The city of mirrors

To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius. - Alexander Herzen.

Rialto

I've attached myself to Venice like a jealous lover.  I stalk its calli during the day, hating the tourists, wishing they would go home and leave it to me so I can fawn all over it undisturbed. Then alone at night with my beautiful treasure, I gaze at it in raptures; all the dark nuances of shadows, the chinks of light that tantalise me, the mysteries that just might reveal themselves if I am patient enough.  I love that the season has changed, and with it the light.  I've never seen light like in Venice, and although I'm aware that it has been rhapsodised over, eulogised over, poetry and art and music poured over it, I still feel, like all jealous lovers, that this light belongs to me. No day or night is the same;  the moon changes the shapes and stature of the buildings, waxing and waning with the tides that I'm now conscious of on a cyclic level. The colder air changes the shape and form of the light; sometimes Venice looks as if it is being seen through a grimy glass window, at others it's reflected in ancient, peeling mirrors;  in between it shimmers and trembles as if it has just been washed with mountain water.

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone. ~ Erica Jong

Famous Horses at San Marco

Yesterday I went with Pamela from school to the Museo di Storia Naturale, at Ca' Rezzonico, after twists and turns and dead ends in the back lanes, washing flapping above us, cane caca beneath our feet. I don't normally like being cooped up in museums, but I bought a Museo Card for E18 which entitles me to dieci museo per ses mese - a euro and a bit for entry into fabulous palaces with fabulous collections - priceless.  What a museum. Outside, the grace and splendour of a truly grand villa, while inside it's a statement of everything that is wonderful in Italian contemporary design, a brilliant counterpoint to creepy things and crawly things, and bottled things and fossilised things.  There are no English translations of any of the exhibits, but to our delight, both P and I understood EVERYTHING.  

A jaunt around another corner led us to the exhibition of Alexxandre Vassiliev - a Russian designer - of clothes and textiles from 1900 - 1920, from Paris, Bulgaria, Venice, and Russia.    They were made of exquisite silks and beadwork, and looking around at the plethora of ugly clothing we now wear, you'd have to lament that elegant time lost. 

Several times, but always on the way to somewhere else, I'd chugged past the astonishing artwork of Oksana Mas, who created gigantic panels of wooden eggs into " Wooden Egg Mosiacs called ‘Post-vs-Proto-Renaissance’, (that) features 12 separate pieces, measures a total of 92 by 134 meters and numbers an astonishing 3,640,000 wooden eggs hand-painted by people in 42 different countries.

This city is a living, breathing art gallery, and the longer I'm here the more I find there is to see. I haven't yet seen a Tintoretto!

I've been wanting to see "Venice behind the Mask" ever since I saw it advertised on a billboard way back in July. I'm leaving for Sydney in a few days, there to meet Dawn and do the Pacific cruise that I won while I was in Nepal, before I return here. Yet I'm voracious for more and more, as everything is much more fun, and accessible, now that I have a leetle beet of Italian; enough to get around, get fed, get out of trouble and eavesdrop. We bought tickets for the show at Teatro Gallo  - ate at a little trattoria in a piazza - where Pamela asked for Sambucco instead of Oso Buco - note to selves, why bother with meat here - it's always terrible.  Front row seats and the show was a riot, a wonderful multi media production covering five hundred years of ribaldry, rivalry, plague, fame, fortune, decadence, death and divine intervention.

Venice from Lido, with fishing nets

Today - a trip to the Lido to ride a bike. Or rather, three of us riding one bike - three seats next to each other, with one dud steering wheel, a mismatched set of pedals, seats that couldn't by any stretch of the imagination comfortably seat three bums.  We mounted pavements, we created traffic jams of buses and cars (eeuw, yes, those macchina are noxious, stinky belching pests) we pushed and heaved up hills and let loose down hills, we squeezed between barriers over ponti, all the while looking across the gorgeous Venice shrouded in a delicate, delicious autumn haze, the water flat as a mirror.  

Not Sydney! Phew!  Lido, Venice. Hideous.

Most definitely the most fun I have had for 4Euro for a long time. I wasn't allowed to ride in the main streets because I'd turn the wrong way, but the residents of the Lido were very accommodating, apart from a grumpy woman sitting on a park bench watching the traffic, who cursed to her husband about the lunatic foreign infidels who dared to have a good time. We stopped pedalling to ask a man directions to the light house - which we called Casa la luce, which resulted in him giving us a history lesson on the lighthouse, a linguistic lesson on the correct use of the word, and the various types of lighthouses, so that by the time he was finished it was too late to go to the lighthouse, but, very well informed, we stopped briefly at the Lido, a beach ruined by the platoons of change booths that resemble a detention centre.  

