Venice

My friend Piotr and I arrived in the vicinity of Venice after nightfall by car, having navigated in pure paramecium fashion a comically arcane set of highway switchbacks and roundabouts. Feeling a bit anxious after this experience about finding our way further at night in a strange city, we ended up ignoring Jan’s sage advice to park the car on the mainland, and instead drove over the lengthy bridge into Venice, then paid an exorbitant price to take it on the half-hour ferry ride over to the Lido district, which resides on an island shaped a bit, Piotr says, like a leg bone. I can’t remember ever having taken a car on a ferry before, so this was a tonne of fun for me. We were sure that the parking rates would be punitive, but were fortunate enough instead to find rockstar parking, right on the street across from our little hotel.

Water Buses
Taxis and buses exist as usual in Venice, only of course they are all in the form of boats. We climbed aboard the waterbus from Lido to downtown Venice on Saturday morning, then elected to simply not leave for an hour and a half, until it reached the end of the line and they threw us off. By this method, we managed a tour without narration of the main thoroughfare, which weaves along between some very impressive architecture. Imagine Rome or Florence or some other awe-inspiring Italian city made of marble, then put it up to its knees in the ocean. You can watch the water lapping at wooden doors as you grind by on your bus.

Frog Strangling
We eventually overstayed our welcome on the water bus, and climbed off to find an alternate route back, circumnavigating the archipelago instead of traversing it. We arrived at noon at a stop of interest, near one of the major squares, just in time for a monumentally torrential downpour, which turned into a good, steady, heavy rain for the remainder of the day. Tourists with an ounce of sense immediately purchased and donned colourful translucent raincoats and rainboots, which fit right over their shoes. Enterprising umbrella salesmen also made the rounds, taking advantage, as Piotr put it, of the harvest season. We of course had just arrived from Poland, where people pull down their hats and pull up their collars, shaking their heads in sadness at the weak folly of their fellow mortals.

The Absence of Paperwork
We sat out the first 45 diluvian minutes by taking refuge in a restaurant run by a couple of energetic men, one of whom was a Marcel Mastrionni lookalike contest winner in a somewhat shabby white linen jacket. This wasn’t the kind of restaurant that stood on ceremony. Instead of providing a menu, the waiter came up and said: “What do you eat: pizza or pasta?” We said “pasta.” He began naming sauces until we chose one. “What to drink?” We said. “Tea, with lemon.” “Limon, certa,” he said, and in due course, things arrived. Similarly with the bill, which consisted of him naming a number and us conjuring some Euros from about our persons.

The Labyrinth
Venice, the brochures tell us, is actually a micro-archipelago, with more than 100 islands joined by something like 350 bridges. I can attest to this because I crossed most of those bridges in the course of repeatedly, some might say obdurately, violating my principle of “don’t go up that alley.” In Venice, if it isn’t a Square, or rather a Piazza, it is probably an alley, situated between stone walls that rise several storeys on either side. In many of them, two umbrellas can’t pass each other, and in some, a single umbrella is too wide. They are all streaming with people going both directions or sometimes just standing in everyone’s way and having an Italian conversation. You have the option every few metres of plunging into a canal, but usually the preferred method is to cross it on a little rounded stone bridge about as big as a minute. I had to admire a country where those aren’t just flat paths with railings, but instead there has been individual attention to their nature as bridges.

Bridges
As you sail under the larger ones, you can see that the designs are varied and impressive. There are many stone arches, of course, but also some ancient wooden ones that are simply amazing. Down by the ferry to Lido, there is a modern footbridge, made of metal and enameled white, so that it looks like the extended spinal cord of some prehistoric beast.

Signage--now you see it; now you don’t
They have quite good signage in Venice, if by good you mean a clearly legible sign with an arrow pointing some direction. If, on the other hand, you mean a series of signs of that kind, intended to get you somewhere, then maybe you want another city. As far as I was able to judge, signs in Venice are produced as individual works of art, never to be corrupted in their essential purity by subjecting them to the mundane methods of mechanical reproduction. As Piotr said, staring at yet another list of ten arrows, each pointing different directions: “Rome, Cairo, and Peru.”

San Marco Square
One of the places we had hoped to see was this historical location of Church and State, where the paintings on the marble fronts of the buildings are rivaled only by the sculptures and other carvings that flank them. They are sufficiently overwhelming that it is hard to give them the credit they are due. Perhaps it will help to say they are like the Cathedrals I’ve seen all over the world, only moreso.

Random Bell Ringing
If there is one thing that has been a consistent theme of my first sabbatical, it is the bells, bells, bells. Like the hunchback of Notre Dame, I love them but sometimes I think it may have been a case of too much of a good thing. I heard Big Ben when he wasn’t ringing in London, and only stopped hearing him in my dreams when I got to Krakow and he was replaced, not only by a different set of bells but also by the mad trumpeter--a civil servant who climbs the tower in the square every hour, 24/7, to play a song that breaks off in mid-note. He does it to commemorate the brave watchman who was shot in the throat in 1241 while warning the city of invading Mongols. In Venice, it was the churches, completely removed from this postlapsarian world, joyously ringing out the 2:37 or 7:19 or whatever it happened to be. Piotr explained that they were likely doing it in memory of the moment of someone’s death.

