The Split Rock Lighthouse State Park

Split Rock Lighthouse, MN (Aug 19, 2016)

On November 27, 1905, a storm system moved through the Great basin, bringing fresh easterly winds to the Great Lake region. By early morning the next day the winds had reached 68 miles per hour in the harbor of Duluth, Minnesota, on the shores of Lake Superior. It became known as the Mataafa storm, after one of the 29 ships that sank that day. During the storm the water of the lake on the North Shore were raised by almost three feet above normal, and heavy ice and snow covered the region. The temperature were so low that one of the body of the unfortunate sailors from the Maatafa wreck had to be chopped out of solid ice from the bay to be given a proper burial.

Split Rock Lighthouse Park

The portion of the Lake Superior shore where the wrecks occurred was named as the most dangerous coast of the whole Great Lakes region. To prevent a similar tragedy to repeat in future storms, the Pittsburg Shipping Company, owner of many of the lost vessels, lobbied the government to provide some protection in the form of a lighthouse. The Split Rock Lighthouse was built, on a 140-feet rock cliff overlooking Beaver Bay, not far from the site of another shipwrec from that fatal storm, that of the Madeira shooner-barge. With its octagonal shape, steel-frames brick building, it is the most picturesque lighthouse on the Great Lakes. When it was built there were no roads along the North Shore of Lake Superior, and all construction materials had to be supplied by water, and lifted on the cliffs with a crane. Its dramatic location made it a popular touristic attraction for sailors and excursion boats, and in 1924 a road was built from Duluth to allow land access. This was the beginning of Route 61 now connecting all the previously isolated towns on the North Shore, all the way to Grand Marais. Now retired, the lighthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1969, and designated as National Historic Landmark in 2011.

View from Corundum Point

Since 1945 the lighthouse is part of the Split Rock Lighthouse State park, managed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. We visited the park on our free day during our summer trip to the North Shore. The park is beautifully maintained, with many trails on land, and even a kayak and canoe route along the lake shore. We spent the whole day walking around the park, with Kero leading the way from one pebbly beach to the next (see for example the panorama below). The park has several camping grounds easily accessible from the road; something to consider for the next time we will visit (assuming that Kero would be up for camping... we never tried staying overnight in a tent with him that and I am not sure he would be relaxed enough to actually let us sleep). Before turning back to the cabin we rented, we climbed up a trail leading to Corundum Point, a rocky outcrop raising from the lake with an excellent view on both sides of the shore (little photo above on the right). The point claims its name for the belief that the outcrop was rich of corundum mineral (Al2O3, the same gem as emerald). A crushing house was built high on the lake shore to process the mineral, that however turned out to just be a hard rock, and not the precious gem. One can still see the foundation of the mining buildings along the steep (and sometimes almost lost in the vegetation) trail.

After a quick lunch with some cheese I "smuggled" from Italy, we went back to the car, for a quick stop on the cabin we rented near Lutsen, before heading north to Grand Marais for dinner.

Split Rock Lighthouse Park, MN (Aug 19, 2016)

Roaminations Across Italy

Umbria, Italy (October 28, 2007)

Before I took my two suitcases on a plane to l'America, I was very much into caves. Living in Trieste, at the center of a region crisscrossed by deep caverns and tunnels as if it was a form of swiss cheese, it was just a matter of time before I would fall into one of these holes. And indeed I fell, multiple times, in fact, together with my friends in our exploration of the karstic underworld.

Sarteano, Tuscany

One could argue that the caves where, in fact, an excuse for other kinds of exploration, more attuned to the study of human nature, rather than hidden geological mysteries. Adventures typically involving good wine, food, and other forbidden pleasures that are not fit to write on a respectable blog. Yet this was all part of a journey of discovery across the landscape of Italy and its people, above as well below the surface of a land that barely exists as a country, yet is impressed in three full millennia of recorded history. And we traveled a lot, along the forgotten paths meandering across the mountains, peppered with small medieval villages still preserving the memories of multiple centuries in their walls of recycled stones, stolen from an ancient Roman road. But it is not the stones, or the marble in the monuments, that we were looking in our roaminations. It is the people we would meet on the road. The boy still carrying the face immortalized half a millennia ago by a Raffaello in some Renaissance painting. The owner of the closed bar that had run out of cheese when we were begging for food during the afternoon break, but still opened his store and made the best lard sandwich that I will ever eat in my life. Or the old lady that two of my friend helped back to her house on the top of the hill, disappearing then for hours because she insisted serving them a five course meal, in gratitude, before they could leave.

If you truly want to discover a country you may perhaps skip its muddy caves and concentrate on its surface, but please dump your Baedeker and find its living history in the people you meet.

