61. Venice, alive alive OH!

My horrorscope today:

You could have more bounce to your step today, as if a lightness of being has entered your body and activated your cells all the way down to the tips of your toes. However, your head is also affected as the changing clouds move quickly across your mental landscape. Luckily, Mercury shifts into your 9th House of Future Vision, encouraging you to reach further than usual. Give yourself permission to fantasize about what's ahead without worrying about whether or not it's actually possible.

It’s morning. The sky is pink, in the distance church bells peal. The sweet aroma of jasmine fills my room. The floors of the apartment where I’m staying are mottled grey marble. Oil paintings of religious subjects are hung above softly aged inlaid walnut tables. I can hear doves cooing, and a pot boiling in the cucina, and in the apartment below, someone is preparing risotto - I can smell the aromas.

I’ve been to Venice several times.  I think it’s one of the most beautiful, delicate, fragile, exquisite cities in the world.  It’s ethereral.  It’s vulnerable.  Seeing Venice for the first time is like lifting a silky veil to reveal mysteries of light and shadow.  I spent very happy weeks here many years ago, on my own.  I wandered down the damp, mossy calle (laneways) where the light hardly dared venture, became happily lost, found myself in a painted basilica where an opera was in performance.  I wrote copious journals of my delight in this city, about the operas I attended alone, the churches I meditated in, about a lone lunch on Burano, an adjacent island.  I lamented I was waiting for a special occasion and a special person to do a gondala ride with.  But my then partner “lost” my journal, believing I was having an affair. He didn’t realise it was Venice.

And now I’m back. Every moment of the day I think I’m going to faint. I’m having dizzy, delirious spells, and moments of total visual abandon where I am deeply lost in the elusive beauty of Venice. I walk up a bridge to be confronted with watery palettes of the most subtle of colours. I look up to the toppling 16thc buildings with their exquisite stonework and delicate architecture or look across to a laconic gondolier steering his boat by pushing his leg up against a well-worn wall.  I look down at the cobbles, softly after centuries of feet, now where the killer shoes of the immaculate Venetians click-click by, and I want to sit down on the steps and just cry with bliss.

Once I’d regained my breath and composure on the Istanbul/Venice flight, I talked to an Italian woman who’d just spent some time in Bodrum, Turkey. I told her I’d ditched my known life and had been travelling for four months.  She told me I was brave, and asked how I managed to do it, and why I was doing it. She said she wanted to do the same, one day, but what of the future, after she’d ditched her known life? I told her a new life would come to her.  That once you start travelling, all the pain of the past life assumes less and less relevance, as you learn to realise how strong you really are, and how little you need the person who brought your previous life to a shocking halt.  I told her that I was scheduled to return to Australia that week, and because I now had nobody to return to, decided to return to Venice instead.  

I’ve never flown into Venice before. I’ve sailed in, on a yacht, at daybreak, with my hand over my mouth as the Grand Canal opened its breathtaking vista for me. Past the palaces and villas with their typical Doge architecture, the delicate curling mists, the slightly stinky water sometimes clotted with seaweed, the speeding vaporettos that take charge of the waterways as they transport everybody everywhere.  Arriving my sea is how a Venice landing was always done, which is why it is, with Istanbul, such a strategic waterway.

Flying in over this mythical city was extraordinary.  Across the sea, seen from the skies, a small lip of land approaches, and then solid ground is broken up into thousands of tiny islands, like a jigsaw puzzle clotted with seaweed; many once islands are now slightly submerged. The area is an enormous swamp, and you have to wonder why people chose this because sure as nuts their boats, having travelled so far,  would have become entangled in the weeds.  The islands are like a maze leading you to the main prize - Venice, where the bronze domes of the churches, the spires, and the dense patchwork of terracotta tiles are first seen. 

