Square Tower House at Mesa Verde National Park. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user BenFrantzDale.

Everyone knows what to see at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado: the cliff dwellings of the Pueblo people who occupied the Four Corners region from A.D. 600 to 1300. Soon, though, there will be good reason to stop at the entrance because the park is building a new Visitor and Research Center, scheduled to open late this year, that will give a state-of-the-art museum to its remarkable collection of archaeological artifacts, ethnographic material on the Native Americans of the Southwest and Santa Fe Indian School painting. Considered as a whole, it’s one of the oldest and biggest museums in the national park system.

Another one of its treasures is a collection of jewelry and ceramics given to Mesa Verde in the 1940s by architect Mary Jane Colter. Born in Pittsburgh in 1869, she attended the California School of Design in San Francisco, then went to create and decorate buildings for the Fred Harvey Company which ran shops, restaurants and hotels along the Sante Fe Railway. Among her masterworks are Hopi House, Lookout Studio, Hermit’s Rest and the Watchtower on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, all stunning examples of the American Arts and Crafts movement that take their inspiration from Hopi, Zuni and Navajo design, as well as Spanish-Mexican hacienda architecture. Between 1900 and 1940 Colter also worked on landmark train stations in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and Los Angeles.

At a time when women spent their time in the kitchen and parlor, Colter made her way in a man’s world, striding over construction sites and seeking artifacts all over the old Southwest, her hair in an untidy French roll, her radio tuned to a Mexican music station. On forays around the Four Corners region she collected baskets, jewelry and pots, while getting to know the Native American craftspeople who made them. She used most of the treasures she found to decorate Harvey Company buildings, but kept some for herself, eventually retiring to Santa Fe where she died in 1958.

Colter was a close friend of the archaeologist Jesse L. Nusbaum, who excavated Mesa Verde’s Balcony House and served as the park’s superintendent from 1921 to 1946. So the museum there seemed to Colter a suitable home for her art.

But she never wanted the 530 pieces of jewelry she bequeathed to Mesa Verde to be known as the Mary Colter Collection. “I think she didn’t want it to be about her. She wanted it to be about the artists,” said curator Tara Travis. Later some of Colter’s ceramics were added from the old Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.

When the new Visitor and Research Center opens at Mesa Verde, 30 Colter pieces will be on display, including a silver Navajo pin shaped like a biplane, heishi necklaces made of delicately strung shells, and tie slides carved from the vertebrae of cows and goats—all showing, as Travis explained, that “Colter had an interest in how artists used materials—shells, stones, turquoise and silver—and everyday objects to create works of art.”

The mastery of the Native Americans who made them should be overwhelmingly apparent. But I can’t think of it as anything other than the Mary Jane Colter Collection.

The Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of New York. Image courtesy of Flickr user Shelley Panzarella.

It’s fascinating to watch the focus of interest move from one gentrifying neighborhood to another in greater metropolitan New York. Once upon a time it was SoHo and Park Slope, Brooklyn; today it’s DUMBO, which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, and the Lower East Side, where hip shops, stylish new hotels and restaurants have replaced garment workshops and pushcarts selling fruit and vegetables.

Days gone by in that neighborhood—east of the Bowery and south of Houston Street—come alive at the Tenement Museum in an Orchard Street apartment house where a long chain of German Jewish, Irish and Italian immigrants tried to make good in America. Tours of the building reveal how they lived from 1863 to 1935 with no electric lights, heating or indoor plumbing. Some made it out of the Lower East Side, while others who couldn’t manage to pay the rent moved to even worse neighborhoods.

The Tenement Museum also offers walking tours, one of which I recently joined. The first question I asked the guide on the pavement outside was what exactly is a tenement? I wanted to know because I live in what I assume was a West Village tenement building, characterized by its layout—two apartments in back, two in the front, on each floor—a fire escape climbing the facade and a tight, narrow internal staircase. The guide elaborated on the definition, describing a tenement as a building housing three or more unrelated families, originally with exterior wooden steps linking the floors, where housewives dried the laundry.

