by Kurt Caswell
Before arriving in Venice, however, I was in Spain, teaching travel writing in my university’s study abroad program in Seville. It was all going swimmingly—our group kept hours in the university center for classes, then roamed the country on weekends, tossing in a rogue journey to Lisbon. Then, during Semana Santa, all my students and colleagues fled for northern climes (Paris, London, Rome), and I (what was I thinking?) hung around Seville like a starving dog. I spent a few days with two Hungarian brothers who were two years into a six-year walk around the world (another story, really) and spied on the endless robed processions processing through town. And yet a bad case of cabin fever blew in over me.
I couldn’t sleep. I had already watched a half-dozen DVDs on my laptop, read a wonderful book by Laurie Lee, and written page after dull page in my notebook. It was midnight one night, maybe it was Thursday, when I found myself pacing back and forth from the window to the door in my little flat. What was I to do? I put on my shoes and grabbed a handful of cash. I thought I might walk about town to gas off, but I’m not a night person so much, not a city boy, not a barfly. I made a few turns around the cathedral, passed through the old Jewish quarter and across the tip of the Jardines de Murillo. I hungered for something natural, a bright star overhead, a tree to sit under, an empty land out in front of me. I did the only sensible thing: I bought a bag of potato chips and ate them all in one go. I couldn’t make a habit of this, what with the dangers of chemical preservatives and high cholesterol. So the next day, when my friends Carmen and John, along with their young daughter, Maria, invited me to join them on a trip to Venice, I accepted.
It was raining as I entered Venice from the north. I say the north because if you take the shuttle bus in from Marco Polo International, you step out into the Piazzale Roma on the north end of town, northwest end really, and if it is raining, then the first thing you do is buy an umbrella. You’re going to walk to your hotel, of course—wander is more like it—across the ancient city through ancient streets and along ancient canals; and if it is raining, then you buy an umbrella. My friends would be in late that evening, as we had booked different flights. I had the entire day to myself. Oh, glorious! What would I do with this expanse of time? What could I do? I bought an umbrella at the first kiosk I found, a spring-loaded shade of a goodly size with a nice tartan pattern, red and black, a pattern I’d never consider if I were traveling in Scotland, but this wasn’t Scotland, and this pattern was hip in the way that things are hip when out of place. I sauntered off, protected from the rain.
The umbrella is an ancient tool, older than Venice herself. It likely grew out of Egypt some three thousand years ago, as many things did, for royalty, as usual, a symbol of those beings living on a higher plane and overshadowing the lower worlds—a vault of heaven over the pharaohs. In ancient Greece, the umbrella was associated with Bacchus and the sexual reveries of his followers. It soon lost that symbolism and was used as a pedestrian shelter from sun or rain (call it parasol or umbrella, respectively). Later, something very exciting happened. In 1177, so the story goes, Pope Alexander III blessed the Doge of Venice, Sebastiano Ziani, with the honor of bearing his umbrella on arranging a meeting with Emperor Frederick of Germany. So I carried my umbrella boldly through the city, neither pope nor doge nor pharaoh, just an ordinary guy from Oregon, lifting it high over a sea of umbrellas, tourists probably, a gangway of bright colors fustering down the narrow streets.
There are no cars in Venice, no bicycles either. The pace of Venetian life is at walking speed, slow and of the body, the feet and knees and quads, the hips moving in their gentle gait, the shoulders squared and the head up, an outward view, a bright and peaceful forward progress at about three miles per hour. We don’t know, or we don’t realize, how the speed of modern things—our cars and trains and planes, our iPods and iPhones and e-mails, our enslavement by the clock—takes us away from ourselves, hurries us along to death. In Venice, I felt alive and easy, happy and hungry, maybe even younger than I was, part of something larger than myself, like Big Bang all over again. I guess in summer the canals stink of mortality, a thousand years of human refuse slowly decaying in the bottom’s black mud. Yet on this day, the rain freshened the city and my sheltering sky. I was perfectly in my element—nothing to do but saunter along, explore museums and buildings and waterways, have a coffee, gaze at people and their shoes, watch the clouds roll in or roll out, and see the ancient waters of the black lagoon cover over the smooth Piazza San Marco.
