Mannekin Pis ('Ere, What's That... Oh, That's Disgustin'!)

Some three years ago whilst buying some 78 rpm records I was asked if I collected postcards as well. On saying yes, a large cardboard box appeared and it was given to me freely by the wonderful Hayley Easthope. I rashly promised to send a CD of the scanned images once I had got through them.

They went on the back burner for a while at my excitement in going through the 78s - about a third of which are still waiting to be looked at and played. But every now and then the box has come out and I've spent an hour or so scanning them and it seemed never to make a dent in them! Last weekend I finished going through them and when I checked the folder that I had been scanning to there were 700 files in it. There's been a lot of those odd hours or so over the three years!

One set of postcards from the collection has already featured here over several posts. Hayley's collection included the postcards sent by World War One soldier Edgar Pedley and they gave a fascinating insight into one man's experiences in the war. (Being a blog, the entries will appear in reverse order)

This article features a book of postcards brought back from another war. Hayley's father brought this book of photos back from Belgium at the end of World War 2. They were never used, they were brought back as a souvenir. The book is intact, though a little fragile from being opened and viewed many times over the last 70 years.

The Mannekin Pis of Brussels is a fairly small statue of a little boy relieving his bladder. Known in UK popularly as The Pissing Boy it either delights you with its innocence or disgusts you with its vulgarity.

The Belgians must be really proud of it because of all of the postcards I have from Belgium (not just the ones from Hayley's collection) the percentage of them that include this particular water feature is over 70%!

That's a staggering amount. The majority of the ones that don't feature it are views of Bruges. A place I must really visit myself one of these days.

So far my only trips through (rather than to) Belgium have been on coach holidays to Austria or Amsterdam. We did stop to look at a Belgian chocolate factory once which put me off Belgian chocolate for life as I watched a chocolate-covered bluebottle struggling as it went round and round a mixing wheel. I suspect in real life the chocolate on that wheel was for public display rather than for eating, but they really should have checked it once in a while!

Ok, I'll shut up for a while and show the rest of the postcards from this book.

Looking at the cartoons - and in particular at the clothes of the people depicted you could be forgiven for thinking this book of postcards dated from the earlier war of 1914-18...

...but then, in amongst them is this one with a hemline above the knee which clearly belongs from the mid 1940s onwards.

And I'll finish with another postcard of the Mannekin Pis that shows a real photograph. I'm sure today the water would be supplied from a pipe hidden in his leg. Perhaps the pain of the pipe makes up for the embarrassment he has caused the more inhibited viewers over the years!

Many thanks Hayley. More postcards from the Hayley Easthope Collection to come every now and then!

Florence's Ponte Vecchio

8 August 2006. After our look round the Duomo our hairy-armpitted guide walked us around to the Ponte Vecchio bridge and left us with an hour or so to wander around. Florence is a city of statues. They are literally every few yards. They were littering the place so profusely that they set up a few arches in the Piazza della Signoria and bunged a collection of them there. Every one a masterpiece as it were. Anyway, opposite this scrapyard of famous sculpture is Michaelangelo's David. Not the original, which is in the museum, but a copy. Exact down to the oversized hands - though if you were about to kill the giant Goliath then oversized hands might just have come in ...er... hand-y... Anyway according to Hairy-Pits, it was Michaelangelo's way of saying "I made this with my hands" and more fool him... Should have used a chisel... Pausing only to tie the end of her armpit hair to the whip aerial of a Vespa scooter that was stopped at some traffic lights, we went to have a look at the bridge. I'm kidding! I'm kidding! It was a Lambretta... Ponte Vecchio is one of the great Medieval bridges of the world. This is what London Bridge used to look like at the time of the Great Fire of London. Only with more heads on stakes... The construction of a stone-built bridge was started in 1345. Most of the shops were butchers' shops until 1593 when the city's finest decided they would rather have something more elegant and stylish on their showcase feature and they moved in the goldsmiths, who have remained to this day (although they are very very old and feeble...) The gold shops line both sides of the bridge, though of necessity, the shops are not very deep, even the ones that overhang the side of the bridge parapet! You can, by the way, buy much of the same jewellery much cheaper a few streets away from the bridge. But it's not the same. Well it was for Miss Franny as just looking in the shops costs the same either on or off the bridge... The view both up or down the River Arno from the bridge is very aesthetically pleasing. Another way of saying "nice". It became for some reason a cool thing to do, for lovers to attach a padlock to the gates of the bridge. It has been there for 700 years so the act symbolised a wish for a long relationship. After the first few thousand padlocks again the city's finest stepped in and it's now an offence with a 50 Euro fine attached... Why would a bridge have gates? Because they are a route for friends - or foes - across rivers and into cities. Armed forces the world over have a great affection for the heady combination of bridges and dynamite. Ponte Vecchio was the only bridge across the River Arno that the Germans left intact. Presumably under the express orders of Hitler who had either promised Eva Braun they would take a padlock there, or he had plans to number the bricks and transport it back to the Fatherland... Our meeting place was outside the Basilica of Santa Croce which was started on May 3 1294 with the facade of marble added 1857-63. As if I can be bothered to remember that... Michaelangelo's tomb is inside it. According to our guide who was a bit red in the face with the effort of dragging a Lambretta behind her...

