Venice, Autumn, Night

Beyond the square
there is an arch.
Beyond the arch
there is a bridge
Beyond the bridge
there is water.
Beyond the water
there is a bridge.
Beyond the bridge
there is an arch.
Beyond the arch,
there is a square.

Beyond the the square
is the lagoon.
Beyond the lagoon
there are islands.
Beyond the islands
the Adriatic Sea
hisses, cold and silver
in the moonlight.

Venezia
14.X.09

Night thoughts

Venice is different at night, drained of color, a study in shadow and light. It is a brightly lit city in general, at the street level, where there are almost no dark corners. I know this from experience.

After I had been here less than a year, I was teaching English on the mainland, in Mogliano Veneto. One night I stayed late with one of my students, drinking wine and talking about literature until almost midnight. I ran and caught the last train to Venice at 12-15. I sat down in my seat feeling pleased with myself for having made the train and then realized, half-way to Venice, my bag, with my cell phone and my keys, were locked in the classroom in Mogliano and there were no more trains that night.

At 1am they close Santa Lucia train station. It was early November, cold, but fortunately not freezing. My neighbor, who had a key to my apartment, was asleep; her lights were out.

I felt amazingly stupid, and I decided I could tough it out until 6am, when I knew my neighbor would be up, or I wouldn't feel so stupid about waking her up. I couldn't get a hotel for the night because my passport was at home; and I was paranoid about being stopped by police because I was, at that point, technically an illegal alien. Paranoia and frustration grew in equal measure.

As I walked across the Scalzi bridge, through Santa Croce and San Polo I looked for the kinds of places I might have found in the US to warm up. Venice closes early; nothing was open. All the shutters were down. The streets were deserted. I walked to the Accademia bridge, across, toward San Marco and then to Rialto and up Strada Nova back toward the train station. I did the entire circuit of the city, twice, before exhaustion set in and I had to find a place to rest. That was when I learned, indelibly, that there are no dark corners in Venice at night. There are incandescent street lamps on the narrowest lanes and in the most obscure cul-de-sacs.

Around 4am I found a walled courtyard just off the Grand Canal near Campo San Polo. The heavy iron gate was ajar; inside it was reasonably dark, the only light coming from a streetlight outside the wall. There was a marble bench under a large magnolia tree, and I lay there, trying to sleep, until 5-30, and then I knew I could find some coffee somewhere and head back to the apartment.

I didn't cover the entire city, but enough to know it intimately, at night, with nowhere to go. I never felt more alien, nor more alone; a sixty-year-old man in ridiculous situation. It had become something of a quest for me, a trial by darkness and solitude. I had the same feeling I had felt about jail forty years earlier. If I can get through this, I thought, I can get through anything. There is nothing left to frighten me.

At least -- and the only thing that got me through the long, long night without despair -- I knew that with the sunrise it would be over, that I would be able to get into my warm apartment, to sleep for a few hours before my real day began, to eat and piss in comfort and security. That was when I thought about what my friend Kate, who worked for the Canadian State Department in Rome, had said to me one fragrant spring morning in the garden of the bed and breakfast. She was stationed in Rome after years in Africa, where she had witnessed the worst poverty, carnage, and genocide, dealing routinely with torturers and the tortured. She hated Rome, and wanted to get back to Africa eventually.

"You have at least one good meal a day every day; more than one pair of shoes; and a reliable roof over your head," she said. "You're in the 1%." Her smile was simultaneously mirthful and ironic. "And if you can't get everything you own into two suitcases," she added, "you consume too much!"

Although I have always made a point of walking Venice at night because of its particular beauty, that night I had no choice. The lovely was menacing, the quaint, threatening, the obscure, frightening. But I also had ample opportunity to begin to understand the effect of moonlight on water and stone, the combined effect of all of these, and the miracle of sunrise as the sky finally lightened.

I finally bought a tripod. I have been thinking about it for a long time. Now I can experiment with capturing the experience of Venice at night. Given the limitations of my camera, and given that I am not a photographer, I do the best I can. With each batch, I learn.

I am working toward capturing Palladio's Giudecca churches, Redentore, Zitelle, and San Giorgio Maggiore. Tonight I began experimenting with Redentore. The difficulty with these Palladio structures is that the only way to get the proper distance from them is from the water, where you bobble. Bound to land, and without a panoply of lenses, you are forced to extreme longshots or extreme closeups. There is little middle ground.

You can see the preliminary attempts with Redentore and San Giorgio IN THE NIGHT GALLERY

A sense of scale

A medium-sized cruise ship dwarfs Redentore

These cruise ships are the sea monsters destroying Venice. Serene on the surface, their wake roils the bottom of the canals and the lagoon; the erosive action of their wake and the vibratios of their engines, magnified under the water, is responsible for crackiing centuries-old stone, for loosening foundations, for undermining the infrastructure of the city.