In the 1860s the Lower East Side was deluged by a wave of immigrants from Germany; known as Klein Deutschland, it had the fifth-largest German-speaking population among cities in the world at the time. The garment industry provided jobs, along with cigar factories and pushcarts. At 86 Orchard Street, a sign that says Max Feinberg identifies a brick building that now hosts a chichi Mexican restaurant as the former home of Majestic Hosiery.

Around the corner at 133 Allen Street, where there was once an elevated train and the city is building a bike lane—back to the future, as they say—we stopped in front of the Church of Grace to Fujianese. It’s a Christian worship place for fairly recent immigrants from China’s Fujian Province, but before that the building served as a bathhouse for the district’s great unwashed.

More characteristic of the Lower East Side in the late 19th century are the myriad synagogues tucked between storefronts like the Kehila Kedosha Janina temple at 280 Broome Street, home to a small, obscure sect of Judaism that grew up in Greece during the Roman era, and the former Congregation Poel Zedek Anshe Ileya, now a Seventh-Day Adventist church at the corner of Forsyth and Delancey streets, which actually began its long life as a German Presbyterian Church complete with a rose window around 1890.

Across the street Sara Roosevelt Park, named for FDR’s mother and opened in 1934, runs in a narrow strip between East Houston and Canal streets. The city established the park at a time when it hoped to provide one acre of green space for every 600 people. Now the ratio is more like one acre for every 12,000 in the densely packed neighborhood, and the park has welcomed serendipitous new enterprises like the Wah Mei bird garden and the M’Finda Kalunga community garden, opened in 1982 partly to commemorate an abandoned nearby African cemetery and partly to stem drug dealing that was rampant in the area.

Just east of the park at the intersection of Rivington and Eldridge streets, we stood in front of the University Settlement, a welfare organization founded by wealthy, educated New Yorkers in 1886 to aid immigrants by providing education and social services. It continues to do so now, though the clientele has changed since the neighborhood’s German immigrant days.

The Tenement Museum walking tour lasts for two hours and covers much more ground than this. I was exhausted by the time I finished. Fortunately, places for refreshment abound in the neighborhood, from cool cafés like 88 Orchard to Yonah Schimmel’s knishery at 137 East Houston, which has been baking authentic knishes filled with potato, cabbage and spinach since 1910.

Delacroix’s La Liberté to be on display at the new Louvre-Lens museum in the Pas-de-Calais. Image courtesy of Flickr user Storm Crypt.

The thing is, there’s just too much art in the Louvre Museum—35,000 pieces, and that’s just what’s on display. There are also too many people, some eight million a year tromping past the Mona Lisa and the Winged Victory.

Enter the Louvre-Lens, an outpost of the great Paris museum, scheduled to open in December. Other landmark museums have already opened satellites: the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain; the Pompidou Center in Metz, capital of the Lorraine; even a baby Hermitage in Amsterdam. But the rising Lens museum marks the Louvre’s first foray outside the City of Light.

Strictly speaking, overcrowding is not the reason why the Louvre is building a $200 million facility in the Pas-de-Calais region of France. It has more to do with the accessibility of the town of Lens—which can be reached by train in two to three hours from Paris, London and Brussels—and a deep need for urban renewal in an old coal industry center that lost its last mine in 1986, pushing unemployment to 15 percent.

Also driving the museum’s creation is an effort to attract French people to the Louvre; as it stands now, foreign tourists chiefly flow through the I. M. Pei Pyramid at the threshold of the Louvre in Paris, so it’s hoped to attract les Français at an offshoot outside the capital.

The infant Louvre in Lens was designed by the award-winning Japanese architectural firm SANAA with a long, low entrance building lined in glass, underground display areas where visitors can see behind-the-scenes conservation and storage, and a Gallerie du Temps housing a regularly changing collection of 250 masterworks ranging across 5,000 years of art history (including at the time of opening Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté, a French national icon). The side by side arrangement is a vastly different approach from that at the Louvre Paris, where you’d have to walk six miles to visit every room. Having worked off several pounds in past visits to the Paris mother ship, I welcome a more compact experience in art appreciation at Lens. Don’t tell the curator, but I think of it as Louvre Lite.