From the air Venice looks like an enormous crust on the group of islands. Closer I could see small of dark lines between the rooftops - the narrow lanes between the villas, and toppling chimneys, and then bridges of stone, and bridges of iron, and bridges of bricks, and of wood, and shadows and light, and with a bump to my body and my soul I had landed in this city that doesn’t reveal its secrets very easily.

It’s said that the rhythm of Venice is like breathing.  It's measured by the tides, unlike other cities where it’s measured by the wheel, by the clock, by the sun. Venetians see bridges not as an obstacle - another set of steps to get from one place to another - but an object of transition, to be got over slowly, as part of the rhythm. Bridges are links between two parts of the theatre of Venice, changes of scenery from one reality to another. With all the reflections bouncing off water and windows and glass, what is Venice’s truth?

I understand all this perfectly.  What now, for me? 

I’m here at the invitation of Dawn, with whom I stayed in Perth, and who nursed my very fresh wounds at the beginning of the year.  Two weeks ago, she  told me she was going to be in Italy for a month, beginning in Venice. Would I come?  Would I come!  I called my London travel agent for one leg, I called my Sydney travel agent for the next, and I confirmed with Dawn. I ditched all my winter clothes, rushed around Istanbul getting my last fix of the city and bought a few packets of Turkish Delight and some olive oil soap as gifts. Dawn’s a fabulous traveller and we’ve been to Italy together before.  She speaks fluent Italian and doesn’t mind being my linguistic life raft.  I’m taking her with me on the cruise to Vanuatu.

After a suitably Italian airport re-acquaintance that involved shrieks, hugs, kisses on both cheeks, and more shrieks and hugs, we caught a bus from Marco Polo aeroporto, and trundled my luggage over cobbles past the glossy shops and through a blossomy park to the apartment of Dawn’s adopted aunt, Mirella. 

Mirella, who is 84,  doesn’t speak English.  I speak two bad words of Italian, and each of them are impolite ways of saying go away. Mirella lives in Mestre, a twenty minute bus ride out of Venice, a suburban flat area of apartments, laden trees and beautiful shops.  Mangare - to eat- is a very important part of the culture.  Mirella’s tiny fridge bursts at the seams with fennel, apricots, cherries, formaggio from many regions, pomodoro, gelati, latte, provolone, carpaccio, pane.  We’re asked hours before what we’d like for pranzo or cena.  But most times it’s been a plate of dark bread, cheeses, sometimes boiled beans and fennel, melazone and hilarious attempts at my learning the lingua Italiana. 

The first morning we take the tram into Venice, speeding over the long bridge that joins the mainland to this strategic island. Tall dark men from Uganda and Nigeria, who have arrived on leaking vessels and now speak Italian, along with Chinese and Korean vendors, strap hang, straddling big carrybags of knock-off designer handbags nestled between their legs. 

Venice approaches through a mist across mirrors of water. Hundreds of boats churn up the pale green sea.  The green bronze dome of Madonna della Salute, the church built with proceeds collected by those who survived the 17c rat plague, rises above a million terracotta roof tiles. I step onto my first Venetian bridge in fifteen years, carved from marble, straddling a line of leaning villas, and my heart is pounding. The steps are worn and soft looking, with a wonderful satiny patina from centuries of hasty footsteps. Where will they lead me in the next few weeks?

Venice is a sensual overdose.  It’s not a city I can just walk through, on a mission. Every corner, every square, reveals some stunning architectural secret, like a gift being opened from delicate tissue paper. It’s a city I have to walk slowly, stroll, so I can take in every step, every cobble, every dark mysterious wall, every breath and movement of its arteries.

Most shops are mini art galleries, displaying their wares with mastery. The masks lure us first, and we spend a decadent hour trying on the fabulous creations that change our personalities as we lean into them, covering ourselves with feathers and boas and glitter. It’s tempting to bring a mask back home, but I don’t have a home, and I don’t have place to keep the it, even though the one I love most is similar to that worn by Nicole Kidman in the Kubrick production of Eyes Wide Shut. I like that my face is impassive behind it, and yet again I wish that I could be here for Carnivale.