Map reading, Lido.

Worse, you have to pay to visit it, but we chained the three seater bike to the gate and went in over the sticky brown sand to watch a coiffed poodle retrieve a ball. I suppose when you're enclosed by buildings, this beach seems remarkable. It reminded me of Brighton, England, except the light, of course, was infinitely better here.

I've tried never to make this blog a "I woke up, I did this, I went and ate there", but every moment and every meal in Venice has cause to be celebrated. We ate at a very ordinary restaurant at the Lido, but staring over us was the Excelsior hotel, it's facade completely covered with exquisite Belle Epoque tiles. 

Facade of Excelsior made of tiles

Down through the back streets were large, elegant, well maintained villas, looking across the lagoon to Venice.  The Lido is a very sedate place - at least it seemed so on this chilly day, but it was the haunt of decadents and partygoers in affluent times past. 

Venice across the water looks like all the paintings you see in gauzy, hazy, ethereal colours. Fishing nets seem to hold Venice at bay, or stop it from ascending to heaven. The paintings from the past show a city of centuries long decadence, but now it seems like a little frail old lady, trying to remember her courtesan days. 

We ferried back to San Marco where the handbag touts were out in full force - and so were the carabinieri.  These poor African souls tout their knock off uber brand Chinese fakes and the more desperate they are to sell, the less you'll need to pay for them -  if you can catch them when the carabinieri are running after them. I always thought it was a cat and mouse game - not very serious, but today the carabinieri meant business and didn't care who got in the way. Tourists were knocked off their feet, pigeons took to the air, gelatis fell to the ground, upside down maps took off like pelicans,  and the Africans ran like the wind, chased by panting, tubby men in uniform.  The carabinieri called for reinforcements, bags went flying, and a tall Cameroon man was pinned to the ancient stones by two fat uniforms under a mini mound of fake bags. It was easy to follow the drops of blood spilled in the chase ... but for the first time my heart went out to them, as I heard later that they were indentured to the traffickers who had brought them into Venice, paying a portion of the takings in fees or bribes every day.

Grand canal, just under Rialto

Ditto

Sunset, and a meal at Al Buco, under the Rialto. A heavenly place.  You can't beat the view. I've been there three times and come away sated and satisfied each time.  If you don't like the food, look at the view. It never fails. The waiters are out of Fawlty Towers and worth every cent. This is Italy after all. You want swank, pomp, and perfection? Go to Paris!

These photos are not modified .. this is the 6pm light under the Rialto at the beginning of Winter.  Priceless.

A boat ride home to San Toma .. and the strains of Vivaldi in the piazza .. a violinist and a cellist playing in the dark to the passers by. Heaven. If they play the adagio, I said to myself, as I leaned over the ancient stone well, and settled in for a big listen on the 4 centuries old step,  I'll give them five euros. They did. I did. I practically skipped home.

Tomorrow, my last day in my adopted city until I return, I move some of my stuff to my new apartment in Cannareggio.  What a big deal that's going to be - dragging cases up steps over bridges, into a traghetto, then a vaporetto, then more hauling. No transport? Here is easy! Yes. Well.  Whatever.  Then P, M and I are  taking a speedboat to the Lido for a helicopter ride around the islands of Torchello, Cimiteria, Burano, Murano and Venice. Then Vivaldi's Quattro Staglione in the church in which it was first performed, on the edge of the Grand Canal.   Then Sydney, and friends and the cruise and a birthday party and then pre-nuptial planning with figlia numero uno, and then return to La Serenissima for winter, for carnevale. And Christmas in Geneva, and friends from Holland and Verona in January.  And Drella Bella my bff, coming for Carnevale too, she who kept me going through long time travelled nights with tales of her own goings on. Oh, heaven. Oh, priceless.

There really is light at the end of the tunnel .. always. I had a new passport done in January and I look as if ghosts are inhabiting what was left of my heart and body then. It's a truly frightening photograph. It's said that when you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.  But my face now is unrecognisable from that haunted creature.  I have no intention of "going home", rather a temporary respite from this soulful journeying.   I was crawling over metaphorical glass, a shambles of a person, traumatised, compromised, betrayed, broken and humiliated beyond anything I have ever experienced.  The photo for my Venetian pass - the IMOB card, was copied from my passport, and I'm now unrecognisable from that person.  I'm unwillingly carrying my own ghost. But it helps to remind me that no matter how bad your life seems at the time, how utterly out of control and hideous and hopeless, it does get better. It gets best. 

And because you've been through the sewers of your life, everything after that can't be anything but wonderful. It's important to reflect at junctures ... and give thanks for how far we have come from the pits.


Indeed.