My map foretold my way. I decided the Museo d’Arte Orientale was just my style, and I might as well have a look at its companion, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna. The latter I breezed through as I thought I might, an expressionist this and that, a modernist such-and-such, a Dadaist doodad—I didn’t really get it. In the Oriental collection I found weapons—any boy’s dream—spears and swords and daggers. I wandered the corridors with a dozen other dreamers slavering over those gleaming blades. I wondered, as anyone would, which one of these points, inert behind a glass casing, had pierced a man’s heart. But there was too much of it, and it wore on me, slowly, slowly, so I turned to other treasures: scrolls and bowls, armoires and porcelain delicates, lacquerware, and a row of instruments, including the koto and shamisen. I guess some madman, Prince Henry II of Bourbon-Parma, Count of Bardi, collected all this stuff, some thirty thousand items, on his travels in Asia between 1887 and 1889. Imagine setting out on a journey with empty pockets, and then carrying a museum home. Do I need to say it?—Travel light . . . or don’t travel at all. Then again, this collection is one of the most important from Edo period Japan. I suppose we should say three hallelujahs in praise of the wealthy and obsessed.
On I went along the Grand Canal, headed for the Pescheria and the Rialto Bridge, only I did not know it then. I didn’t have a guidebook and had read virtually nothing about Venice. That came later. I had only my little map and knew only that I had to reach the Piazza San Marco to find my hotel. Carmen, who was somewhere in the sky with John and Maria, was reading Venice Is a Fish by Tiziano Scarpa, and later I did too. As it turned out, I was doing it right: “The first and only itinerary I suggest to you has a name,” Scarpa writes. “It’s called: at random. Subtitle: aimlessly. . . . Getting lost is the only place worth going to.” Amen.
I wasn’t so much as lost, but I certainly didn’t know where I was, and where I was turned out to be the fish market. It’s a produce market too, only who can deny the smell of the fish, and the great wet eyes ogling you from their briny ice beds? I cruised through the bustling aisles to survey the goods, the fishmongers taking names and cutting off heads. The floor was slick with slime, and my shoes became like sliders on a curling sheet. I moved effortlessly, lilting along in a lope. Nothing much happened here except the surging energy and excitement of buying a dead fish, coupled with my awareness that people have been doing so in this very market for about a thousand years. When I reached the produce, I became entranced by the shiny fruits, the rounded hard mounds arranged like sins for the taking. I bought three apples, I don’t know which kinds, all different, and took one of them into my mouth without washing it. I was fascinated by the pieces of fresh coconut at various stands, broken at random and set up on little tiers with water running over them. Why I didn’t buy one, I will never know.
At the Rialto Bridge I thought I’d reached a major monument, and of course I had. Perhaps you are worldlier than I, so forgive me, but I knew nothing about this place, this point, this high bank of Venetian culture, apparently one of the oldest parts of the city. But I know about it now. The marble bridge runs up over the Grand Canal, a major point of crossing, where people pause at the pinnacle to have a look at the forever city down its main waterway. Lord Byron loved this city too and lived here in his self-exile from England, from 1816 to 1819. He called it a “fairy city of the heart.” He was famous for his prowess in swimming (among other things) and passed under this bridge more than once, stroking his way up the canal. In his third famous swim he was in
contest with an Englishman, Alexander Scott, and a blowhard, Angelo Mengaldo. I suppose Byron was a blowhard too, but on this day at least his lusty strokes spoke for him: he outraced his two opponents over a distance of four and a half miles from the Lido up the Grand Canal. Mengaldo dropped out before they reached the Rialto, and after that Byron swam alone. In a letter to a friend he wrote, “I was in the sea from half past 4—till a quarter past 8—without touching or resting.” I suppose we might say three hallelujahs in praise of nobles who are physically fit.
