Paradise on the Mediterranean
Camogli is a hidden paradise on the Italian Riviera, around the corner from the more famous Portofino. It is a combination of sleepy fishing village, tourist haven and home for people who commute into Genoa. Both Camogli and Portofino are part of Greater Genoa, but only Camogli is on the rail line. A fast train to Genoa takes 21 minutes, the milk run, up to an hour.
But this town doesn't have a drop of urban blood. After you've been here a few days, you realize Camogli is really three places.
We arrived by train after a long ride from Nice; we booked a hotel we found on the Internet, and it was just 200 metres from the station. We were shocked when we arrived at Hotel Sublimis.
It was far beyond anything we had expected. Our room on the top floor had one window that looked out along the `Lungomare,' the wide pedestrian street and shingle beach; the other window looked out over the Mediterranean. We thought, to use a hackneyed phrase, that we had died and gone to heaven.
There are no neon lights in Camogli, not one fast food restaurant but many places to eat and drink. As a culinary experiment, I ate risotto at different places. All were with seafood; all were different. The top was at a rather sterile, old-fashioned hotel at the end of the beach district. There was a langoustine, which to my uneducated eye looked like a cross between a shrimp and a small lobster, and some other seafood goodies sitting atop the risotto. A close second in the risotto sweepstakes was a subtle mixture of seafood with no large pieces—much less work.
The view from a plate of risotto. The tree that looks like a giant broccoli is a pine that lights up then goes dark. The windows below it are the restaurant with the best risotto, but such a formal old-fashioned room.
We had been taking Italian lessons ahead of this trip but were somewhat tongue-tied when faced with a native speaker. It did make it easier to strike up a conversation such as with Antonio and Lori (sp?), a charming couple walking a beautiful pair of Jack Russel terriers. Two men from Cologne helped us understand the ticket routine at the train station. We kept bumping into them and had long talks. Turns out one of them was a scientist who had made a life-changing discovery. The serendipity of travel.
That day we were off to visit the nearby town of Santa Margherita, a five-minute train ride that cost four Euros, return. We hoped to be able to take the bus to Portofino, but the road was closed. A friend raved about Santa Margherita, but it was a disappointment. Lots of cars and motorcycles. We hurried back to Camogli.
Another part of Camogli is its port. Walk to the end of the Lungomare, go through a short passageway, and there are dozens of fishing boats of different sizes and a few pleasure boats. Two men manoeuvered their small skiff through other moored boats, finding a space at the dockside where they unloaded. The little port has restaurants and caffes, not as fancy as the other side of the portal.
Every fifteen minutes, the church bells ring the time. One loud gong for each hour, a quieter one for the quarter hours. Who needs an Apple Watch? On top of the church is a flag that would outrage my grandmother from the north of England. It is a red cross, the flag of St. George. It is the official flag of Genoa and predates the one painted on the cheeks of travelling English soccer yobs.
It seems English merchants wanted protection when sailing into the Mediterranean in the 13th century, so they made a deal with the mighty Doge of Genoa to be allowed to fly the Genoese flag. The protection payment to the Doge came from the King of England. A few years ago, the cheeky mayor of Genoa sent the Queen a note asking for arrears. "Your Majesty, I regret to inform you that from my books [it] looks like you didn't pay for the last 247 years," wrote Marco Bucci. Nothing came of it.
We took the train into Genoa one day; it is still Italy's major port and where Christopher Columbus was born. It is an industrial city, not as beautiful as places like Rome or Palermo, but it has an interesting old town. The flag of St. George is even stamped on street lamps.
Many buildings in Camogli are painted with a technique called trompe-l'œil, French, for lying to the eye. It gives the impression there is complex masonry when there is, in fact, only clever paintwork. It is everywhere.
Up the side of the hill are where many of the 5,300 residents of Camogli live. Hidden laneways, houses perched on the edge of a cliff and small shops poking out of nowhere.
