All Entries in the "Travel" Category

Read Saved and help protect Kent

It’s more than a year now since Saved, my real-life account of the successful battle to prevent a huge housing complex swallowing the little Kent village of Wye, appeared. You can still buy the book in the village at Wye News and campaign headquarters, the New Flying Horse. But there’s a fresh outlet too.

I have donated most of the remaining copies of the book to the doughty campaigners facing a similarly greedy and unnecessary development nightmare in nearby Sellindge. So please visit their site and support their campaign, with a book if you like (all proceeds now go to their campaign and another local charity). 

For those of you too far away to get a book - or if you’d simply like to know what all the fuss is about - I’m happy to put the entire book of Saved online below. You can email it to others as a pdf and, if you join up to Scribd for free using the icon below, download your own copy too. To see a larger version which you can adjust to your own preferred size just click on the Scribd icon.

Holiday and novels

I get a lot of requests for information on some of the real life locations in my books. This why you will find maps in most editions now, and annotated Google maps for the titles on this site. But it never really occurred to me that people would want to organise some kind of formal tour of Rome to see what the places Costa and co visit look like.

I was, of course, wrong. There’s a lovely new web site which will let those of you interested in locations featured in novels swap info and pictures. My work is there along with that of Denise Mina, Lee Child, Jim Kelly, Elizabeth George and a bunch of others. It’s a great idea and the more people join in the better it will get. Congratulations to Jane Long who began Novels and Holidays, and I’m flattered to find out it was a Costa book and a holiday in Rome that begat the idea. Please take a look and help Jane build this into a great site combining travel and fiction.

Some new places to eat in Venice

It’s amazing to think how much Venice has improved in terms of food over the past decade. Once it was hard even to get a decent pizza here. Now things are so much better, provided you avoid the tourist traps around San Marco and the Rialto.

Here are a few gems from my latest trip to the lagoon. First, a wonderful place for coffee and beautiful home made pastries. Bar Pasticceria Toletta (Dorsoduro 1192, tel 041 5227451) is in Sacco de la Toletta, a narrow alley running from San Barnaba to Zattere (you can get exact locations on Google Maps). Fantastic and inexpensive sweets and beautiful coffee, open seven days a week.

Al Timon (Cannareggio 2754) is in Cannareggio where the popular Fondamenta de la Misericordia becomes the Fondamenta degli Ormesini. There are a few tables by the canal, beautiful cicchetti (Venetian tapas) of bacala and other specialities at one euro a pop and a decent and very inexpensive wine list. Friendly local service and definitely a place for anyone looking to conserve the pennies.

Osteria Enoteca Ai Artisti (closed Sundays) is in Fondamenta della Toletta, just on the San Barnaba side of the pasticceria above. It’s a smart, ambitious enoteca with a great wine list, a daily menu of fish, meat and salad, and a few canal side tables. Somewhat cramped and the service can be a touch erratic but very congenial. I’d book a table if you want to eat though - tel 041 5238944.

In the same area you’ll find one of the best pizzerias in Venice, Ai Sportivi, back on form after a bad patch. It’s in the big square of Campo San Margherita, tel 041 5211598) and serves late for Venice, up to 11 pm. A few years ago the staff seemed to become entirely east European. Today they are Indian I suspect but the service is efficient and friendly and the pizzas, thin, as in Rome, are superb, with an enormous range including seasonal specialities.

Around the corner, in Rio Tera Canal, on the way to San Barnaba, you’ll find the Sardinian restaurant l’Incontro (tel 041 5222404m closed Monday and Tuesday lunchtimes). This has a lunchtime special of two dishes for 20 euros, a good way to try Sardinian cuisine. We had some interesting pasta dishes - trofie with artichokes and an orange flavoured ravioli dish - followed by stinco, a whacking great smoked ham shank, and roast suckling pig. The pig was just out of the oven and could have done with a bit more cooking I suspect but it was still worthwhile.

Finally, for the blowout, I heartily recommend the hotel restaurant of Agli Alboretti, which is just round the corner from the Accademmia. This has a daily changing menu that uses local ingredients but in unusual ways - turbot with artichoke cream, swordfish with lime and ginger, and unusual game dishes. You’d need to be very hungry to manage antipasti, primo, secondo and some fantastic dolci too. The wine list is excellent as well. But with three courses expect to pay around 120 euros for too - well worth it for an elegant dining room with charming service, an oasis from the tourist bustle outside.