Feline Face and Stylized Ornaments from Horse Tack, late 4th–early 3rd century BCE (c) Presidential Center of Culture, Astana

Just around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a much smaller suite of galleries is showing something special: “Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan,” an exhibition mounted by New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Founded half a dozen years ago and occupying a dignified building just off upper Fifth Avenue, the ISAW is a research and education center devoted to the study of ancient cultures that grew up beyond the Mediterranean basin in some of the most far-flung corners of the globe.

“Nomads and Networks” (open through June 3) focuses on Central Asia’s four corners region where Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan meet. For travelers, it is a storied place of ever-frozen mountains and steppes where it’s thought horses were first domesticated sometime around 3500 B.C. Bridled and saddled, they became not just a means of transportation but a cultural icon for the nomadic people of eastern Kazakhstan’s Altai and Tianshan regions, who left no written record, though they were mentioned in “The Histories” of Herodotus.

It’s a small exhibition composed of just two rooms of 250 objects borrowed from four museums in Kazakhstan, displayed for the first time in the U.S. They come from single finds and archaeological digs into burial mounds known as kurgans now being excavated in Kazakhstan. One gallery is devoted to a kurgan that is thought to have held the remains of a chieftain, buried with 13 horses, sacrificed in formal regalia. The animals’ tack, carved of deer horn, ornamented with gold foil and cinnabar, testifies to the artistic sophistication of the nomads. A piece of a saddle made of felt and wood occupies a showcase nearby, preserved across millennia by permafrost, which served as a sort of refrigerator for organic material that would have otherwise decayed. The analysis of human remains also preserved by permafrost has revealed that nomads of the Asian four corners region wore full-body tattoos and knew the secrets of embalming, carrying mummified corpses with them through frozen winters until the ice melted and the bodies of the dead could be interred.

A second room displays a collection of 23-karat gold ornaments, highlighted by what is known as the Kurgan Diadem, a hammered gold band with imagery common in neighboring China, suggesting the reach of nomadic contact and trading. Just as stunning are four tray-like objects, mounted on conical stands, bearing creatures out of an ancient box of Animal Crackers: horses, deer, ravens, two-humped Bactrian camels and snow leopards.

Though the function of many of these objects remains unknown, the exhibition’s objective—to show that the nomadic people of the Central Asian steppe were anything but the biker guys of the ancient world, that they lived in coherent communities and had their own understanding of this life, as well as the next—is evocatively fulfilled. Only, now I’ve got to add another place to my travel list: Kazakhstan, hopefully on horseback.

I was there to see it a few years ago and brought back pictures:

The Mysteries of the Dead Christ procession begins at Terra Murata, where early on Good Friday the wagons are prepared, like this one devoted to the Last Supper. Nearby are the medieval fortress of San Michele Arcangelo, the site of a palace built in the 16th century by the Bourbon kings of Naples, and a small museum that displays floats and regalia from the pageant.

A horn-blower announces the start of the procession, which winds along the island’s south coast.

Here is the finished Last Supper float, carried by members of the Brotherhood of the Turchinis, one of the confraternities that traditionally participates in the procession.

Here’s the condemned side of the Last Judgment, one of the more lugubrious wagons. But even this one has a certain homemade sweetness suggesting less the passion of Christ than the passion of the Procida people for their beloved pageant.

Spectators follow the procession through the fishing village of Corricella.

Finally, Christ’s black-lace-covered catafalque comes at the end of the procession, accompanied by a brass band playing a dirge.

Mahanoy Mountain shows the scars of strip mining. Image by the author

Centre Street in the town of Ashland, Pennsylvania (population 3,091), rides a hill in the coal-rich northeastern part of the Keystone state. To the south is 1,420-foot Mahanoy Mountain, its flank amputated by strip mining, its innards coiled with mine shafts; to the north the abandoned site of Centralia where a trash fire set in May, 1962, spread to coal deposits underground. Fifty years later, the fire is still burning though the state spent millions trying to put it out, then moved some 1,000 people out due to concerns about toxic gas emissions and subsidence in home-owners’ back yards.