They are floating cities, these boats. It was estimated that they loaded and unloaded 3,000,000 people in Venice last year. That's a lot of wear and tear on a fragile city, and accounts for 10% of the tourist load (which peaked in 2007 at 30,000,000 for the year). The city has sold itself to them. Tourism is the only game left in town. Shops and restaurants are dependent upon it; there is little local economy to speak of outside tourism.

But it is a dangerous addiction. In the main, these cruise passengers spend only a few hours on land. They walk a bit, take tours, buy cheap souvenirs, and move on to the next port of call.

There are so many shops selling cheap crap because that is what they, and the majority of the other tourists, want to buy.

"Oh, look," I heard one English woman scream to another. "These are REALLY cheap! Let's go in here!"

Venice is saturated with mask shops and glass trinket shops and tee-shirt and souvenir shops. My friend once counted 187 counterfeit purse sellers along the Riva between Arsenale and the Bridge of Sighs, the equivalent of a three block walk. There are so many cheap generic sandwiches because that is what the masses of tourists eat -- slices of mediocre pizza, sandwiches, and gelato; things you can eat on the fly, walking or sitting on the steps of a church or a bridge or the wall of a canal. The plague of plastic bottles is also monumental, but this is not restricted to Venice.

This is an expensive addiction for Venice. Often the cruise passengers stay and eat on their ships. The restaurants are hurting because so many of the tourists no longer even sit in restaurants or stop at bars for something to drink. They eat sandwiches while they walk and lug liter bottles of warm water wherever they go. How did people live without dehydrating for thousands of years prior to the fabrication of the plastic bottle?

And it is a suicidal addiction. The physics of these massive boats in the lagoon is a disaster. The erosive effects of their wake, so fortuitiously invisible to the untrained eye, can kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Unlike climate change and emissions controls, this is not a massive global-scaled problem, and, unlike them, there has a relatively simple solution: make the boats dock outside the lagoon, in the Adriatic.

There are activists fighting to stop entry of the big ships into the lagoon. Passengers could be loaded and unloaded on the Adriatic side, ferried in on smaller boats. But that would be hugely expensive and cut severely into profits. Given the addiction to money, black and white, that these ships generate, it is a daunting task to move their docks back into the sea. It would be nice if the crusaders against these Leviathans are doing more than tilting at windmills. They are right. The foundations of their world are being eroded before their very eyes.

What is unique to Venice, what is hers alone, is the network of sand bars and salt marshes, islands and canals, the encircling lagoon, and its extraordinarily dense patrimony of fabulous art and buildings. This is what is being threatened with spoliation and extinction.


Docked ship, from Zattere

Changing seasons

It's all about the light. There is less of it, it's dark by 7:30 now, and it comes at different angles. But what there is, is glorious, especially under the full moon, and especially around the Punta della Dogana, where the moon soars like a white balloon over San Giorgio. The tones of the sky, and of the light on the water, put all human art to shame.

All the cameras with tripods were out; this does not happen every night. I don't have my tripod yet, but I keep trying. Here are shots around the Punta della Dogana, Saturday, October 3, 2009.

Roman Bath as Renaissance Church

The baths of Imperial Rome inspired some of the greatest churches of the renaissance.

Particularly the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, completed ca. 300 AD, which covered 32 acres and could comfortably accommodate 3,000 bathers. The complex included changing rooms, gymnasiums, libraries, meeting rooms, theaters, concert halls, sculpture gardens, pools of hot, medium, and cold water with virtual steam rooms and saunas near the furnaces, all executed in marble and mosiac. Designed to dazzle with its splendor, it was a PR project. Diocletian had never been to Rome. He was a soldier-emperor. But he had heard of the beauty and the popularity of the Baths of Caracalla built almost a century earlier and his mandate was simple -- the baths bearing his name would be bigger, better, grander and more beautiful than those built by Caracalla.




Walking inside Redentore, and especially in San Giorgio Maggiore, the two greatest Palladio masterpieces of the Venetian renaissance, this provenance is triumphantly clear. All that's missing are the steaming pools and naked bathers. The arches and apses and domes that now shelter the holiest religious icons, once closed their loving arms around the public baths of the most notoriously decadent city in history. Unless you are Fellini, it's useless to try and imagine what might have transpired in all those giant marble tubs.

Re-imagined by Palladio these spaces are sober, majestic, monochrome, and subject to the constant interplay of light through the well-placed windows that take their name, Diocletian Windows, or Thermal Windows (from terme for bath) from the Baths of Diocletian.