A new chance for Wye

Wye college seen from the churchyard

It’s now eighteen months since an extraordinary campaign to save the rural area of Wye in Kent fought off a vile and deceitful attempt to build on an official Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. I was proud to be a part of that campaign, and document it in my non-fiction retelling of the story, Saved.

If only the news had stayed as welcoming. We always knew that Imperial College, London, the principal developer behind the Wye plan, would probably abandon the village in which it inherited a promising agricultural college less than a decade before. But so soon?

Food and crime in Catalunya

Barcelona Negra was a unique event - a celebration of the crime and dark genre organised in the beautiful Palau de la Virreina. This was a busy and fun festival, the brain child of the very enthusiastic local book store Negra y Criminal. I’m just sorry I had to leave early which meant missing the closing event - a mussels and chips lunch in the pedestrian street outside the store.

It was fun to meet up with Mark Billingham again, and for once have time to chat (and try some great Basque pintxos - a kind of tapas). And to make the acquaintance of the other Brit on the panel too, Andy Oakes. So many thanks to Negra y Criminal and my Spanish publisher Nausicaa for the invitation.

You never see a city properly unless you’re guided by the locals, of course. Without Nausicaa’s Manolo Pintor I would never have found the restaurant 7 Portes. This is an astonishing establishment just out of the centre, where the kitchen opens from 1pm to 1 am every day ’sin interrupción’. Amazingly, it is over 150 years old, and over the years has counted John Wayne and Che Guevara among its customers (as well as Himmler, says the website).

We ate a fantastic lunch -mixed seafood starters of anchovies, prawns, mussels, salt cod fritters and bread with tomato. After that it was one of the best black rices I’ve ever encountered - a lovely paella of squid ink. And after that it was siesta time before the panel in the evening.

Barcelona really is a foodie city. Take a look at some of the fresh stuff on show in the main market on La Rambla below.

[Show as slideshow]

A book for the wish list

I gave an author chat at the very impressive Borders in Fulham not long ago. At the end the store very kindly said, by way of thanks, ‘Pick a book.’ It was not was easy to choose. There were two floors to the place, all of them stacked with interesting fiction and non-fiction, and titles I’d never heard of too.

And so to a real discovery… The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. This is a wonderful work by Gillian Riley, no mere recipe book but an encyclopaedia devoted to recording the astonishing richness of Italian cuisine. Anyone who spends much time in Italy comes to be fascinated and, to some part, infuriated by the variety of food on offer. This is not simply regional. Each borgo seems to possess its own specialities, or variation on a theme. Riley can’t have caught every last dish in Italy. Is such a thing humanly possible? But the breadth of her research is simply awe-inspiring.

Finally, I know what agretti, the sharp, grass-like vegetable seen in Rome in Spring, really are. And lardo di colonnata too, cured lard, stored underground in marble tubs, immersed in brine and rubbed with herbs. Bread, wine, meat, vegetables, fowl… nothing has escaped Riley’s beady eye, and alongside the food she recounts tales of illustrious epicures, the eating habits of famous Italians, and casts the odd reflection on the role of eating in Italian art (remember, one of Caravaggio’s several convictions stemmed from his beating of a waiter for serving an artichoke improperly).

This is a great book and a wonderful present for anyone with half an interest in Italian food. Thank you Borders… for the talk, and being such a clever book store you stock delights like this on your shelves!

The hidden city: underground Rome

A wall painting in the Case Romane del Celio, one of the rare underground sites open to the public, in the Clivo Scauri beneath SS Giovanni e Paolo.

Some questions never go away. One I get constantly is, ‘Why did you choose to set your books in Rome?’ The honest answer is I didn’t; Rome chose me, clubbing me over the head one day when I happened to be there editing a book about somewhere else entirely. I’ve now completed seven Costa novels, and still have two more to go under my present contract… and hopefully lots after that.

So am I bored with Rome? You have to be kidding. Rome isn’t a place, it’s an entire universe, a limitless world of possibilities, ancient, medieval and modern. The Romans have a saying about their city: ‘Non basta una vita’. One life isn’t enough. You bet. Take, for example, the background to The Seventh Sacrament, which is a city I never knew existed until I took to the streets and started asking interesting questions of interesting people.