Gazing out from the bridge in the light rain, I found that the day was wearing on. I descended the other side, walking the smooth marble steps where, from the time of the bridge’s completion in 1592, some millions of shoes have worn away every imperfection in the stone. It wasn’t too far or too long after that when the light came tumbling in, the clouds parting their seams, and though it sounds like I made it up, I stepped out into the Piazza San Marco in the splendor of the midday sun.
Can you imagine it? At heart, I’m just a mountain man trapped in a paved-over world, as I heard it, or, at least, “isn’t it pretty to think so,” but I do give thanks for the beauty of the world’s great cities. San Marco is, as you’ll hear or read over and over if you visit, the only piazza in Venice, with its cornerstone the Basilica di San Marco and its five stately domes, consecrated in 1094. It was the private cathedral of the doges until 1807, when it finally opened to the public. Most buildings in Venice face the canals on which they were built, but the Basilica faces the center of the piazza. If you’ve seen other cathedrals in Europe, as I have—especially Saint Peter’s in Vatican City, Saint Paul’s in London, and the Cathedral of Seville—you may be tempted to pass this by, reasoning that if you’ve seen those three, you’ve seen them all. But have a look at the façade, the dazzling mosaics, and know that inside even greater splendor awaits you. All other places of worship pale in comparison, except perhaps the sun setting on the Grand Tetons.
I sat down on a movable gangway, used in the square to make a path when the water rises. The water was rising after the rains, and in places across the piazza floor it bubbled up from the underground and pooled. These gangways were for walking on, of course, but everywhere they had become benches for weary amblers like me. I sat down, the Basilica at my fore; over my left shoulder, the Torre dell’Orologio, with its two bronze Moors who strike a bell with great hammers on the hour; over my right shoulder, the 99-meter-high campanile, and, beyond that, statues of the city’s patron saints—Saint Mark and Saint Theodore—who show the way out to the waterfront and the sea.
This is where my story stalls, where I met this splendor at early afternoon and sat idle in the center of it for more than one hour. I really had no idea what to do next except sit there and take it all in. And so I did, but it was far too much, and it wore on me, slowly, slowly. Scarpa is right again: “Too much splendor seriously damages your health.”
To repair that, I went for a walk, out between the two saints and up the Riva degli Schiavoni toward a park near land’s end. I still had some five hours, maybe more, before my friends arrived, and I was in no hurry. So I wandered, as is my habit, up along the waters and out along the ways. I saw various lovely sights: statues forgotten in the trees, green grass and black waters, strollers with happy faces, the outline of San Giorgio Maggiore beyond the quay, a puppy straining against its lead. I returned to the piazza the way I had come and crossed back over the footbridge, whereon stood a collection of teenagers smoking and laughing before the Bridge of Sighs. Then I did all that was left to do. I went uptown a few streets to pay too much for food I could cook better at home, checked into my hotel, and settled in for a short rest. Ah, Venice!
At nearly 11 p.m. there came a knock at my door. My friends, obviously. I went out with them, for they hadn’t dined. This time, they paid too much for food that was modestly fair. Ah, Venice, again.
Morning in Venice is the finest hour. I woke before my friends and popped out to a little café on a corner and ordered coffee with milk. This wasn’t the sort of place you’d find a seat, in fact there were no seats at all, only little shelves scattered about the walls where you might set your cup for the three seconds you need a place to set it between the three seconds you need to drink it. I stood near a pillar outside the café. The place was jam-packed, lots of men and women in suits, nary a tourist anywhere. I felt not like an insider but not quite like an outsider, so happy and welcoming were the baristas. I drank down my coffee, ordered one for the road, and returned to the lobby of the hotel.
