Blame it on the Panorama

Hotel names can be very beguiling. Having left it too late to book one of the conference hotels I selected the Hotel Panorama on this basis, and the view from my window bears out the promise of its name as you can see, being especially seductive when the church bell across the way begins to toll. Above on the Terrace where breakfast is served the view is amazing.

The hotel is also close to the Piazza San Marco, and to the ancient colonnades of the Piazza della Independenza where A room with a view was set. One morning at breakfast there was a VERY earnest (and competitive) discussion amongst some English guests tabling their encounters with different pieces of Art, but the Hotel Panorama is a little more Barton Fink than EM Forster. I did have a fleeting Separate Tables moment when pursued from the breakfast room by a handsome man :
"Madam Madam you have left something."

The hotel begins on the second floor of an undistinguished brown building in the lawyer and court district, and was meant to be accessible via a lift although I couldn't get the lift doors to open on the night I arrived. The staircase leading more or less off the street is open to the world, and probably accounted for the enormous fight broadcast from the stairwell on my first night there. It was the kind of din you'd expect if you were arresting a cat. After a lot of contrapuntal yelling between a woman and several men calm was eventually restored to the Panorama except for me, coughing myself back to sleep again.

The atmosphere here weighs on my lungs like a broth of pollens, car pollution, damp air, old buildings and cold and I've been struggling to breathe ever since I arrived. There is the off-setting 'high' of the various drugs I take, but fresh air would be preferable. On the afternoon we went to the Tenuta di Capezzana I was looking forward to the clean Tuscan hillside breezes. Instead we went straight to the cellars where an industrial strength mould has been colonising since the middle ages.

But it was lovely to get out amongst the vineyards and the crumbly buildings. I especially liked 'Luna' who was pleasingly disobedient and went in through the cellar door although told strictly that she mustn't.

The Conference venue is a beautiful Renaissance cloistre.

It's been a bit scrappy with some papers highly focused on the technicalities of specific legislation processes, by the Austrians for example (who all looked like Sigmund Freud), or on specific XML approaches to making legislation available with different schema (difficult to convey in a spoken paper being simultaneously translated). In any event I prefer the more legal discussion and loved the Constitutional academic from Rome University who delivered his view of the new citizen's rights, including full and free access to both the law online, and to an understanding of it, something he appeared to think achievable. This sort of paper inevitably includes the historical processes of that particular society, which is probably my reason for enjoying them. Of course underneath any discussion of this kind in Europe is the understanding of what happens when basic rights are no longer honoured.

On Thursday night Alex and I drifted towards the exquisite 17th century Teatro della Pergola with our maps aloft (I pretended I could read mine), paused for a stand up coffee in the Piazza san Marco, and generally meandered around the tiny winding laneways until we were in the right place. I liked the graffiti below, although its meaning eluded me. The Conference had the theatre to itself for the night : Mendlessohn's Italian symphony, conductor Christopher Franklin, Orchestra della Toscana.