VENICE THROUGH NEW EYES

           

Sometimes you need another person’s eyes in order to see clearly.  When Max saw Venice, it was love at first sight.  I’ve been to Venice twice before, and maybe those times my vision was jaded, or too tired, or distracted, for I failed to see the wondrous beauty that Max immediately recognized.  Once before I was in Venice with friends whose marriage was dissolving, like those flavored tablets you drop into a glass of water and watch fizz and sputter until the water is stained with the tablet’s dissolution.  I remember almost nothing from that visit, my memories of it having dissolved along with my friend’s union.

Another time I was in Venice with Jeff, and I remember snippets from that:  a wonderful rainy day lunch, a hotel room so small you had to crawl across the bed to get to the bathroom, a cruise down the Grand Canal.  But Venice never grabbed my heart the way other places have, and when I was planning this four-month journey I considered skipping it altogether.  But Max really wanted to see Venice, and it is a place that should be seen soon since sea level rise may well swallow it, making it a latter-day Atlantis, a once-there-was-a-city kind of place that will one day exist only in stories and paintings and old movies.

            So I dutifully added Venice to the itinerary, figuring it would have an almost Disneylandish appeal to Max with its canals and boats, and lack of cars.  But Max saw the Venice not of Disney but of the Doges.  He saw its grandeur and immense beauty, not only along the Grand Canal but along Venice’s myriad back street canals.  He insisted we get off the main street and dive instead into the little back walkways and neighborhood piazzas, with their small footbridges over narrow canals. As a consequence, the Venice I saw this time displayed its many small, glittering gems along with its crown jewels.

            In fact, “glitter” could be a word that describes much of Venice, both outside and within its palaces and cathedrals.  The brilliant May sunshine sparkled off the water of the Grand Canal.  Every conceivable make and model of boat zipped in frothy patterns up and down the Canal, leaving behind whitecaps like ivory eruptions on the water’s blue surface.  The sun glittered off the water, and off the sides of the long narrow vaporetta boats that chugged like city buses from one stop to the next.  The boat would slow as it approached the next pick-up point, and the sinewy young boatman would casually toss a loop of rope the thickness of my arm over the tie-up at the station, reining the boat to a halt like a restive horse brought to a standstill with a final jerk.  The boat would hug the dock, the boatman would slide back the gate along the boat’s edge, and people would step from the floating dock onto the floating boat, as casually as walking down the steps of the number 42 bus in DuPont Circle.  Then the vaporetta would nose back out into the Canal, making its way past four and five and six story mansions that clustered, knee-deep in water, along its edge.  Coming back from dinner at night we’d peek through the windows of the mansions illuminated from within by chandeliers, revealing salon-style living rooms painted in bright colors.

            Venice’s back streets were like turning over a beautiful painting and discovering on its back side another beautiful image.  The streets were narrow and sometimes dark, a crevice between towering stone walls of houses and other buildings.  Sometimes only wide enough for one, the streets were paved paths twisting between structures.  Down a straight short path you’d go, around a curvy corner and, surprisingly, into a small back-alley neighborhood piazza.  The blue sky would reappear from between the buildings, the square would have a tree or two and there would be a few mothers with baby carriages sitting on a bench, next to a few old men, passing the time.  Each piazza had a stone cistern in the middle, which were built centuries ago to capture rainwater that would be filtered through sand and purified for this city, built in the midst of seawater, to drink.  The little street paths would go past a restaurant or a wood-panelled bar selling espressos and short glasses of wine; past house doors or long blank walls.  Fifteen steps away from the promenade along the Grand Canal, crawling with gobs of tourists, the back streets were quiet, empty except for groups of people walking in twos and threes, on their way from one space to another.

            The promenade along the Grand Canal was another matter.  The cruise ships have claimed Venice as their own private playground, turning it into an insufferable mob scene from 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning until the late afternoon when the ships move onto the next town to despoil.  Some of the cruise ships anchor just offshore and send their thousands of passengers into Venice on boats that are still three and four times the size of the vaporetta.  The boats pull in and a couple of hundred passengers are disgorged as a group, coughed up onto the sidewalk where they stand in a huddle, waiting for their tour guide to take them to the Piazza of San Marco and whisk them into the Cathedral and the Palace of the Doges.  They move in big clumps, and I found myself wishing for a couple dozen good border collies to run circles around them, nipping at their heels and keeping them moving in an orderly fashion.  The groups of people overwhelm everyone else.  They are all nationalities, joined in a fraternity of obnoxious behavior:  French, German, American, Japanese, Indian.  Their tour guides lead the pack, holding aloft umbrellas or a stick from which ribbons flutter so that the herd can follow the leader.  If you enter the Piazza of San Marco any time after 10:00 in the morning, you’re screwed.  You will confront thousands of clumped tourists, lined up to shuffle through the sites before they are vacuumed back onto the cruise ships and carted off to the next venue.

            The size of the cruise ships is mythic, almost unbelievable.  I was sitting in the lounge of our hotel, up on the second floor, relaxing for a moment and looking out the window, when my view was blocked by a cruise ship floating by.  It dwarfed the hotel, it dwarfed the Campanile of San Marcos; it was 10 stories high and lined with people, like a Titanic gluttenously engorged to obscene proportions.  Below it the vaporetti slowed, fighting the waves; the gondoliers headed to the banks of the canals; and the water taxis zoomed across the ship’s wake, slamming their passengers up and down from the force of it.  Then the ship passed like a water-borne Hindenberg, and all was calm again.

            While you have to fight the baaing herds of tourists to get into the major sites, once you’re inside and up a flight of stairs or down a hall, the numbers quickly dwindle or even disappear.  Inside the Palace of the Doges, and the Basilica of San Marcos, the glitter of Venice reappears: this time not sunlight glinting off of water, but sunlight shining through windows and glinting off gold mosaics, gold leaf, gilt-edged paintings, gold frames, gold, gold everywhere.  The Palace of the Doges was ostentation of an epic degree; the Trump Towers of its age.  Each room was covered with paintings and frescoes, walls and ceilings alike.  The staircases were ceilinged in gold leaf, scenes from the Bible intermingled with scenes featuring the Doge, Christ-like, being blessed by the Virgin Mary, by God, by fat angels trumpeting his divine right to rule.  And what a job being a Doge was: we should all be so lucky.  He had no real power, no duties other than turning up at the occasional public ceremony or church service, he served for life and had an enormously opulent home to live in.  In return for his entirely titular leadership, the Council of Ten and the Council of Twenty and the other lords and aristocrats of Venice ran the city.  The Doge was a lot like the Queen, without the color-coordinated handbags.

            In contrast to the Basilica of San Marco and the Doge’s Digs, the Santa Maria ­­­­­­­­­­­della Salute is lovely but not overwhelming.  Built in the early 1600s in thanks to the Virgin Mary for ending the plague that had wiped out one-third of Venice’s population, the octagonal church sits across the Grand Canal from San Marco.  The altar is flanked by statues by Titian, and rising above the altar is a statue of Mary, above whose head hangs a colossal crown.  Standing outside of the church, looking onto the Grand Canal, I could imagine the terror that the plague must have brought, the level of infestation this city would experience between ships discharging their cargoes laced with vermin, and the pestilential canals in summer’s simmering heat.  Small wonder they built a monumental church to praise their deliverance.

            So we wandered Venice, praising it and its deliverance through the ages.  And this time, for me, seeing it with wide-open, revitalized eyes.