Let me introduce you to my friends. John is a tenured professor of Spanish language and literature, specializing in the Golden Age. He’s an American, from the Midwest no less, whose boyish good looks compete with his professional pragmatism. Carmen is a Spaniard, a Galician to say true, and also a professor of Spanish language and literature. She is slight, like a willow bow, but she is mighty, like Toshiro Mifune. She knows something about everything or everything about something, take your pick. So usually when I travel with these two, we will make our way through a museum of this or a gallery of that, and all look to Carmen for answers. She has the kind of mind that holds on to everything she reads, so after she had taken on Scarpa’s book, we were on the lookout for everything she read. The number one dish, for example: bigoli with salsa. The anti-pee devices on the street corners around the city. The fact that the city itself is built on millions of piers, which are upside-down trees, “larches, elms, alders, pines and oaks,” driven deep into the slime at the bottom of the lagoon. “How do you lay solid foundations on slime?” Scarpa asks. That’s how. Even the basilica is supported by such piers, which, after all this time, have mineralized and turned to stone. So Carmen knows all this from her reading, and John now knows it from Carmen. Not wanting to leave me out, bless his heart, John lectures me on these points as we make our way about the city as if he invented Venice himself. But why, I ask, referencing Scarpa’s title, is Venice a fish? Neither Carmen nor John seems to know.
We head south and west with the day, Maria complaining all the while of the great toll the walk is taking on her soul and body. She can be the hardiest of trekkers—I once climbed a mountain with her in New Mexico—but today we drag her about the city from museum to café to museum, and she’s just about had enough. She does this little thing, because she’s eight years old and bored to death, where she steps in front of me, walks a few steps, and trips me up. So I stumble to keep from knocking her down, regain my composition, start again, and walk now out on the edge of the four of us in the mainstream of the crowd. She’s just not paying attention is all, and it’s not her fault. So, on we walk, and there she is again, tripping me up, me tripping up, and finding a new space now to walk without knocking her down. Then it happens a third time, a fourth, and I realize the little rascal is doing it on purpose. She loves this game. She mostly considers herself a Spaniard like her mother, so the game is, as I take it, Trip the American.
“Look, Maria,” I say, trying to distract her. “You’re in one of the greatest cities in the world. Imagine all your friends back home in Texas who will never see such gorgeous palaces, such solemn temples, such great works of art! And here you are seeing them all, and you’re only eight.”
She turns and gives me the how-did-you-get-so-dense look, gazes back on the amazing city, and says: “But they wouldn’t want to.”
We wend our way through the crowds, headed for the Gallerie dell’Academia, Carmen and I stopping here and there to consider various glass trinkets from Murano to take home to friends. For John, spending money is like bleeding. When Carmen stops near the front doors of a shop and says something benign like “Shall we take a look?” you can see in his ashen face that he is a dying man, the bloodletting so severe his head swoons and he has to turn in circles to keep from passing out. You would think John a saint, however, when even at such peril to himself, he opens the shop door to show Carmen in. We finally reach the bridge over the Grand Canal, both Maria and John ne
ar death’s door. I expect to see the ferryman waiting for them, but it’s just us and some other tourists, passing over without incident.
This gallery is a must for anyone who likes art, so say the guidebooks, and so I’m optimistic as we go up the stairs into the first exhibit. It’s the usual splendor and beauty of famous galleries in Europe, and we walk about looking at one priceless thing after another.
“Look,” John says, his excitement audible, “this is the lion of Saint Mark!”
As God is my savior.
“Look,” John says, “you can see how the angels are flying up to heaven here. Remarkable!”
And so let’s remark it.
“Look,” John says, “there’s a dog in this one. See it right here? A dog.”
And by god it is. John has a particular affinity for dogs in paintings, as he’s written an entire book on the subject, focused especially on that one painting in the Prado you probably didn’t miss but now don’t remember: Las Meninas by Velázquez.
“You see,” John starts in, “I like dogs in paintings. And now that I’m on to my next book, this stuff here is really important to me. I’m writing about the ‘beast within.’ Do you follow me? You look at all these paintings, look at all this art, and there is this representation of ‘the beast within.’”
“I see,” I said.
“It’s really hard what I’m doing, because I’m inventing a new language to talk about it,” John says, trying to provoke me. “We don’t have a language to talk about it.”
Had I any measure of dangerous spontaneity, I’d have doled out that wonderful line from the Brad Pitt movie Snatch: “In the immortal words of the Virgin Mary: ‘Come again?’”
