Toward the Western Mediterranean:

Cruising for Enlightenment.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness,
and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things
can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner
of the earth all one's lifetime.
— Mark Twain

By Ron Fritze
June 10, 2008

Some of you already know it, but on 11 June, Twylia and I are heading out on a cruise. We are going to England, landing at Heathrow, and then boarding our ship at Southampton, bound for the western Mediterranean. Our first stop will be Gibraltar. From there we go to Cannes, and then to Florence and Rome.

The cruise last summer also took us to Florence and Rome, but otherwise, there is not overlap between the cruises. We stop at Sardinia on 22 June, Seville (Cadiz) on 24 June, Lisbon on the 25th, Vigo on the 26th, and back to England on the 28th.

Going back to Florence and Rome are quite good things. I did not get to visit the Uffizi Gallery last summer, so I'm hoping I can score a timed ticket for the museum. Otherwise it is about a three-hour wait in line.

Last summer we visited Rome on a Sunday. We had a wonderful time walking from the Vatican down to the Forum and the Colosseum. Along the way we visited the Pantheon, but did not get to go inside because of a church service. So I want to go back to see the interior of the dome. This time we will visit the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museum.

If Mark Twain is right, Twylia and I should come back pretty enlightened. Well, we will probably come back lightened of some money, but I fear that we will also experience some heaviosity from intense exposure to all the food on the ship. Over the next couple of weeks I will try to send you reports of the Fritziad and the Twyliadyssey.

Crystal Skullduggery.

Meanwhile, let me offer a couple of notes on historical topics that might be of interest. Like a lot of you, I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls. It was a pretty good movie, not the greatest of the Indiana Jones films, not the second greatest — but it wasn't a Temple of Doom either.

What's up with these crystal skulls? Mysterious artifacts from who knows where, they are supposed to possess all sorts of strange powers. Certainly Indy's crystal skull did. Documentaries about the movie on the History and Science Fiction channels both brought out that the crystal skulls first appeared in the late nineteenth century, and that analyses with modern technology shows all of the examined skulls to be modern fakes. One of the people interviewed, a Smithsonian scientist named Jane MacLaren Walsh, has an article in a recent issue of Archaeology titled "Legend of the Crystal Skulls: The Truth behind Indiana Jones Latest Quest." [Archaeology 61 (no.3, May/June 2008), pp. 36-41]  The History and Sci-Fi documentaries managed to blunt Ms. Walsh's findings by interspersing her arguments with commentary from the usual collection of flakes and nuts, the cadre of pseudohistorians and poseurs who write about crystal skulls as artifacts from space aliens, or as harbingers of doom championing, for instance, the supposed Maya prophecy that 2012 is going to be rather rough on everyone.

Crystal skulls make for a fine movie. As history they are pure bogus hokum — redundancy intended. So, have fun at the movies if you are so moved — and let us thank Indiana Jones for making professors look like cool guys again.

A Serial Killer at Work in Cambridge.

For those of you who like a good mystery, I am just about finished with a very good book by a relatively new author, Ariana Franklin. Her novel, Mistress of the Art of Death, is set in England in 1171 during the reign of Henry II. A serial killer is at work in Cambridge. The victims are children, who are frightfully abused and murdered. Nervous townspeople blame it on the Jews. Riot follows. The Jews who survive take refuge in Cambridge Castle. Henry II is pretty concerned about this development. He wants to maintain a peaceable kingdom — and besides, the Jews were a great source of tax revenue for him.

To help out, King William of Sicily dispatches a team of investigators, including Adelia, a female physician from Salerno, whose specialty is pathology. Now this is where the story might sound like CSI goes medieval — for the few of you committed Luddites who refuse to watch pop TV, CSI refers to the long-running crime drama on CBS — but Franklin's novel is not some anachronistic clone. The characters are compelling and the reader comes to care about them. The plot is intricate and full of surprises.

By the way, I was not playing hooky from writing my own book to read Mistress of the Art of Death. I got it as an unabridged audiobook on CD for a bargain basement price from Hamilton Books on the Internet. So I didn't read, I listened — and it was a well-produced audiobook, too. Consider it highly recommended.

For the curious, the quote from Mark Twain comes from Innocents Abroad. If you haven't read it, I recommend it the next time you take a Mediterranean cruise because it is about Twain going on the voyage of the Quaker City to the Holy Land. The Quaker City's voyage was one of the earliest such excursions. The passengers had a lot of rather funny adventures. We shall see.

Click on the black panther to read Ron Fritze's previous essay,
"From Novel to Movie to Bad History: Another Boleyn Girl?"