I want to be a Madame Pompadour, or Josephine, or Cat Woman, in enormous skirts and be somebody completely different, or mysterious. Dawn and I think we should start a new fashion for reading glasses - masks on sticks, but with optical lenses. But we don't buy masks, because we can't take feathers into Australia, and probably they'll be one of those souvenirs that are totally out of place in a different environment.

We wander down another calle, breathless and delighted and struck, and swallowed by the crowds coursing through the city. By accident find ourselves manoeuvered by the crowds in a shop that sells old Venetian beads. The window is laden with new and old Murano creations, religious icons, lamps, paperweights and vintage jewellery. Inside, where we move with difficulty, my bead geiger counter points me to a bowl of 18c Venetian trade beads - millifiori elbows.  “They’re old Venetians”, smiles the dapper, friendly owner, who is dressed in a yellow linen jacket, a navy silk cravat and white linen pants. He introduces himself as Giorgio Mion. “They’re not easy to get any more!”.  “I know,” I reply, “I collect them myself!” 

We start talking about trade beads, and I identify some beauties. He pulls out the Picard Bead Museum bible, and I tell him I’ve bought beads from Ruth. He’s known both her and John for decades, he tells me. It was from him they they bought their first beads, took them back to the United states, where they sold them for a tidy profit, and then returned to him to buy more. “In those days,” he smiled, “You could buy a hundred strands at a time. Now, no.” I identify some Fishermen’s friends, some bicones, some king beads and skunks, and gooseberries, old chevrons and watermelons and, my identity suitably established, Giorgio reduces the price of the old chevrons I’ve selected.  

He gifts me a piece of chevron, sliced obliquely so show the cane work, that he says he found submerged on Murano, where he lived and worked as a young boy.  Then unaware of the impact of his question,  Giorgio says he’d like to take us to Murano to meet some of his bead collector friends and possibly, if it’s low tide, try and find some old beads in the water.  I’m stunned, excited, beside myself. He tells Dawn in Italian, which I’m beginning to understand rapido,  that with a personality like mine, I should come and work in Venice as a bead trader, as I’d do very well.  We take some photos to prove this magic moment was not a figment of our overworked imagination.

Dawn finds some beautiful new cane work Murano beads in his window, made now as they have been for three centuries, which I also buy because I don’t want to wake up and find this didn’t really happen.  I dream of beads so often now, and of finding remarkable pieces, and when I wake they’re gone.  So, giddy, we leave his shop with promises to meet up in three days, for our Murano outing.

I’m so excited I’m radiating gold.  We stagger down the alleys, pinching each other, and celebrate with a bowl of pasta vongole and a bicchiere vino bianco, but our meal is cut short when we realise its almost three and we’re supposed to be back at Mestre, so that we can accompany Mirella to an operatic recital at the local old age home.

Now in most places an invitation like this would be an ordeal, a shambles of organisation, bad smells and bad music.  But this is Italy.  We gather some of Mirella’s friends at various bus stops - nobody drives here, of course, because it’s Venice and full of water and canals and bridges, so buses, trams and trains run everywhere every five minutes and are fast, full and efficient.  We ask Mirella about one of her friends, and to identify her, say we think she’s 82. Mirella puffs herself up and says with enormous Italian indignation.  82! She’s not nearly 82! How can you say such an insulting thing!  She’s much, much, younger than 82!  She’s 80! She’ll be 82 in 21 months! 

The residents of the home are all dressed to perfection: perfect leather shoes, matching handbags, exquisite silks and linen, immaculate hair and nails and makeup, even though they’re all octo- and nonno-genarians.  The immaculate old age home, with its predominant chapel,  is in a garden of roses, wisteria, oleander and frothy jasmine.  Inside those who aren’t on their walking frames or in wheelchairs,  sit on red velvet chairs, surrounded by beautiful Italian furniture donated by those who are now with their Maker.  Expensive perfumes waft around, and Dawn and I, having given our seats to those more in need, sit on the marble steps of the main lounge room and are transported by the opera singers, while many of the inmates pay more attention to our scruffy shoes.