Outside of Italy, there is much talk of the switch to the right in the latest election. What we saw was the triumph of Italian humanism. At the Hotel Sublimis, there is breakfast in the morning, poached eggs and croissant looking out over the Mediterranean. One server is Katerina, a young Ukrainian who has worked there for five months. Her family is still in Kyiv. Idris is the other server; he is from Burkina Faso, where there was a coup while we were in Camogli. He and his family are safely in Italy, and he replied politely that the violence in his home country was wrong. These two people seem to me the face of Italy as much as the new president.
Putin’s dream, Ukraine’s nightmare
It was a long time ago. Here are the countries that made up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its population was 288-million in the 1980s, Russia today, stripped of all those flags, is 144-million, cut in half.
Back in the USSR: Beatles , 1968
Flew in from Miami Beach B-O-A-C
Didn't get to bed last night
On the way the paper bag was on my knee
Man, I had a dreadful flight
I'm back in the U-S-S-R
You don't know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the U-S-S-R (yeah!)
Been away so long, I hardly knew the place
Gee, it's good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey, disconnect the phone
I'm back in the U-S-S-R
You don't know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the U-S
Back in the U-S-S-R
Well
The Ukraine girls really knock me out (Wooh, ooh, ooh)
They leave the West behind (Da, da, da)
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout (Wooh, ooh, ooh)
That Georgia's always on
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my mind
***
The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show
It made them and it was a major score for Ed Sullivan, the smart newspaper columnist who ran a Sunday night variety program from 1948 to 1971 that was a must watch.
The Dumbest Columnist of 1964
There is one surveillance camera for every three people in China
Essay of the Week
This is the obituary published in the Globe and Mail of a man I knew well.
Michael Sweeney was a top news and documentary cameraman who won a Gemini for Children of Darkness, a film on the famine and child slavery in Sudan; he was also the director of photography and principal cameraman on the CBC series Canada: A People's History.
He started at the bottom.
After high school, Mr. Sweeney apprenticed to a still photographer, learning how to frame shots and the intricacies of how much light you need to take a proper image. By 1970 he was a junior cameraman at CFCF, a Montreal television station. He would shoot silent film of fires and crime scenes on a Bell and Howell silent camera that held just 100 feet of 16-millimetre film, enough for about three minutes of pictures. Later he graduated to using a heavy Auricon camera that shot sound.
This was before the invention of the portable video camera. The film would have to be developed in a chemical soup, then run through a contraption called a telecine which converted the film into images that could be seen on television.
In 1974 he moved to Toronto to be on staff of the start-up Global Television Network. He worked with Anne Macmillan at Global; Mr. Sweeney moved back to Montreal to work with Ms. Macmillan, by then the national reporter for CTV News. When she was transferred to London, he followed. From London, the two travelled into the Mideast often. On one trip from Israel into Syria and Lebanon, they were stopped by border guards.
"Mike charmed them. He started showing them how his camera worked. His wonderful lopsided smile won them over," recalled Ms. Macmillan. "He was always so positive and polite. And he was a brilliant cameraman. He had a fantastic eye."
Mr. Sweeney returned to Toronto in 1979, where he worked for CBC News and shot mainly for Newsmagazine, the half-hour weekly documentary program. It was replaced by The Journal in 1982.
At the North Pole in 1979: reporter John Blackstone, producer Rudy Carter, camera Mike Sweeney and soundman, Alister Bell.
"Mike and I were the first crew hired to work at the Journal," said Alister Bell, a soundman who worked with Mr. Sweeney for ten years, first at Newsmagazine, then The Journal. "Our first major assignment was in Cambodia and Vietnam with Peter Kent."
Mr. Bell remembers some harrowing incidents, including shooting in a moving vehicle on the runway at the Beirut airport when they could hear the bullets that were all of a sudden aimed at them. The two men covered wars and disasters, but nothing prepared them for one of their assignments at The Journal, the chemical disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, when a leak killed more than three thousand people and injured more than 50,000.
"We were the first camera crew there. There were bodies in the streets. It was like Dante's Inferno," said Mr. Bell.
