Venice unmasked

Dimenticare Venezia

In 1892, in Italian Hours, Henry James wrote that, Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs.

 
In 1956, Mary McCarthy (an American critic and novelist, 1912 – 1989) wrote, in Venice Observed, And there is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities – Rome or Florence or Naples.  The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian’s, Quadri’s, Torcello, Harry’s Bar, Murano, Burano, the pigeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto.  Venice is a folding picture postcard of itself.

 
Both these statements, I believe, ring true today, but neither should be taken as the last word. Many other writers have added their pennyworths to the pile of thoughts that Venice inspires.  Charles Dickens, in Pictures from Italy (1846) dreamt of buildings that were high and low, and black, and white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong.....  He fancied he saw old Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all built up with shops and humming with the tongues of men.....  Jan (then James) Morris wrote in 1960 that, In Venice the past and the present are curiously interwoven.....and that Melancholia contributes strongly to the Venetian atmosphere.  

Joseph Brodsky, in Watermark (1992), referred to the chiming of bells, his room flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers.....  

More recently, in Venice is a Fish (2000), Tiziano Scarpa suggests that the visitor to Venice should put on very dark sunglasses....  Venice can be lethal, he says.  In the historic centre the aesthetic radioactivity is extremely high.  

Every angle radiates beauty; apparently shabby; profoundly devious, inexorable.  The sublime pours in bucketloads from the churches, but even the calli without monuments, the bridges to the rii, are picturesque at the very least.

My love affair with Venezia has lasted almost fifty years, though over those years we have both aged and changed.  It may be a platitude to say that the magic has worn a little thin, and that I feel a little less excited about our relationship than perhaps I did when I first set foot in La Serenissima.  But I guess the feeling is reciprocal – she loves me a little less too.  I am just one of millions of admirers, and the restauranteurs and the gondoliers know it.  

There is nothing special about me.

So, during my recent stay, in a tiny quiet apartment above a courtyard in the Santa Croce sestiero, 

a step away from the delightful Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio, 

I retrace the steps of many years, revisiting the great churches of the Frari and Saints Giovanni and Paolo, the Salute, 

San Giorgio Maggiore, as well as, of course, San Marco.  

I climb campanili to see the views across the city and the lagoon to the distant Dolomiti.  

I wander over the Rialto, through the markets, through the Correr, the Accademia, the Scuole (dei Carmini, Grande di San Rocco, 

di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni), the Guggenheim, 

the great Palazzi (Ducale, Ca’ Rezzonico, Ca’ Pesaro).  I visit La Fenice (for Il Barbiere di Siviglia), having not been there since I went with Amanda before the fire....  I visit the campi (too many to mention) and the islands (Murano with its flamboyant glass, multi-coloured Burano, 

silent Torcello, 

the Lido with its Adriatic strand 

and Giudecca with its busy boatyards).....  

In the Arsenale we see a magical show about Casanova, boats and floats and acrobats, and projections on fountains. 

 

And with every step come memories but also new pleasures as the light changes, and I see things I hadn’t noticed before.  The Carnival adds spice and splendour, 

the old Bacari replenish flagging spirits, 

various trattorie fill my belly (but drain my wallet) with bigoli in salsa, risotto di nero di seppia, pasta e fagioli, moleche (soft-shelled crabs), branzino (sea bass), pesce san Pietro (John Dory), all lubricated with copious glasses of Tai (Venetian Tocai) or Soave (et alios).....  

My love is rekindled and, as the weather turns from rain and cold to crystal clear skies and gentle breezes, I relax into a routine of living once more all’Italiana: a cappuccino and cornetto con crema at Lavena, then a walk, as Tiziano Scarpa recommends: The first and only itinerary I suggest to you has a name.  It’s called: at random.  Subtitle: aimlessly.....  Getting lost is the only place worth going to.....  I feel a new sense of delight in every calle, every sottoportico, every campo.  Here you can sit and dream.  Here you can immerse yourself in a book 

or just take the sun with your floppy dog.  