Perhaps many of the residents are tone deaf, and didn’t notice the excruciatingly out of tune piano, but the mezzo soprano, the contralto, and the soprano singing the most popular arias from La Boheme, La Traviata, Rigoletto; music from Verdi, Tosca, and Puccini did their very best to counteract the abomination of keys and strings by drowning it out.  These photos are taken in Piazzo San Marco, as I didn't want to put the oldies on the blog!

The ancient audience yelled and clapped and shouted Bravo! Brava! Bravi!! and stamped their feet until clouds of mothballs came out of their cashmere cardigans, and if the bowls weren’t filled with artificial flowers, I am sure they would have been tossed to the singers.  The very very very very elderly, attached to their drips,  who’d been wheeled out of their rooms to the marble landing, peered myopically through their foggy glasses and over their gnarled fingers gripping the wrought iron balustrades.  They twitched a foot here and there in time to the arias, and I could see a glimmer of cultural recognition somewhere in their foggy brains. And I thought, well, if you’re going to die here, you may as well die listening to fantastic opera than a rerun of The Diary of Anne Frank, which was what my sick mother was offered as an incentive to be moved into the Jewish old age home in Cape Town.  Instead, she died under her fox fur, which was something she always wanted, besides dying under something young and handsome.

The land is so flat, and the landscape so scenic, that most people ride bicycles, even the elderly. In their straw baskets are loaves of bread, herbs, flowers;  I’ve never seen a nation with such fantastic legs.   It’s spring, too, and the sun sets at 9.30 with a silky golden haze that drops softly over everything - a genteel old lady covering herself up slowly for the short night ahead.

We closed the shutters in our room and were enveloped in the blackest of night, essential if you want any sleep in a city that is too gorgeous and full of itself to waste time on such a  useless pastime.  Children are awake until close to midnight - schools finish after lunch, and all shops close for afternoon siesta so everyone is fortified for the night.

We woke to blinding light slipping under the door and waves of jasmine floating through the windows, and set off by train for Padova, the 15c university town where Tintorelli painted stupendous frescoes, Leonardo da Vinci taught mathematics and the current students graffiti the ancient walls as a rite of passage.  We lunched under dropping petals in the garden of the Ritz Hotel, surrounded by fountains, and sculptures of buxom women holding cornets of flowers, on a feast of lamb chops, grilled salmon, masses of salads, olives and a vino bianco so floral and aromatic I thought I had imbibed perfume. 

I wanted a cup of tea.  Tea? sniffed the waiter.  He looked up through the blossoms to the impeccable blue Venetian sky.  You cannot have tea.  I can still see the sun!  He puffed himself up with indignation, and walked away.  I had to call him back.  What do you want tea for? You are in Italy.  You think this is the Ritz in London?  He suggested a glass of champagne mixed with peaches. I asked for a half glass. He sniffed again.  A half glass?  A half glass is for boys who haven’t shaved yet!  You are a woman!  This will fill you with love in the afternoon!  He poured an enormous glass of frothy champagne which went directly to my eyebrows and the backs of my knees. For the rest of the afternoon, he winked at me.

We were the guests of the owner  whose father built the Ritz in the 1960‘s and who is now, with the family, buying it back from the present owners. Padova is famous for its thermal waters that come down from the volcanoes, and thousands visit every year for spa and mud treatments so the shops are bursting with swimming clothes - and the most ridiculous colletzione of bathing caps I have ever seen, as it’s compulsory to have capelli covered. There are lurex leopard skin turbans, rubber lotus flowers, pink towelling with beadwork, snakeskin spandex, black and white pedestrian stripes, bunches of rubber daisies, blue net, seaweed with hidden fish.  Instead, I bought a half kilo of big fat red cherries for $4 which lasted all day, no matter how many I ate. 

