If I were really, really rich...

I mentioned that I was watching THE GRAND TOUR a TV documentary series following art critic Brian Sewell around Italy as he talks about the experiences of young eighteenth-century British grandees there.  He's very hard to please:  he didn't like Chianti wine, dismissed the Vesuvius crater as boring, and pettifogged that the modern version of the Turin Academy was showing something they wouldn't have shown the Grand Tourists (peasant dancing to hurdy-gurdy music).  But the show is entertaining despite his efforts.

One place he stopped at was the sixteenth-century Bomarzo gardens near Rome.  That actually wasn't a Grand Tour stop; interest in that place only developed in the twentieth century.  But who cares?  It's a piece of ground where some Orsini noble commissioned a whole set of grotesque, imaginative stone statues: stuff like a grimacing head whose mouth is big enough to step into.

Which brings me to the question of what I'd do if I were really, really rich.  I'm not interested in fast cars (can't drive), fancy clothes or big mansions, but I would travel a lot.  When I was about four in the mid-'60s my father, a physics professor at Mount Allison University, spent a sabbatical year in Brighton, England.  That was about the time when Brighton was a big Mod centre, though none of us remember anything about that.  Anyway, we sailed there and back on the Greek Line ship Arcadia. (The return, I recently found out, was its last voyage before being scrapped.) I'd like to cross the Atlantic by ship again.  Also there are a few places I'd like to visit in my lifetime like Madrid's Prado art gallery and the pilgrimage mountain Tai Shan in northeastern China.

But I was also thinking, if I had the money I'd create a new Bomarzo.  One of my statues might be of Glooscap, the Hercules-like hero of the Micmac, a native people in eastern Canada, showing him sailing away on a whale as they say he finally did. (Whale-riding is found in a lot of cultures:  even Herodotus had a story about someone riding a dolphin.) Or I might have some famous Canadian explorers like Humphrey Gilbert (gesturing his palm toward heaven just before his ship was lost) or Lief the Lucky.  Or theatrical heroes like King Lear (raging on the moor), or opera heroes like Rigoletto.  Just so long as they're larger than life.