I detoured to this lost corner of America on a recent road trip across Pennsylvania, stopping first to see the Museum of Anthracite Coal in the Ashland borough hall. They had to turn the lights on for me when I got there, but the displays proved to be a comprehensive primer on the industry that shaped a region with the world’s highest concentration of low-ash anthracite, a prized kind of hard, clean-burning coal. It was discovered around Ashland in the 1850’s when Henry Clay, then a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, promoted the imposition of tariffs that made it profitable to replace imports from Wales with coal from the United States. Surveys revealed that northeast Pennsylvania had 75 billion tons of bituminous coal and 23 billion tons of anthracite, resulting in the growth of mining operations and small towns to serve them.

Ashland is a classic with its own Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine Shaft and Steam Train tourist attraction and Whistler’s Mother Monument, built in 1937 for the annual homecoming of the Ashland Boys Association. It looks like a scene from the 1978 film The Deer Hunter, with modest workers’ homes, shops and bars that have good bones, but an air of dilapidation stemming from the failure of the industry after World War II, when coal fell out of favor as a fuel source. It’s estimated that 58 billion tons of bituminous and 7 billion tons of anthracite remain, but natural gas deposits are now more attractive, tapped by the environmentally-contentious technique of hydro-fracking.

The coal museum tells the anthracite story from prospecting and drilling to treating acid water, a toxic byproduct of the mining process. Disasters like the 1869 fire at an anthracite mine in Avondale, Pennsylvania, that killed over a hundred workers, are also described, along with deadly gas known as black damp. But to understand the dangers of abandoned mines I drove three miles north to the ghost town of Centralia.

A few long-time residents continue to live there, along with those at eternal rest in two sorrowful Centralia cemeteries. When weather conditions are right, visitors can see smoke billowing up from scorched patches of ground, but otherwise nothing marks the mostly-abandoned town site. Highway 61 has been diverted around Centralia and the old main street is barricaded by a litter-strewn berm, defaced by fresh graffiti that tells who to call for a time. It reminded me of visiting the ruins of Gibellina, a small town in southwestern Sicily, razed by a 1968 earthquake, then memorialized with a cover of concrete by Italian artist Alberto Bruni.

Obviously, no one’s celebrating Centralia’s semi-centennial this year and visitors are mostly curiosity-seekers like me. Its lack of markers is presumably intentional, given the hazards, but sad. I stood there in a cold rain wondering whether some stray, surviving dogwood would put out commemorative blossoms in the spring.

Sites like Brussels' Place du Jeu de Balle are featured in the new Tintin movie. Image courtesy of Flickr user kgbstar

Any Tintin fans out there?

I’m pretty sure there will be once The Adventures of Tintin, directed by Steven Spielberg with the assistance of motion-capture expert Peter Jackson, opens next week.

For many Americans—young and old—the appearance of the Belgian comic book hero on the silver screen will be a first encounter because Tintin never caught fire in the U.S. the way he did everywhere else. Since his adventures first appeared in a Belgian newspaper in 1929, books based on the strip have sold 250 million copies, translated into 100 languages (most recently, Yiddish). But America had its own indigenous cartoon tradition, featuring heroes like Superman and Catwoman, so when Tintin‘s creator Hergé approached Disney in 1948, he was turned down flat.

Enter Spielberg, who got to know Tintin in the early 1980s. It took 20 years for the movie project to find its perfect medium in motion-capture, a computer-assisted technique proved by Jackson in his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The film opens with Hergé’s intrepid boy reporter at a flea market where he finds a model boat with a secret inside. Anyone who has been to Brussels will immediately recognize the setting: the Place du Jeu de Balle in the Marolles, where Belgians sell bric-a-brac from their attics. I’ve bought my share of precious junk there. When the sun occasionally shines on the Belgian capital, it’s one of my favorite haunts.