Perugia, Italy (September 15, 2009)

Dead Marshes

Lake Trasimeno, Italy (Sept 16, 2009)

There is a scene in the Lord of the Rings where Frodo, Sam and Gollum need to traverse the Dead Marshes. These almost impassable marshes had been, an age before, the theatre of a bloody battle during the last alliance between Elves and Men, when the forces of Mordor were first defeated. The corpses of the fallen soldiers still lingered in the water, amid will-o'-the-wisps enchanting the travelers and luring them to join the dead form eternity. It is said that Tolkien imagined the Dead Marshes based on his horrific experience during WWI, and in particular the battle of the Somme where he witnessed the corpse of his dead companions languishing in the mud.

The photo above shows the location of another crucial battle that over 2200 years ago almost changed the course of history in the mediterranean. During the Battle of Lake Trasimeno Hannibal executed the largest and most successful ambush in history, and delivered one of the most devastating defeats ever suffered by the Roman Republic. It is a story worth telling.

In case you forgot, Hannibal Barca was the greatest general in history, still studied and admired in present-day military academies (WWII general Patton believed he was the re-incarnation of Hannibal, go figure). He was the leading carthaginian commander during the Second Punic war, when Rome and Carthage battled each other for the supremacy in the Mediterranean. In one of the boldest military actions ever recorded, Hannibal crossed into Europe through the strait of Gibraltar, traveled through Iberia and Gaul (modern day Spain and France) and finally crossed the Alps into Italy, with an army of 37,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry and 37 war elephants. The Romans, that had planned to battle the Carthaginians in Iberia, were taken by surprise, and suffered a defeat in northern Italy on the shores of the river Trebia. With that victory Hannibal was free to march south unchallenged, and the desperate Romans struggled to raise a new army to stop the carthaginian general before he could reach Rome. A 100 miles north of Rome, Lake Trasimeno was the location chosen by the roman consul Gaius Flaminius to engage Hannibal's army.

It didn't go well. Flaminius's pride led him to a rush attack, against the advice of his generals, in an unfavorable location between the marshes bordering the lake and the hills behind. Hannibal in fact provoked this turn of events, by sending a small portion of his forces to skirmish with the romans, attracting their vanguard away from the main infantry. As soon as the roman forces were divided and dispersed in the narrow corridor between the marshes and the hills, the bulk of the carthaginian forces attacked from their hiding positions in the heavily forested hills. The result was devastating for the romans, with the total annihilation of their 30,000 strong army, against 2,500 carthaginian losses. The victory gave Hannibal the undisputed control of most of Italy, with the romans resorting to a war of attrition trying to slow down the inevitable march of the carthaginians on their city. It also opened the stage for the battle of Cannae the following year, when Hannibal delivered an even more terrible defeat to the Romans, causing them to despair to the point that they resorted to human sacrifice to plead the favor of their gods. 

In the end it was Rome who won the war. Hannibal after Cannae didn't take immediate advantage of the situation and let the romans enough time to rebuild yet again their home army. Hannibal was ultimately defeated by politics, recalled to Carthage before he could finally conquer the romans. A battle in Zama, in the North African coast, sealed the fate for Carthage. Unable to continue the fight for the supremacy in the Mediterranean, the city had to accept an onerous peace treaty. Hannibal after the war had a second career as Carthaginian politician and statist, until he was eventually forced to exile by the romans, and died by poisoning himself to avoid surrending to his mortal foes. He left behind a suicide note, saying: "Let us relieve the Romans from the anxiety they have so long experienced, since they think it tries their patience too much to wait for an old man's death".

Lake Bolsena

If you travel now in the area where these battles were fought, you won't see a trace of the bloodshed. Unlike in the Lord of the Ring, the spirits of the dead have long disappeared from the past battlefields, and their corpses have dissolved in the calm waters of the lake. Only some of the toponyms in the area betray their violent past: "Sanguineto" ("Blood River", a small stream entering the lake), "Ossaia" ("Charnel House"), "Sepultaglia" ("Sepulcre"), "Pian di Marte" ("Plain of Battle"), to mention just a few. The area is beautiful, with the green and marbled Apennine mountains providing a backdrop to rolling hills and numerous lakes. The scenery is the one you find in the background of renaissance painting, behind the virgin with the scary god-child and the lady with the funny smile. It is a place I have enjoyed many time to wander about, from one hill to the next, around hairpin curves and gentle slopes covered with wheat. These days, traveling through this region evokes peace, and not terror. We may never be completely beyond our worst homicidal instinct (the same Lake Trasimeno was the site of a capital battle during WWII, two millennia after the fight of Hannibal and Gaius Flaminius) but, at least for some time, we can relax staring at the mirror-like surface of the Lake, without being enchanted by the ghosts of a violent past, Mordor exiled from our mind and our heart.

Tuscany, Italy (Sept 16, 2009)