Mark Starowicz and his team started the Journal, most of whom came from CBC Radio, where they had worked on As it Happens and Sunday Morning. "We were print and radio people. Mike Sweeney taught us all how to see through his lens," said Mr. Starowicz. "Mike said: I think of what I do as writing in light."
Brian Stewart was an experienced television reporter when he started working with Mr. Sweeney in Ethiopia, Sudan and the first Gulf War.
"Mike Sweeney shot remarkable photography of National Geographic calibre," said Mr. Stewart. "He gave much more than pictures. His brain was always working on many levels. And he was a solid rock in many tense situations."
Michael Dennis Sweeney was born in December of 1947 in Montreal in the working class district of Park Extension. His father, Edward Sweeney, worked in a hospital; his mother, Rita Matthews, stayed home with her children. His mother died when he was 18, and his father when Mr. Sweeney was in his early 20s.
In 1980 Mr. Sweeney met Gail Fumerton. "He took me skiing three weeks after we met, and we would drive to Mont Tremblant from Toronto every Friday and come back late Sunday," said Ms. Sweeney.
They married in 1981 and had three girls. Ms. Sweeney says it wasn't easy being married to someone who was on the road for long periods.
"He was gone for about two months after Madeleine (their first daughter) was born. He was in war zones, and he did Beirut, Cambodia and Ireland a lot. I kept the kids in the loop. I had maps of where he was in the house, and every time he moved, even in a war zone, I would put a pin and say, that's where your dad is now. I made it adventurous for them." said Ms. Sweeney, "I can't lie, it was difficult. You had to make your own life, and I did. He once said to me that the only way he could do his job was if he had a secure place to come home to, a place that he loved. It let him go forth and actually film the outside world with confidence. He needed us to do what he did."
When he returned from his foreign trips, he would bring his daughters something related to where he had been, often a book such as African Tales of the Hare, to try and share the culture he had just experienced.
Gail Sweeney said the project he was most proud of was Canada: A People's History. "He felt that it brought Canada together. Whole families would watch it."
Mr. Sweeney learned to scuba dive to shoot certain scenes. Perhaps the most dangerous incident occurred in a boat off Newfoundland where he was shooting an opening scene involving a replica of the explorer John Cabot's ship, the Matthew.
"We almost died when the ship started to sink," recalled Mr. Starowicz, the executive producer of the program who was onboard. He said Mike Sweeney rescued the tapes and the camera. An SOS signal was sent out, and a trawler recused them.
Mr. Sweeney was part of the team that won a Gemini award for Sudan: Children of Darkness, a 1989 CBC documentary on children fleeing slavery in Sudan. The producer was Tony Burman, the reporter, Brian Stewart. He was nominated for several other Gemini awards.
He and his colleagues won an international award for Nuclear Jihad, made for the CBC Documentary Unit in association with the New York Times.
"Mike knew that television was a visual medium, and we would get up at four every morning and go into the mountains to get the red sun over Islamabad and its minarets," said Julian Sher, the director, producer, and writer of the program.
"Mike would take our journalism and turn it into a painting.”
The program won the Alfred I. Dupont Columbia University Award, which Mr. Sher described as the Pulitzer Prize of the documentary world. The other principal cameramen on the shoot were Brian Kelly and Louis Deguise, men he had worked with at the start of his career at CFCF in Montreal.
Mr. Sweeney was also proud that he could add CSC to his credits, the designation for the Canadian Society of Cinematographers.
Mike Sweeney on assignment in Kampala, Uganda. Neatly dressed, as usual and sitting on one of the many camera equipment cases needed on the road.
Mike Sweeney loved the water, and one of his hobbies was fly fishing. He was always a fairly formal dresser. His wife said he didn't own any sweatpants or a pair of sandals.
"He went to emergency a week before he died in a navy blue, linen sports jacket, a pastel striped button-down dress shirt and a pair of khaki pants, a pair of brogues and a Panama hat," said Ms. Sweeney.
Michael Sweeney was born in Montreal on December 3, 1947. He died in Barrie, Ontario, on August 24, 2022. He is survived by his wife, Gail and his daughters. Madeleine, Carlin and Margot and his Norwich Terrier, Ruby.