Hergé was scrupulous about verisimilitude, which is why travelers can’t crack open a Tintin album without recognizing real-life sites and scenes that, like the Place du Jeu de Balle, served as models for frames in the strip.

The Belgian Royal Palace on a hill above Brussels’ medieval Grand Place stands in for the Royal Place of Klow in King Ottokar’s Sceptre (1939), capital of the Eastern European nation of Syldavia.

The Seven Crystal Balls (1948) features the Belle Époque Hotel Metropole, opened in 1895 on the downtown Place de Broukère.

Out in the suburb of Uccle the Belgian Royal Observatory gives frissons of deja-vue to fans who know Destination Moon (1953) and Explorers on the Moon (1954), in which Tintin completes a lunar landing 16 years before Apollo 11.

And here’s an extra-Belgian ringer. Marlinspike, ancestral home of Tintin’s Scotch-swilling buddy Captain Haddock, is the 17th century Chateau de Cheverny in the Loire Valley of France, without its two side wings. It’s not clear that Hergé ever went there because he wasn’t much of a traveler, poor soul. But Tintologists—a serious tribe of scholars who have investigated every aspect of the strip—found a tourist brochure for Cheverny among Hergé’s papers with a faint pencil drawing of Tintin and Haddock walking toward the chateau’s entrance.

Arezzo, Italy. Photo courtesy of Flickr user anguskirk

This year Arezzo, a Tuscan provincial capital about 50 miles southeast of Florence, celebrates the 500th anniversary of the birth of favorite son Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), author of Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. One of the first art historical treatises, published in 1550, it remains a touchstone for scholars and connoisseurs; some claim Vasari even coined the word Renaissance for that period of remarkable artistic flowering that occurred in Italy around 1500. As biography, the Lives is equally successful, providing colorful stories and intimate touches only a Renaissance gadfly like Vasari could know.

But the father of Italian art history was first and foremost a painter and architect in his own time. He worked for Popes in Rome and Medicis in Florence, where he designed the Palazzo degli Uffizi, now a renowned museum that displays, among many other noteworthy works, Vasari’s Portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Poor fellow. His art, generally considered Mannerist in style, has ever played second fiddle to that of Renaissance contemporaries like Michelangelo. And even in his hometown of Arezzo he is eclipsed by Piero della Francesca, who created his masterpiece The Legend of the True Cross fresco series for the Church of San Francesco.

I recently visited Arezzo, the Tuscan town hill town where Roberto Benigni filmed his 1997 film “Life is Beautiful.” It has the same noble, dignified air as Siena, but fewer tourists, with a Medieval center reached from parking lots below by escalators, one of which landed me on the piazza in front of the Romanesque Duomo. Behind it is a fortress built by the Medicis who controlled Arezzo from the 14th century onward; its ramparts overlook the beneficent Tuscan countryside, hemmed in to the northeast by the rugged Apennines.

My first stop was the Church of San Francesco down the hill from the Duomo with its glorious True Cross, which left me with a case of Stendhal Syndrome, a psychosomatic illness known chiefly by anecdote, marked by chills and tremors caused by exposure to great art. To steady my nerves I sought a café, winding my way east across Arezzo’s sedate main street Corso Italia to the gently-sloping Piazza Grande where I found a table under the elegant loggia on the north side designed by none other than Vasari.

In a tourist brochure I read that the town planned to mark the Vasari anniversary by restoring his Assumption of the Virgin (1539) and holding a special exhibition on the artist’s stylistic development at the Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art. The Church of San Francesco was assembling another Vasari show on the Tuscan artists featured—some say favored—in his seminal book. And, of course, every day is Giorgio Vasari Day at his Arezzo home on via XX Settembre west of the Duomo with interior walls richly frescoed by its famous resident. His art may pale in comparison to that of Michelangelo, whom he counted as a friend, but you’ve got to love Vasari as a multi-faceted Renaissance man.