There you can compose a sketch, 

or sip a spritz. 

I like to watch the world go by.  It is reassuring to see people going about their lives in this timeless place.  

And I love to exchange a cheeky glance here and there.....

And then as the days spin away, the sun falls, 

the moon and stars appear above the rooftops, 

and the canals become deep dark alleys lit only by the occasional lamp.  I love the close dark silence, just sometimes broken by a lonely splash.  I love the mellow warmth of the crumbling walls.  

It can be eerily quiet – so many palazzi now are uninhabited, and very few are the animal sounds of the night.

I even get so lost in my reveries that I photograph a man with a mop of silver hair leaning on a bridge without realising who he is.  

Later I discover that if I had £8,450 to spare I could have indulged in six days (partly) in the company of acclaimed architect and descendant of an ancient Venetian dynasty, Francesco da Mosto to discover the layered history of the Floating City, exploring its waterscapes, architecture and artworks.  

Ah well!  Another time....

But will there be another time?  There are other places.  Beautiful and unique as Venice is I feel this may have been the last time.  So now, perhaps, is the time to forget Venice, as in Dimenticare Venezia, the 1979 film written and directed by Franco Brusati which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but which tied for the 1979 David di Donatello Award for Best Film with The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Christ Stopped at Eboli (it was a very good year!)

The film isn’t really about Venice at all, but I know it because one of my students at the time had a role in it and that was quite something. The main point here is that there comes a time when decisions must be made, and relationships may be more important than seeking diversion in fanciful plans.  

I love Venice, and had a really good time there this year, but perhaps I should acknowledge that there are alternatives to beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past (F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby).

To quote Henry James again, this time from 1882 (Italian Hours), When I hear, when I see, the magical name I have written above these pages [Venice], it is not of the great square that I think, with its strange basilica and its high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the stately steps and the well-poised dome of the Salute; it is not of the low lagoon, nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St Mark’s.  I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city – a patch of green water and a surface of pink wall.....

Basta.

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I wrote another piece about Venice on this blog some fifteen years ago (updated, I think, a year or two after).  If you have the stamina, have a glance:

https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2010/04/venezia-venice.html

And then, if you need some light relief, join in with Joe Dolan's audience in this jolly piece of theatre.....

https://youtu.be/p0G9Fq3nsbo?feature=shared

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{For Sarah H}

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Venezia (Venice)

La Serenissima

Everyone knows Venice, one way or another.  When one of my daughters was ten, and had not been there, she told me “It’s a very nice place, and I want to go there,” and she based this conception on pictures from books and TV.  Later we did go there, and she had a wonderful time.  We rented a one-room apartment in a residential district and lived like old-time Venetians.

I must have first heard of La Serenissima many years before I first went there.  Perhaps studying “Othello” at school?  Or in geography lessons?  Of course this is the same with many places.  We know the names Oklahoma, or Siberia, or Tokyo, without going there, but with Venice there is a particular fascination and a great deal of visual and imaginative evidence to hand.  Some will remember the film “Don’t Look Now” for example, with its creepy images of dark canals and sottoportici.  Others will have the wistful palette of Visconti in mind having seen “Death in Venice.”  Others will have the speedboat glitz of James Bond in their stock of images.  Television travel programmes, images in magazines, posters in travel agents, garish ashtrays, and shiny plastic gondolas - all contribute to our knowledge of this unique city on the water. 

As a teenager I spent one summer as a guide in a Scottish castle and daily gazed at two enormous Canaletto paintings, marvelling at the delicate pink of the Doge’s palace above the glittering water of the Grand Canal.  And then the remarkable thing was that when I did finally see that view in three dimensions with my own eyes, it was almost exactly as painted, and this is one if the continuing attractions of the place.  It is not that old, compared with many another European city, but it is, in many ways, unchanged by history, or at least, less changed than most of the places we see. 

