Staid narration is not his thing. Though he probably overuses the phrase "for thousands of years," Wolf is a sucker for throwing in a small joke at the end of a serious description. When he's describing the Roman aqueducts and explaining how their support columns spanning rivers were designed like the prow of a ship to minimize erosion, he tells how the mortar the early builders used was made from "lime, pork fat, wine, and figs . . . with a little salt and pepper added for taste." The first part was oddly true, but the cookbook writer in him just couldn't pass up the joke, and he does this again and again. I personally liked it because it lightened the narration, and I think he's successful in this technique because he never goes for the big laugh. It's always a smile or a mild chuckle he's trying to generate, so the jokes glide by as effortlessy and enjoyably as the river boats. In Linz, Wolf's voiceover tells us, "people have been living here for 3000 years," and as the cameras pan
Source: DVDTOWN.com
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