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Olympia and the Temple of Zeus

Thursday, 27 August 2009. Our port today is Katakolon and we jump onto a coach for a tour to the ancient site of Olympia. Not Mount Olympus, but the site of the ancient Olympic Games.

The Palaestra was built in the third century BC as part of the gymnasium complex, it was used to practice boxing, wrestling and jumping. And apparently still used for ducking practice (see below)... What makes this site somewhat different to some of the other sites we visited during the week is the fact that there's actually a bit of greenery knocking about. It is quite pleasant to walk around Olympia and there is some shade to be found. That's the plus side.

On the negative side there are so many lumps of what used to be parts of impressive buildings that it's difficult to make much out apart from the one or two bits that are obvious. Unless you like listening to guides rambling on I'd suggest learning a bit about the place and its history beforehand and what I wish someone had told me - find a map of the site and print it to take with you.

The Philippeion was an Ionic circular building of ivory and gold, built by Philip II, King of Macedonia. It contained statues of Philip's family, Alexander the Great, Olympias, Amyntas III and Eurydice I. Somewhere behind it is the place where they light the Olympic torch by sunlight reflected and concentrated by a curved mirror. Runners then carry it in relay to wherever the games are being held.

Miss Franny is giving me that look... She knows that any second now I will be so fed up with the drone of the guide's voice that I'll wander off to take more photos and worry about what I'm seeing later at home.

We were at Olympia for a limited time of course and so far hadn't moved for 20 minutes. I wandered off...

More about this particular tall standing column later, but it is one of the most exciting remains at the site.

The remains of an early building. There is evidence of religious worship here from the 10th century BC, but evidence of building only from around 600 BC. For 400 years apparently they sat around saying "It's freezing - shut that door!" only to get the response, "Door???"

The Crypt was an arched way leading to the Olympic Stadium. In the very early days the Olympics were for men only. They competed nude and women were not allowed to enter the site on pain of death and being chucked over the cliff into the river as well!

This is the actual stadium on the edge of the site. The site includes temples, bath houses, practice gymnasiums, the workshop of Pheidias, who sculpted the statue of Zeus for his temple - we'll hear of that in a moment - and a villa of Nero's. A chariot race was held between Pelops and King Oinomaos, whose daughter fancied Pelops. She had the pins taken from her father's chariot wheels. He was killed and Pelops took the throne. He was buried here in the 6th century BC. His tomb, the Pelopian, though, is in ruins.

There's a good map on Wikipedia that would be worth having with you. I've had to go looking to make sense of what we saw - I soon tired of the guide I'm afraid and anyway she had such a quiet voice that only those who were treading on her toes could hear her...

There were temples to both Zeus and his missus, Hera in the sacred area or Temenos. Shown here are the remains of the Temple of Zeus with that single column re-erected that we saw earlier. The temple held a fabulous statue of Zeus, made of marble covered with ivory and gold, seated with a small statue of crowned Nike, goddess of victory in his right hand and a sceptre in his left. The statue was considered one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and stood for 600 years here before being either pinched and whisked off to Constantinople and perishing in a fire in 475 AD, or perishing in the fire that destroyed the temple in 425 AD.