In 1892, Henry James wrote that, “Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs.”  The sense of what he says is true.  The population has changed, and certainly diminished, and there is no longer the bustle and business and pride that occupied the Venetian Republic before Wordsworth recorded its extinction:         

(Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;

And was the safeguard of the west:).

But then, to go back only a little in history, there was nothing there but reeds and rivulets, such as you see when your plane banks over the northern end of the lagoon.  Attila the Hun, in A.D. 453 set the ball rolling by invading the neighbourhood and causing people to seek refuge on the damp and muddy islets. Life in Venice has wavered and flourished and receded, a little like the tides, over the centuries, but still goes on.

I was recently amazed when, waiting for a certain assignation I had made in a quiet street in the Sestriere San Polo, the seemingly deserted calle I stood in kept being disturbed by signs of life.  People, with shopping bags and brief cases, appeared and disappeared, letting themselves into otherwise hidden doorways.  It took me a while to realise that, in fact, people were going home.  They had done whatever they did during the day, whether it was working in a shop or hotel or office, or managing the home for the numerous school children that also appear and disappear at certain times, and they were going back to their family residences to prepare the evening meal.  After all, when you think about it, how else would all the food shops and market stalls survive?  And there are many of them.  Venice may be dying.  But she sure ain’t dead yet!

How long this will persist, however, is not easy to foretell.  The phrase “Venice in peril” was responsible for television documentaries and news items many years ago.  It no longer seems to be newsworthy, as if the lion has cried “wolf” too often.  There is no doubt that she is sinking.  In one hundred years Venice has ceded twenty-three centimetres to the sea; in the last seven years, she has lost four.  In 1996 there were one hundred and one instances of “alta maree;” in 2002 the sea rose one hundred and eleven times over eighty centimetres.  In 2002 the first aqua alta was in February; in 2003 there had already been three by January 4^th, when at 09.35 the water rose one metre and eight centimetres.  As recently as November 2012 70% of Venice was inundated with high winds from the south and heavy rains whipping the sea level up to one and a half metres above the norm.  The phenomenon is complex and is generally attributed to low atmospheric pressure and sirocco winds from the south, but the greenhouse effect and the melting of the ice caps seem to be behind the inexorable increase in occasions when the Vigili have to direct pedestrian traffic on the passerelle to avoid intasamenti where the tourists are photographing San Marco under water.

As an extraordinary and highly successful example of human ingenuity and artistry, which, like all things, may not survive for ever, it is, worth first hand experience.  The worldwide trade in images of San Marco, or the Rialto, cannot substitute walking on the stones themselves.  No amount of reading, whether it is Ruskin or the Rough Guide, can replace the exhilaration to be had in situ.  A vaporetto trip down the Grand Canal must be one of the world’s finest bus rides, and it is one that bears repeating in different lights and seasons.  In the depths of winter, at night, it has an unusual attraction, perhaps because of its unphotographable darkness.  With snowflakes smudging your vision, the glimpses of illuminated ceilings, darkly glowing chandeliers, bevelled mirrors that reflect smoky portraits, and the floodlit architecture of the façades, swirl past over the inky viscid waters.  Around you stand silent, swathed Venetians; ahead of you looms the Rialto, festooned with a thousand Christmas lights; in the empty Fish Market stands a forlorn Christmas tree.  It is a world apart from the warm brightness of summer nights, or the spooky levity of Carnevale, and far more difficult than the misty colours of the autumn, but it is a memorable part of the cycle, and one that cannot but entertain.

