We just spent three weeks in the UK and Italy, and it was glorious. Family, mostly, plus a few friends, a little culture, a lot of food, and plenty of pizza and pubs.

On the quiet side we visited the Isle of Mull and the Suffolk countryside, and on the busy end we hit up Naples, Rome, Florence and London. We explored Pompeii and the Coliseum, we watched Shakespeare, lots and lots of football, and we even bumped into the Tour de France.

Some reflections.

Italian museums have amazing access to antiquities and yet were pretty uninspiring. We took a few guided tours of places of interest and enjoyed them all in various ways, but as spaces, the museums themselves felt entirely uninterested in giving audiences an understanding of anything.

We saw room after room of cases with barely any description or context, or confusing displays that gave no real information. In some cases it was impossible to find the things we were looking for. And nearly everywhere was obsessed with provenance, with telling us about the story of how this item came to be in this museum, which kings or princes had uncovered them, which museum director had overseen the acquisition. Meta history is OK, I suppose, but I want some actual history first.

I did get to see Galileo’s finger, though.

Context was also missing when we went to see a performance of The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe in London. It’s a funny venue with a peculiar audience, and a play that is increasingly hard to put on (each new approach seems to wrap the plot in an extra new layer in order to navigate around its ugliness.) The performances were solid to strong, but the staging more than a little strange. The performance was hard, though, I found the handful of abrupt twists and turns quite distressing. No spoilers, but it lurched forward in a couple of unexpected places.

It was only afterwards that Anna, a connoisseur of the stage, explained that it was a Brechtian performance: i know enough about Brecht that suddenly the aggressive tone and shock value made sense.

Now, I don’t need my art to bash me over the head or deliver its message simply, but I would never have put the pieces together without her help. Nowhere in the program or even the reviews did I get a hint of the epic approach.

(Then again, when the Kate character gave her closing monologue dressed as a rodent, I struggled with serious Roland Rat vibes—it was only after we left that I realized that she was literally dressed as a fucking shrew. So maybe my radar is just not working at the moment.)

Oh, and talking of failed reviews: one other noticing was that the tyranny of online ratings is now utterly complete. Every service, every hotel, every museum, every tour… they all asked us to review the experience online. Asking. Asking again. Pleading. Personally I try to avoid giving ratings myself except in exceptionally good or bad circumstances. That’s probably a good thing, because if I reviewed everything that I was asked to on this trip, it would be a full time job.