A Don’s Life

Classics in Cuba

I have been rather off radar because, as I hinted in my last post, I went with the family to Cuba for a few days -- a brief visit, but one driven by the desire to see the place before Fidel died and before Obama loosened it up to the United States (before, I mean, there was a GAP on every street corner). We couldn't, it seems, put it off much longer.

I shall report on some of the surprises soon. But lets start with the biggest of all. I never expected to see so much classical tradition, and classics around the place. At the top of this post is a a wonderful little 1828 classical revival temple from one of the main squares in the city (the Rough Guide claimed it was a miniature replica Parthenon, which it isn't -- but it still is a great piece of, archaeologically inspired,colonial classicism).

And there was more than just that. We missed the vast statue of Athena (the world's third largest indoor statue) in the Capitolio -- a 1920s building closed for renovation, but externally bearing an unnerving resemblance to the Capitol in Washington DC (on the right, from our hotel bedroom). But in the front hall spanking new university building (which looks, I have modestly  to say, a rather pricier piece of architecture than our own recent Faculty extension) was a somewhat smaller version of the cult statue of Athena from the Parthenon.

There were also a good deal of original antiquities around the place -- from pots, to paintings and sculpture. Most of these I am afraid I cant illustrate as photography was often not officially allowed , and I hadn't quite mastered the technique of buying the blindness of the guards.

The history of holidays

I spent most of yesterday on a business park just outside Peterborough. I was at the HQ of Thomas Cook, the travel company -- not booking a holiday (though the vast number of people working busily here suggested that the holiday business had not been as hit by the recession as you might guess), but exploring the company's archive. For the company goes back to the mid nineteenth century, and to an excursion he arranged in 1845 from Leicester to Liverpool. In fact one of the objects on display in the archive was an 1840s Cook's guidebook-cum-brochure for Liverpool.

I was there, as you might guess, to try to find out more about Cook's travel to Pompeii and Athens in the nineteenth century. Now, Cook's customers were not anything like so downmarket as they are sometimes painted (and were painted at the time in the more snobbish sectors of the British press), but they do give you a glimpse of the travel experience of those who are not simply blue-blooded aristocrats. Amonhst his early travellers to the Mediterranean, you find retired army officers, families from New Zealand, single ladies and all sorts.

So what did I turn up?

The Egyptian Museum in Turin

You have been very nice in not complaining about my long haul, big carbon footprint weekends (I suspect because they were to visit the kids, and mothers get a bit extra on their emissions allowance if on maternal business). I fear that Sunday had no such excuse. I went to Turin with the husband for the sole purpose of visiting the Egyptian Museum -- which we had never visited and which is run by an old friend of ours from Cambridge, who showed us round.

This post is part of my very sporadic mini-series "Great Museums that you Might Not Know". Because it is tremendous.

I always get a slightly perverse kick out of Egyptian museums anyway. That is to say I know a very few of the barest bones of Egyptian history and culture. I can more or less tell my Middle Kingdom from my Old, I know a few of the great names and I good give a very rough and slightly inaccurate explanation of what "Egyptians" (which Egyptians you rightly ask) thought about what happened to the body after death. But more than that is all a bit of a mystery. All of which puts me in the same position as the many of visitors to classical collections -- who know something about the difference between the Republic and Empire, have heard of Nero and can describe a gladiatorial show. . .  So it turns out to be rather museologicallay instructive.

But there was a lot more to the Museo Egizio in Torino.