There are so many sights in Venice that repeated visits may never suffice.  Art works abound and astound; architecture and nature work together to continually stimulate the visual imagination.  There are guidebooks aplenty to help you choose, and your own taste will help you select, as you will not manage everything.  Baedeker, in 1912, recommended five (very full) days for sightseeing.  Who knows?  If you are a retired film star who can stay indefinitely at the Daniele, then take your time.  Breakfast in Florian’s, lunch at Quadri’s and dinner at Harry’s Bar.  Maybe a picture or two in between.  If you are a lesser mortal, may I suggest a wander to the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni to see Vittore Carpaccio’s early sixteenth century cycle of paintings.  And spend some time working out exactly how St George managed to spear the dragon so deftly on the left of his horse’s head.  Brilliant stuff!

To complicate matters, the attraction of Venice is not limited to the major sights either.  Although many tour operators ship their charges out to Murano to see glass making and buy souvenirs (glass furnaces were banned in the centre at the end of the thirteenth century following some disastrous fires) not many make it out to the splendid isolation of Torcello, with 11th and 12th century bizantine mosaics in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta.  Fewer still change boats at Burano, leaving the pastel shades of the fishermen’s houses (and the elegance of the Trattoria da Romana), to venture out to the island of San Francesco del Deserto where Saint Francis himself founded a convent on his return from the fifth crusade in 1220.

And, when all else is seen to, in Venice, as everywhere, the weary visitor needs nourishment.  Not surprisingly, there is no end of places to choose from, and many are regularly recommended by guidebooks.  In the early sixties, James Morris declared he soon became tired of Venetian food, and, perhaps, if you had to reside there for a year to write a book, you also might tire of the diet, but these days a casual visitor will find the many osterie, bacari and trattorie, charming and stimulating.  Seek out Osteria Do Mori, near the Rialto, if you just want un ombra (a drink) and some cicheti (snacks).  For something more substantial, head for Ca d’Oro alla Vedova, Cannaregio 3912, where copper pans and lanterns hang from the ceiling, and ceramic jugs and glassware nicely decorate the shelves.  It’s a busy, popular place, but as authentic as they come.  I have taken my daughters, and other friends, there.  They were not disappointed. 

Venice is not a republic any more.  It has been overrun by Austrians and French.  It has, perhaps, seen its glory days.  La Fenice has burned down and arisen from the ashes.  Peggy Guggenheim is no more.  Hemingway no longer downs Bellinis at Harry’s Bar.  Titian and Giorgione have hung up their brushes and Tourism overrides almost all else.  But it is still La Serenissima, and it is easy to throw off the crowds and pace the alleys without oppression.  On one of my first visits I walked for hours along dark lanes, over tiny bridges, through narrow covered ways, and alongside quiet canals.  I twisted and turned and thought I must have reached the outer limits of the city, far from the throngs in Piazza S Marco.  Then I spotted a light over a door, and a modest sign for a trattoria.  This seemed heaven-sent.  I was tired, hungry, in need of company and comfort.  I entered a discreetly lit restaurant with worn carpets on the floor and old fashioned furniture.  I was served politely, a delicious meal, with light Soave from the Veneto.  I saw no menu, but trusted the welcoming host.  It was heaven.  And when I was full and warm and happy and the bill was settled, I got up to leave.  Instead of returning the way I had entered, I took what appeared to be the main entrance, and found myself right by the Rialto market, and that I had just dined at the Antica Trattoria, Poste Vecie, reputedly the oldest restaurant in Venice.  It was a startling moment.  One that taught me not to take anything in Venice for granted.  There is more to this city than plastic gondolas, or pigeons in the Piazza S Marco.  And I, for one, will keep going back until the waters have covered us all.

ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC

Once did she hold the gorgeous east in fee;

And was the safeguard of the west: the worth

Of Venice did not fall below her birth,

Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.

She was a maiden City, bright and free;

No guile seduced, no force could violate;

And, when she took unto herself a Mate,

She must espouse the everlasting Sea.

And what if she had seen those glories fade,

Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;

Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid

When her long life hath reached its final day:

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade

Of that which once was great, is passed away

William Wordsworth

http://www.daromano.it/index.htm

http://www.teatrolafenice.it/

http://www.postevecie.it/