Dawn with Nymphs in Padua

With the sun deepening and the colours of the villas and trees intensifying, and the promenades filling up with strollers, we joined the crowds,  like two grubby runaways down at heel and smelly of armpit amongst the pampermousse and pedicured.  We splashed in the fountains where fabulous bronze statues reclined in the water and watched the cyclists and manicured dogs.  

We chanced into a shop run by a man who also worked in a Murano factory - he showed us photos of him there as a young man, and a reference to him in one of the Venetian bead books, as proof that he wasn’t selling Chinese glass beads.  I wasn’t going to buy any contemporary glass beads, but I’m here now, and the beads I collect anyway began in Venice and then Bohemia, and I must follow the path I’m on.  I bought several small strands of new millifiore because I really liked them.  There are a lot of rightly indignant Italians who are up in arms because the Chinese have come here in their droves and have filled the cities with knock off everything, even the Murano glass, and masks, so many of the shops have the discrete version of Chinese go home, no more 365 day Vendere! Vendere!  (Sale Sale). It says instead, please support Murano Glass!

The real deal Murano

On the way back to Mirella’s apartment from the station, a silver convertible Audi circled us and once we’d crossed the tramlines, it’s owner got out of his car and intercepted us. He was early sixties, with a trembling lip and beads of nervous perspiration on his brow. He couldn’t take his eyes off Dawn’s legs.  He asked if he could walk with us. Dawn said, NO NO we are not what you think, to which he replied, of course not, but I had to drive twice around the block before I could stop for you!   And then, he complained, he had to find parking, so that was a good enough reason for us to let him walk alongside. He wanted to take Dawn for drinks, and Dawn wanted me to accompany her, so they made loose arrangements for another day in a bookshop where I could amuse myself amongst Italian and he could, as he kept telling her,  lose himself in her eyes and smile.  As he wouldn’t give his phone number and Dawn wouldn’t give hers, when the date arrived, we don’t know who stood each other up first!

It was Mirella’s 84th birthday. I had the best haircut I have had for years, not only because I haven’t had a scissors near my head for five months, but because my Scissorhands was a Tony Curtis lookalike in a very tight white shirt, bangles, chains, bracelets, and piercings, who wielded my mop like a maestro. He teased it, he fluffed it, he put it in curlers, he ran his fingers through it, and when he’d finished I looked like Natalie Wood when she was still alive. The woman sitting next to me told me that she’d changed houses, and men, but she’d never changed her hairdresser and he’d been doing her hairs since the seventies. Mirella had another application of blue, and Dawn came out more blonde and bobbed than ever.  

Not Mirella! Another nonna, attending her mini garden

Mirella ordered plates of sandwiches for her party from the local pasticceria, and we staggered out of the supermarket with ten times more than we needed and trundled the trolley home over the cobbles and through the park and up the two flights of stairs.There were over a hundred different types of cheese and processed meats, breads, wines, olives pastas; cherries and apricots bought by the bushel, biscuits, cakes, savouries, salamis, and gelatis, but I was more interested in the way women dressed for the supermarket, in killer heels, world bank jewellery, bosoms exposed to navels that threatened to roll into the formaggio, fashions fit for a barmitzvah, and seriously big hair.  They also wear so much makeup that they wouldn’t spoil the effect by wearing sunglasses. 

Moi, in Venetian apartment

Dawn and I went into Venice to meet some of her prospective landlords for the properties she might handle. She has a business called Italy France Vacances - helping people find fabulous accommodation in Italy and France.   It was a wonderful way for meto see the interiors of some of the villas, especially to see how they’ve been renovated into modern, light apartments with modern facilities, yet still keeping the magnificence of their history.  We gazed onto the canals, an looked at the tops of the heads of the gondolieri, and looked up to the rooftop platforms where in the old Italian days, the women used to henna their hair so that the red wouldn’t run onto the floors of the villas.  We walked for hours and hours because there was a bus strike, and finally arrived home very late, very tired and my feet very “depresssed”, as I complained to Mirella.