General Joseph Stillwell's desk at the museum site in Chongqing, China. Image courtesy of Flickr user mag3737

General Joseph Stilwell (1883-1946), known affectionately as “Vinegar Joe,” is one of my favorite American war heroes. His career—West Point, World War I in France, service as a military attache in Beijing and, most notably, command of U.S. forces in China, India and Burma during World War II—is masterfully described in Barbara Tuchman’s 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945.

Recently I discovered that it’s possible to see the man in action in The Stilwell Road, a 1947 U.S. War Department documentary, narrated by Ronald Reagan. Using vintage film footage, it tells the story of the general’s effort to retake northern Burma from the Japanese and supply beleaguered Chinese forces under Generalissmo Chiang Kai-Shek by building an 500-mile road across Pangsau Pass in the Himalayas. The Stilwell Road, as it came to be known, was an impressive engineering feat, completed in 1944, costing millions of dollars, thousands of lives and the good will of Air Force commander Claire Chennault who favored flying supplies over “The Hump” instead building a precarious land link from India to China.

Someday, I’d love to follow the Stilwell Road, though its most accessible portal is located in a rough, isolated corner of India plagued by unrest, terrorism and tension with neighboring China. I’d like to see the Stilwell monument in the West Point Cemetery and the plaque on his house in Carmel, California.

But there’s one “Vinegar Joe” site I have visited and won’t forget: the Stilwell Museum in Chongqing, China, where the general lived while liaising with Chiang Kai-Shek, then fighting both the Japanese and a Communist insurgency that would spiral into China’s long and brutal Civil War, ending in the establishment of the Peoples Republic. While Stilwell was there he grew increasingly disenchanted with corruption and subterfuge in Chiang‘s Nationalist government, ultimately opening communication with the Red Army under Mao Zedong, earning him hero status in contemporary China. The museum has artifacts and displays (with English subtitles) outlining the general‘s distrust of the Nationalists and efforts to put American relations with China on a new track. Ultimately, the powerful American China Lobby, headed by Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to recall him. Sometimes I wonder how the China-U.S. relationship would have unfolded had Stilwell’s voice been heard.

View from Piazza Garibaldi in Rome. Image courtesy of Flickr user StefZ

Yearlong celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of Italy unification are now winding down as the economy totters, protesters take to the streets and Silvio Berlusconi step downs, leaving a void in the president’s palace on Rome’s Quirinale Hill. Talk about an anticlimax.

So I‘m happy to report that the anniversary has brought something really worth celebrating in the form of a new Roman museum dedicated to revolutionary gadabout Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882), a central player in the creation of modern Italy; when sentenced to death for his participation in a 1834 uprising in northern Italy, he fled to South America where he fought for Uruguayan independence from Brazil, which is why he is known as “the hero of two worlds.” Fractious Italians aren’t unanimously in love with the great man. Nevertheless, almost every town has its via or piazza Garibaldi.

To reach Rome‘s Museo Storico Garibaldino, follow via Garibaldi from Trastevere up the Janiculum Hill on the west side of the Eternal City. Along the way you‘ll encounter a host of red-letter sites like the Church of San Pietro in Montorio with Bramante’s Tempietto, a Renaissance landmark, and the American Academy in Rome, founded in 1894 in a glorious building designed by the McKim, Mead and White. Carry on to the Porta di San Pancrazio, which was the scene of a bloody battle in 1849 between a revolutionary army headed by Garibaldi and superior French forces supporting an anti-Republican pope. Overmastered, the Garibaldini retreated, but lived to fight another day.

The museum is in the gate, restored after unification. It holds artifacts relating to the Italian hero and exhibits about the Garibaldi Division posted to Yugoslavia during World War II, where it fought against Germany after Italy capitulated to the Allies in 1943.

Walk on from there along the Passeggiata del Gianicolo which will take you to a proud equestrian statue of the Italian rebel and another to his Brazilian wife Anita who shouldered arms during the battle at San Pancrazio and died in the retreat, carrying their unborn child. If you’re arrive at noon when cannon fire marks midday, so much the better.

Viva Garibaldi. Via Italia.