Palladio's windows are clear bottleglass, the sun through them is as white as poured steel. Raise your eyes above the religious statues and paintings -- from the top of the first order upwards -- and you are in a pagan space with its joyous interplay of circles and arcs and straights, and absent the tubs and the gambling and the whores, it is equally suited to the religious purposes to which it has been put: it is grand and elevating.

Proust was wrong

Proust was wrong, or at least as I recall it. There is a quote in my memory where Proust says that Santa Maria della Salute is a perfect example of a mediocre building made great by its location.

There is, of course, no escaping the location.

The church stands on over a million and a quarter trees pounded into the mud between the Grand Canal and the Zattere to support its mountain of stone. It faces the Grand Canal where it widens into St. Mark's Basin. Salute is triangulated by San Marco and San Giorgio, and on the Festa della Salute a temporary pontoon bridge is built across the Grand Canal to reach Salute from the San Marco side. During the Republic the Doge led a procession from the Basilica of San Marco to Salute, across the bridge, in perpetuity, in gratitude for the Virgin sparing the city from the terrible plague of 1630.

The architect was a relatively unknown 26-year-old, Baldessare Longhena. The design is actually one of the great examples of human ingenuity and problem-solving, but you have to understand the problem to appreciate the achievement. Proust was certainly aware of the problem, but his dismissal is that of the esthete, void of the customary rigor and precision of his analyses. It reeks of an ill-considered first impression. Perhaps he didn't spend enough time with it.

To grasp its true genius, you have to walk around the exterior slowly and observe it from its successive angles, preferably at night when it is well-lit but the city is quiet and there are few distractions. The inside must be seen at several different times during the day for reasons that will be made clear.

Since the fall of Rome, architecture has labored in its shadow. The Renaissance revived the rules and proportions, the structure and decorative motifs of an idealised Rome extrapolated from its ruins. Palladio's Churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Redentore, behind it, are the last word in Renaissance Roman.

But the Church had a problem with this idealization of Roman architecture. In its early centuries it inhabited ancient temples, and then it built its own upon, and often incorporating, their ruins. Eventually the forms themselves, the monospaces and circular temples, were abhorred by the Church as too pagan. The nave-and-aisle basilica ruled; it was too humble to have been used in the great Roman temples. What was not incorporated into the Christian iconography and style was suppressed.

Up until Longhena's design for Salute, circular basilicas were forbidden. The echoes of the Pantheon in Rome were too loud and too clear, and although the Pantheon had been converted into a Catholic Church, the Vatican frowned on any use of the circular form in highly visible or important locations.

Even the Benedictines across St. Mark's Basin, when confronted with the task of completing San Giorgio Maggiore after Palladio's death, chickened out. Palladio's design featured a perfect Roman facade complete with a porch thrust forward. Once Palladio died, before the church was completed, they revisited the design and pushed the porch in, making the facade another variation of the superimposed pediments Palladio had used for Redentore.

Longhena's idea is brilliant. The church is not round, it is not a Pantheon per se. It is an octagon. The octagonal base supports a round dome and inside the space is round. He created a round basilica within an octagonal frame. And he got away with it. That was not only due to the cleverness of his design, but in some measure to a loosening of the stylistic reins during the general restyling of the Catholic Church in the Counter-Reformation.

In a brilliantly Venetian masterstroke, the dome sits on a glass drum. The light floods Salute through these high, tall, clear glass windows from different directions at different times of day. It should be seen at as many different times of day as possible. The interior can be uncannily luminous. As always in Venice it is about the light.

As you enter and walk around, you are definitely in a different realm, no longer Roman, no longer Renaissance; it is pure imaginative fantasy. It is Baroque. The circular floor beneath the dome is a geometric Persian carpet of inlaid polychrome marble. The altar chapel, on the far side of the soaring circles created by the dome, is a smaller variation on the same theme, windows supporting the ceiling and the smaller dome above the altar. It is complex, spacious, luminous. Light rules.

The stonework and stucco are white and grey, a harmonious monotone that highlights the paintings and creates, with the surrounding sculptures on pillars, walls, and ceilings, its own textures of light and shadow.

In its echoing center, all we see of the Grand Canal is a distant glitter of the sun upon the water through the open portals. It is not about the setting. It is about the sensuous curves and the stately geometry of the interior.

Piero il magnifico

Usually the Palazzo Cini Gallery is closed. Having walked by it a million times, not certain what exactly was inside, it became a perpetual enigma in my daily life. Today, and for the next few weekends, it is open.

The collection is small, amassed by the Cini family and donated along with the palace to the Cini Foundation which also runs the monumental S. Giorgio Maggiore complex including the magnificent Palladio refectory and a spectacular library. (The filing system of the library is old style. Books by and about Dante are shelved under the carved bust of Dante atop it. Ditto Homer, ditto Plato, ditto Petrarch, etc. A neat system, but to find what you're looking for you need to know what the author looked like. Early cult of personality?)

