Venice

Theme Music: like a nickname, it chooses you.

The blank page is more faithful than these words to the emotion that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons evoked, wrapped as it was in the columns, stone, marble, sculpture and oil paintings of Chieso San Vidal, the medieval church where nine musicians including the man at the harpsichord rendered the aforementioned and what has come to stand as the soundtrack to our days in Venice, Fritz Keisler’s “Introduzione e allegro.” That run-on simply to say that words fail. The day before, this piece had struck Mom from the corners of another church into which we’d wandered to view an exhibition on Venetian violinmakers. Before she crumpled into a chair to bear the sequential downward progression of major sevenths, she pulled at my elbow to warn me that they were coming, these sevenths, just as they had when she’d accompanied Cindy’s violin on the piano three decades ago.

Sunday night, in the Chieso San Vidal, the sevenths were the finale to a day of, in reverse chronological order, Vivaldi by the ensemble Interpreti Veneziana, green salad under the yellow awning of Art Blu Café, classic and more modern iconography by Carpaccio, Zais and others, the stubborn stucco of ancient architecture lining the Grand Canal, celebratory gelato for successful navigation of travel requirements, eye-witnessing the dying art of glass blowing on the island of Murano, and a two-hour tour through the humidity of St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Doge’s Palace. These last two structures were both adorned with the dark of centuries-old frescoes and mosaics, burdened with the weight of wide stone walls, the papacy, and the responsibility for the Venetian state, and shackled with the irony of imprisonment: the people by the church in Rome, the Doge by his unpaid civic responsibilities, those tax-evaders revealed to the “secret mouth” in the wall of the Palace, and lawbreakers who found themselves in the dank prisons under the palace as the Doge’s involuntary guests.

The bed and breakfast in which we’re staying feels not dissimilar to the dungeons we saw. Though comfortable and spacious, at least in terms of old Europe’s structural confinements, the front doors open into a one-room foyer of ancient brick and the dank smell of perpetual darkness. When we found the light switch on day two we no longer shuffled across the room with our hands outstretched; now we comment EVERY TIME on how old the building is, a phenomenon that alternates between a positive conception and a negative one. It goes something like this:

Nathan: Wow, this building, it’s so old!
Mom: I hope it’s safe.

or

Nathan: Wow, this building is soooo old!
Mom: It has so much personality, doesn’t it?

or

Mom: Imagine how old this building is.
Nathan: The incongruity of our transient presence with its staid insistence is overwhelming.

or

Mom: This building must be hundreds of years old.
Nathan: It sure smells like it.

Age surrounds us, but though Venice has roots going back hundreds of years, in comparison with other Italian cities, such as Rome or Florence, it is relatively young. In a way, the city flouts its centuries, and the presentation of a certain vitality, a vivacity, may account for the pulse of romance that keeps canal waters and tourists flowing through the city’s veins.

2006.07.29

Or, alternately, Venice is the largest outdoor shopping mall in the world, the quaintest and oldest amusement park, a pedestrian’s paradise, a courier’s nightmare, a floating city, a future Atlantis, a Rococo-style painting, the paragon of commodification, a secret for everyone, a manmade maze, a mason’s rendition of a canyon, a grand corroboration of tourist and shopkeeper, foreigner and native, the gospel according to Gucci, the undiscovered among the overridden, a city on life support, a postcard around every corner, a photo op down every canal.

2006.8.23