Much of this book takes place in underground Rome. No, not the odd sewer or archaeological excavation. I mean a different, hidden city altogether, a world of temples and streets, shops and simple homes, all going back two thousands years or more, and very familiar indeed to the specialists who spend their time exploring this unseen metropolis.

Ancient Rome was huge, a city of more than a million souls, and its subterranean legacy falls into three distinct types. Over two millennia the Imperial-era city has come to be buried by the rebuilding work of the centuries. Palaces such as Nero’s Domus Aurea - the Golden House - now lie beneath the rubble of ages, in the case of the Domus beneath the hill by the side of the Colosseum, next to the modern subway station. Many churches stand on the actual sites of the homes of Christian martyrs, which are preserved in the foundation.

But two kinds of remains were put beneath the earth to begin with. The first are the ancient sewers and aqueducts built out of pride and civic duty by emperors competing with one another for their legacy. Many are still working today. The Trevi fountain is fed by an Imperial aqueduct. The Cloaca Maxima, the original sewer of pre-Imperial Rome, which runs through the Forum, continues to empty into the Tiber as it did in the days when the bodies of executed criminals were thrown into it for quick disposal.

Walk along the Tiber and you will see many ancient outlets such as this - now used by the city homeless

And there are the temples, which came to form the heart of my story. SACRAMENT centres around Giorgio Bramante, an archaeologist with an obsession for the subterranean, and one element of it in particular: Mithraic temples which were usually built beneath the earth to begin with. Bramante is an expert - as much as one can be - on the cult of Mithras which was wiped out when the empire adopted Christianity as Rome’s sole religion when Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. The literature and rites of Mithraism were largely lost after that time. But we know that the cult was popular among soldiers and civil servants, that it emphasised loyalty to the state and the empire, and that its followed were divided into seven different hierarchical ranks, with promotion depending upon some kind of sacrament, a penance, perhaps an ordeal, which had to be borne in order to gain advancement. Hence the title of my book.

You can read a lot about Mithraism these days - much of it conjecture. But I don’t research books by reading alone. I needed to know what it felt like to be underground, and to talk to people who shared the same kind of interests I intended to visit upon Giorgio Bramante.

The enterprising tourist can find several interesting underground sites open to the public. The catacombs are well known - and pretty boring to me. The Basilica of San Clemente, close to the Colosseum, is altogether more interesting. Pay a small fee and you can descend into its lower levels, passing through an early Christian church, and winding up in the original subterranean Mithraeum. Just around the corner, in the ancient street known today as the Clivo Scauri, there is also a recently-opened excavation beneath the church of SS Giovanni e Paolo which has revealed shops, homes and a wealth of wall paintings.

But Giorgio Bramante would have looked down on these as mere tourist attractions. I needed more… and I soon found the place to get it. Roma Sotterranea is an organisation run by people who have permission to go places the ordinary public can’t. They have an excellent web site. They run tours for the public. They also have a membership system that runs occasional visits to more out of the way sites too, some of which come close to what we in the UK would call pot holing and in the US spelunxing.

I signed up to join in the winter of 2004 and have fond if chilly memories of those months. To be honest, damp, dark underground spaces aren’t my favourite places. But I wanted to try to understand what drove people to investigate them, and, more than anything, to get some feel for what they were really like. I hope that informs the finished book, much of which takes place in the caves, waterways, and hidden temples and streets that run beneath modern Rome, unseen by the millions who tramp the pavement above.

And when I felt I had enough I stopped. I write fiction, not fact. I need a solid basis on which to weave my fantasies. But I am not writing a guide. Some of the places in SACRAMENT - such as the Little Museum of Purgatory and the ossuary of the Via Veneto - are real. Most are not, or are mangled versions of the original. That is what I do for a living: invent from a basis of truth.

It was a great experience. But when I look back on writing the next book I can see I didn’t spent one moment underground. Instead, that title focuses on the world and legacy of Caravaggio, a continuing obsession of my detective Nic Costa, and one I was happy to explore through a year spent largely in galleries, private, public and religious.

Non basta una vita. Dead right…