evident as we followed them around and they explained what we were seeing. One theme every guide mentioned was the need for security. Over there, they measure history by millennia whereas the history of North America is measured in centuries. Every place on earth is equally old, of course, but if history is defined as the written record of events, the record of the Mediterranean Basin goes back far longer. And, as Karl Marx observed: war is the locomotive of history. There’s been plenty of that throughout the region.

Being one of ten or fifteen people in each tour group, I mostly listened. Guides explained their cities were once fortified — surrounded by high walls and always expecting attacks. Traveling through interior Tuscany our guide pointed out hilltop villages surrounded by walls, each with a tower inside where someone was constantly scanning the countryside for invading armies or roaming hoards of bandits. Earlier there had been a long period of relative peace when the Roman Army was so strong it could protect its provinces from outside attack — The Pax Romana, or The Peace of Rome.

When Rome collapsed, Europe went into the Dark Ages — a period when no one was in charge for very long and various tribes battled for dominance. There were was no common law and few authorities to enforce it if there were. Life was tenuous and people didn’t travel much. They ventured into the countryside to tend crops and animals, but didn’t stray far from the fortress back to which they would flee if invaders appeared.

After the Dark Ages came the Pax Britannia during which England ruled the seas and few could challenge it — until the World Wars of the 20th century. Most of you reading this have grown up in a time and place during which there has been no invasion of hostile forces bent on rape and pillage. We have lived during the Pax Americana. No armies, no navies, no hoards of bandits have dared molest Americans because they knew they wouldn’t survive if they tried. We’ve been unusually fortunate to have lived peaceful lives here but how many of us realize that?

Monaco street

While most of Europe was made up of small kingdoms during the Middle Ages, or Dark Ages if you will, nearly all merged into nation states by the 20th century. One that remains is Monaco which we visited last Friday. It has been ruled by the same family since the 13th century and it’s a rich little principality of less than a square mile and over 38,000 people. It was preparing for the May 27th Grand Prix while we were there.

Naples fortification

It’s a nice place but much too crowded for me. I like Maine.

Tension in Barcelona

Opposite our hotel

Though I wasn’t looking for it, I couldn’t avoid politics during our three days in Barcelona. My wife leaves all the trip planning to me so I booked the little Hotel Bagues based its proximity to the Gothic Quarter and the sea. We could walk to places of interest along La Rambla, a popular, tree-lined pedestrian boulevard. It’s very popular and it appeared there were tourists from just about everywhere else in the world.

There were mimes, tourist shops, and restaurants with sidewalk tables along La Rambla. Above the first floor restaurants and shops were residences with small balconies overlooking the streets and nearly half displayed political banners, flags, and posters draped over them calling for Catalan independence. Tourist literature called our section the “nerve center” of Barcelona — the city which is itself the nerve center of Catalonia.

We were sipping wine on our little balcony our first night there when we heard chanting in Spanish getting louder by the minute. Then demonstrators marched out of the street across from our balcony which connected La Rambla to the Gothic quarter. They carried Catalan flags and signs and chanted a phrase neither of us understood.

Last October, Catalonia tried to hold a referendum declaring independence but Spanish authorities violently disrupted the vote. According to CNN: “Police fired rubber bullets at protesters and voters trying to take part in the referendum, and used batons to beat them back   using rubber bullets.” Nine hundred people were injured.

Across from our balcony was another owned by a local woman with a Catalan flag and another banner I couldn’t read. Our bellman told me she is a leader in the independence movement. Last October counter demonstrators gathered on the street below and tried to get her to come out, but she wouldn’t. “They would have killed her,” said the bellman.

As if that weren’t enough, the previous August, another kind of political violence flared up when Moroccan Muslim immigrants mowed people down along La Rambla with a rented van. Sixteen people were killed and more than a hundred wounded. Our bell man told me three people died under our balcony and a dozen more lay gravely wounded. The door man pulled out his phone to show me videos too gruesome to show on television. The night before, an imam blew himself up in another area as he tried to construct explosives with gas cylinders.

Last Saturday in the Gothic Quarter very heavy drumming filled the air of a plaza where we were eating breakfast at a sidewalk cafe. Heavy base vibrated my sternum as it bounced off the stone buildings on all four sides of the plaza but I couldn’t pinpoint its source. We paid our bill and walk up the front steps of a gothic cathedral across the square where many people milled about. Looking over their heads, we could see the drummers surrounded by people holding banners and flags. When it stopped, one man with a banner told me they were rallying to keep Spain united.

Below our balcony

Saturday night six motorcycle police gathered there and two vans of heavily armed soldiers with automatic weapons positioned themselves below our balcony at dusk and hotel employees said that wasn’t unusual for a Saturday night. Going to our cruise ship Sunday, there were more soldiers with automatic weapons deployed at the waterfront. 

Naples

Two days later in Naples, Italy I saw an even heavier military presence soldiers with two very alert soldiers with automatic weapons were deployed every fifty yards along a pedestrian walkway in the center of the city. On Friday we’ll be in Nice, France where two years ago a Tunisian Muslim driving a cargo truck killed 84 people and wounded 458 others. Clearly tension is high in heavily-trafficked pedestrian zones of Mediterranean cities.

Truck Attack in Nice

A huge, 13th century castle dominates the Bay of Naples where our cruise ship tied up, built by the French when they dominated the region. It’s a reminder that political conflict is nothing new here as it’s been besieged many times. Muslim navies terrorized the entire Mediterranean for centuries. The last Muslim armies were expelled from Spain in 1492, the same year Columbus discovered America.

Castle Nuovo in Naples

Castles and other material fortifications are useless, however, against the kind of terrorism plaguing the region now. The European left encourages Muslim immigration, while the rising European right wants to cut it off, especially in eastern Europe. The right claims Muslims don’t want to assimilate, don’t want to become Spaniards, Italians, Germans, or French, and have a long-term strategy to take over Europe by demography. Demographic studies indicate that native Europeans are not producing offspring in numbers sufficient to maintain population. Meanwhile, immigrants are having large families.

Europe is changing but it’s still possible to travel peacefully, for now.

Addendum:

(ANSA) – Naples, April 26 – State and Carabinieri police arrested a Gambian national in an antiterrorism operation in Naples on Thursday, sources said.

The arrest comes after investigators found evidence the suspect was planning an attack, the sources said.

Alagie Touray, 21, admitted to investigators that he had received a request to drive a car into a crowd, the sources said. The evidence against him includes a video published on Telegram in which he allegedly pledges alliance to ISIS leader Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi.

He was detained as he left a mosque in Licola, in the province of Naples. Touray landed in Messina along with over 100 other asylum-seekers in March 2017….

We were there Tuesday. Touray was arrested Thursday. The first sign one sees when arriving in Naples by sea quotes Pope Francis and pleas for no borders. Let everyone come who wants to.

Europe is committing suicide.