For Mirella’s birthday party the next day, she fussed while we prepared. The formal lounge room was officially opened. The silk flowers were shaken. Out came the family silver and crockery, the white lace curtains parted to allow the light, the antique wood and frail glasses dusted with a pair of old grannie panties and the cushions and lace doileys rearranged. There were plates of pretzels, meatballs, nuts, chips, cakes, chocolates and the local delicacy - the sandwiches, which were sponge like slices of processed bread that resembled brillo pads, filled with spinach or tuna - inedible to people with normal gastronomic desires but obviously highly palatable to those with synthetic teeth.  All this was just for show, anyway, as 5pm is cocktail hour and the women don’t want to spoil their figures.  Mirella’s friends arrived in puffs of perfume bearing flowers and plants, and we left them to explore Mestre and complain about our culinary input - and our shoes.

Dawn and I took a boat trip down the Brente river, to visit the villas built by Palladio, whose design was copied for the White House.  We left Venice early morning in a soft rain, on an open topped barge-boat - burchiello -   passing through locks, with magnificent villas straddling the river on each side.  This region is where the Venetians would decamp for the summer to escape the blistering humidity and the social fervour of Venice.

Going up locks on the Brente river

We lunched at a tiny cafe - where the toilets - the old fashioned hole in the ground “launching pad” - was identified on the appropriate doors by a pair of grey jocks for the men and a grubby bra for women.   The villa at Malcontenta has the remains of breathtaking, feminine murals, which were ruined by lime in the 18c when the villas were turned into granaries to avoid paying taxes. The villa was built by a very rich Venetian for his very young wife, whom he practically imprisoned when he went away to war and trade, and she was terribly unhappy because he wouldn’t let her have affairs.  

Moi at Villa Pisani

I don’t understand how I can walk for hours and hours and hours through forests and along rivers, and over rocks and along beaches.  But put me in art galleries and villas and I’m dead after a few hours. My feet weigh like lead.  I don’t know if the enormous weight of history and drama and passion ties itself to my feet and expects to be carried out, but always after a few hours of filling my brain, I’m exhausted. Dawn and I both fell asleep on the boat, curled up on the banquettes while the other passengers stayed up in the sun. 

Napoleon shagged here

Villa Pisani was the most marvellous villa of all, but we trudged listlessly through some of its 400 rooms, listening to long Italian monologues, jammed amongst tired tourists.  I was drugged from my sensual overload of the past few days, and a bit disinterested, until I realised I was standing in front of the bed that Napoleon slept in.  Napoleon. Him.  The one who sent a message to Josephine not to wash because he was coming home.  There was an N on the canopy.  And all I remember of the talk was that in those days everyone feared death so the beds were made short so people could sleep sitting up.

Private villa, locked up for season

Private villa

Moi, totallo mento amore with Venice

Back streets of Venice - sans tourists!!

Returning at night to Venice, we staggered around culture-drunk, and foot sore. Although Dawn has for days tried to dress me in sophisticated Italian clothes so that I’d look like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in lovely fifties shaped frocks and high heels and cotton shirts with collars, I bought a hat, and shoes, and a bag, and two summer dresses from a Chinese outlet for the cost of a pair of Italian socks.   We shared a pizza and a bottle of water, and caught the crowded vaporetto, the public taxi, to the bus station. Passengers dressed in ball gowns, silk suits, velvet jackets with white bow ties, hats, sailor suits, masks, satin coats filled the boat, talking about the parties they were attending as we churned past the illuminated Peggy Guggenheim museum, a Tintorelli exhibition, rotting villas and grand, restored villas through whose windows we could see brilliant chandeliers, magnificent paintings and wallhangings where many people were making merry with fluted glasses in their hands as the sounds of music and glass tinkling over the water. 

We watched agog as Venice passed by - an entire floating city, completely in love with itself.  And everybody in love with Venice.