The Casanova Tour
Venice was Casanova’s home town, where he worked as an 18th century alchemist and quack doctor, and where many of his adventures occurred, including a dramatic escape from the Leads--a prison notorious for its solitary confinement cells up in the ceiling, where the hot sun would beat on the lead tiles and make life an intolerable oven for anyone within. Hence the nickname for the prison. Today’s Venice honours young Giacomo by offering tours in his name. We wondered how his amorous adventures fit in to the tours. “Perhaps,” Piotr dryly observed, “they contain special opportunities.”

A Domino for the Masque
Casanova enjoyed a lot of things in his long and eventful life, and one of them was dressing up and going to a ball. The labyrinth contains many places overflowing with absolutely gorgeous masks, each one calling out to the impractical, improbable heart of the Frahnkenshteens. I was particularly drawn to the ones that featured coronas consisting of about a yard of feathers. Luckily, I had Piotr there to help me keep a steady head, or I’d have been drawn in like a moth to the flame and ended up shipping bits of colourful shattered enamel to my family and friends.

The Doge’s Palace
The name of the place is a bit of 18th-century humour, since it is actually the seat of government, a bit like the parliament buildings, and not a palace at all. Venice was a republic. But the Doge apparently did sometimes reside there. Casanova’s prison is connected to it by way of a bridge called “The Bridge of Tears.” That seems somehow more romantic when you aren’t aware that every ten metres there is another bridge connecting something to somewhere.

Ants of Glass
There is evidence of glass craftsmanship everywhere, from the many shops selling glass sculptures and ornaments down to the railings in our hotel, which were metal bars with coloured glass dumbbells, or maybe they were thighbones, strapped vertically on their middles. One store had a display with thousands of tiny glass creatures, each one no bigger than the fiery end of your elegant Italian cigarette. Among them was a whole platoon of glass ants.

Architectural Festival 2010
Piotr was eager to see the last day of this month-long event, and he had a map to the many locations scattered around the city. We settled on one of the two main venues, the Arsenale, which is a building about a mile long, originally used I think as a dock warehouse. Despite the appeal of architectural models, I was too wet and cold to enjoy myself, so I suggested to Piotr that he go ahead while I rested and dried out a bit at the rather extensive bookstore and coffee shop. It also gave me an opportunity to dry my hat under the hand dryer, while I waited in the half-hour bathroom lineup. I saved the exhibit's 20 Euro entrance fee, but what I missed were some amazing projects, including an indoor cloud that some lunatics had engineered, a giant art installation/sprinkler system consisting of running garden hoses suspended from the ceiling, and an audio installation where they had miked each member of a choir separately, then reproduced them on individual speakers, arranged in the shape of the original choir, but manipulated so that the songs could be deconstructed into their components. What I did get to see were several displays about architecture in Hong Kong, including the history of the astonishing Walled City of Kowloon, where our pal Rosan Chow grew up. Take the apartment block in Stephen Chow’s movie Kung Fu Hustle, and imagine the same design packed wall to wall inside a single square mile.

Peggy Guggenheim
We also had dreams of getting to see the collection at the Peggy Guggenheim gallery, but alas we arrived after it had closed. So we contented ourselves with hanging for a few minutes on the elaborate metal gates, which look like tangled bramble bushes where some fist-sized chunks of glass have gotten caught. I say contented ourselves, but really we were washed up against them by a surge of umbrellas turning the tight corner of the alley.

Santa Maria della Salute
To console ourselves on the way back to the water bus, we joined the eisodus of pilgrims heading into the cathedral of Santa Maria. I saw Piotr eyeing the three-foot-long white candles that you could buy outside for the choirboys to light, but we managed to sidestep that particular rite. We also narrowly escaped the lineup to go behind the altar, but only because I baulked and Piotr realized that none of the people who went back there ever came out again. Make of that what you will. We ended up instead watching one of the many large-screen TVs. Each screen showed a live video feed of the same closeup of the face of the icon of Mary above the main altar. Piotr said they were perhaps waiting for it to do something miraculous, like weeping. The TVs were mounted above head height, apparently at random on the walls between pillars, which were draped in decorative red tapestry. We conjectured that all the festive appearance must have been put there in commemoration of whatever was signified by the random bell ringing.

Grotesques and Gargoyles
If you are a fan of making fun of The Man by carving his face in marble, whether with his cheeks blown out or with an improbably and wickedly irreverent expression on his bad face, then Venice is where you should set up shop. You can hardly light a candle without being startled by some manner of grotesque or gargoyle either leering at you or gurgling water on you.

Catwalks on the Waterfront
The water being absurdly located as it is, the locals occasionally find it expedient to produce artificially raised sidewalks, which consist of miles of gritted plywood, supported on knee-high scaffolding. They resemble nothing so much as fashion-show catwalks, only in this case they are keeping tourists a few additional inches above high tide. When we arrived, workers were just dismantling them and stowing them away.

Hotel des Bains
The hotel used for the movie Death in Venice is now closed, but it still stands, another marble monument to Italian architecture, overlooking the beach that runs the length of Lido. We were there in the off season, so the sand had been bulldozed to make a six-foot-high embankment to help protect the inhabitants from the Adriatic. There were also 530 (they were numbered) little wooden shacks facing the water, which people could presumably rent when they brought their families and friends for a day on the beach. Imagine, I said to Piotr, all of those Italians in their designer bathing suits and sunglasses. It would be something to see.