The workshop was discovered in 1954 - a momentous year as that's when I was born - and it contained not only a cup with an inscription "I belong to Pheidias" (honestly!) but some of his tools, moulds used for parts of the statue and even an elephant's tusk from which some of the ivory was used. Rumours that the cup had an inscription on the other side "so keep your bloody hands off!" are sadly untrue... Pheidias did come in for a bit of criticism as apparently if Zeus had stood up, he'd have banged his head on the roof of the temple. I wonder if Pheidias was ever struck by lightning...? Despite the ancient destruction of the statue, so many images exist of it on coins, medals etc, that we can be fairly certain exactly how it looked.

And that's all for this article. Now I'm going to strip naked and dash three times round the Stadium...

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St Marks Square, Venice

Sunday, 3 May 2009. I've already described how we got to Venice, so in this entry we'll have a look at St Marks Square and in particular the exterior of the cathedral itself.

At the waterfront to the west of St Mark's Square are several ranks of Venice's famous gondolas. There are many other places to find a gondola, but from here you have the best chance of being guided underneath the Bridge of Sighs. Hence, the gondolas here may not be the cheapest to ride.

The Doges Palace. Doge is the Italian equivalent of Duke and the Duke of Venice was also the Magistrate, hence the judicial hearings were heard in the palace. It was largely constructed from 1309 to 1424 and following a fire in 1574 was reconstructed in the original style.

St Mark's is the only "square" in Venice. All the other spaces are called a "campi" rather than a "piazza". It had its origins in the 800s but only reached its present shape and size in 1177 when waterways, including a dock that separated it from the Doges Palace, were filled in.

The bell tower is 98.6 meters tall, and separated from the basilica. It has an arched belfry, housing five bells.

The belfry is topped by a cube, with walking lions and the female representation of Venice. It is capped by a pyramid with a golden weathervane of the archangel Gabriel. It reached its present form in 1514 although it is a reconstruction, completed in 1912 after the collapse of 1902.

The first thing that strikes you when you look at any cathedral and stop to think about it is how long it must have taken to build it. In fact that's a source of frustration for many people in Barcelona, where Gaudi's cathedral, La Sagrada Familia has been coming together slowly since 1882 and it is not due to be completed until 2026. Gaudi shrugged this off with the comment "My client is not in a rush..." I quite like the idea that every time I go to Barcelona there is something new to find. And when you think about it, it really makes no difference whether that's because it wasn't actually there to be found the last time, or whether there was just so much to take in that you missed it. With any large cathedral there is always something new to find and see when you visit.

Above the central arch with the fabulous mosaic that we'll look at in a minute, there are four horses cast in bronze in Roman times. The Horses of Saint Mark were part of a Ben-Hur type racing chariot statue. They were looted from Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, around 1204 by Venetian forces in the 4th Crusade.

I've mentioned them before, because in 1797, Napoleon stole the horses for the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, in Paris. They were returned in 1815 after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. In the 1980s damage from air pollution forced their replacement with exact replicas. The originals are displayed inside - something else I have yet to see...

The mosaics in the arches of St Marks are worth a look with real gold having been used in the making. And let's tear ourselves away from the cathedral for a moment to spare a glance around the rest of St Marks Square. I've been lucky in that I've never been there when it has flooded. The drains of the square apparently lead straight to the Grand Canal and whilst it works perfectly at most times, when the level of the Lagoon rises because of storm surges, the channels of the drains work both ways... St Marks Square is the lowest part of Venice.

I have already mentioned the Doges Palace. So let's look to the other side of the cathedral, where we find the clock tower. The tower is an imposing building with the Venetian winged lion standing out against a blue and white chequerboard design at the top of the façade, on a single storey tower. On top is a bell with two giant blackened bronze figures who strike the bell on the hour.

Right! It's time to plunge into the maze of streets and see where we end up!

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