The collection includes masterpieces of renaissance Tuscan and Ferrarese painting, works by such big name artists as Filippo Lippi, Pontormo, Botticelli (and Co.). These are interesting, as are many of the other paintings and drawings in their collection. The Botticelli, a "Judgment of Paris" is clearly primarily by "& Co." The Lippi is small, sad, touching, but not blisteringly beautiful like his works at the Uffizi.

No, pride of place goes to the late Piero della Francesca "Madonna con bambino" which is breathtakingly spectacular. Piero is one of my favorites and his extant work is sparse. This painting wins the Blue Ribbon for the month.

The Piero is strikingly modern; in it you can see Picasso, Modigliani, Cezanne. Like late paintings tend to be, it is spare, terse, and perfectly composed. Often this simplicity was the result of failing eyesight, as with Tiziano. But here, exquisitely articulated detail is a testament to no diminution in technical skills. The apparent simplicity is by design. If anything, Piero is here transcendent; the terse pictorial language is the result of age, skill, and fully mature artistry. The madonna's simple black robe is thrown back over her shoulder reveraling a sumptuous lining of burgundy and gold brocade Byzantine in its complexity. Its dramatic impact is emphasized by a simple sky blue shift beneath it, and beneath that, for perfection of design, a ruby colored frock with silvery gold brocade.

Everything else is clean, spartan, geometric, void; the sky behind them is a late Georgia O'Keefe desert sky. The faces are somber; their pose is monumental, as if the wind had carved them from sand and pale stone.




Piero della Francesca
Borgo San Sepolcro, 1410/20 - 1492
"Madonna con bambino"
Palazzo Cini Gallery

Is it real or did you make it up?

Accademia Bridge, Santa Maria della Salute, 8AM

There are twenty-six stairs up, and down, fifty-two total, to cross the stone bridge at the Arsenale. There are 52 up and 52 down on the Accademia Bridge, total 104. This does not particularly matter to me, but it matters to a character I am writing. I could have pulled a number out of my ass, but someone would know. So I took the No. 1 to Arsenale and counted.

Fiction is a variable balance between reality and imagination. Different writers rely more heavily on one or the other.

Here's how I formulated it for myself the other night. Use reality where necessary and imagination where necessary, depending on which makes a better story. Never be limited by the truth; never yield gratuitously to the imagination.

Proust, who was rich enough to publish his own masterwork and mad enough to understand the enormity of his achievement, laid bare the contradiction between the two and worked its dialectic from every angle. The result is genius; the product of a singular set of circumstances, something never to be repeated. But he set the bar very high, and most memoirs contain nowhere near the volume of truth as Proust's fiction.

So it is a pleasure to blend, like an alchemist, what seems to be memory, with what seems to be imagination (both being very approximate and difficult to quantify), and create something unique from them, transforming the base metals into gold.

Quantum physics proved how the act of observing something changes it. The act of remembering also changes reality, as the does the act of imagining. In the end, the real is more or less a composite of an infinite number of simultaneous points of view, vide "Rashomon." Nothing is ever real except the present moment, and there is very real reason to question whether anything else exists.

Strange as it may seem, that makes perfect sense to me...

The images are merely an excuse for thinking aloud... Santa Maria della Salute at 8am, when the sun is rising over the lagoon, and at 8 pm, when the sun is setting over the mainland.


Santa Maria della Salute from Accademia Bridge, 8pm

The Waste Land

Western sky after storm

For unaccountable reasons, I reread T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".

Written in 1922, it was, when I was in college, regarded as the definition of Modern. Yeats was mystical-traditional, Dylan Thomas plain drunk and Ezra Pound plain crazy. But Pound's influence, his encyclopedic knowledge and precise language, is evident in every line of The Waste Land, which Pound edited.

I read it in the aftermath of the first big storm of the season, a rip-roaring downpour that emptied the streets and filled the vaporettos to capacity and beyond. My ride from San Zaccaria to Zattere, normally a pleasant eight-minute zip across the basin and up the Giudecca Canal, was a complete nightmare. There was barely space to breath. I was standing in an exposed area, partly covered by other people's umbrellas; the poor English chap in front of me, in his shirtsleeves, pushed against the gate, was streaming water and somehow smiling good-naturedly. His wife tried to hold her umbrella over him above the shoulders of other people but one slight turn of the boat and the wind flipped it inside out.

A tumultuously wet and thundrous day. A good day to read The Waste Land which ends with a rain storm of expiation and rebirth.

The Waste Land not only held up, it was, in fact better; that is to say, I appreciated it in a new and wholly personal way.

When I was 19 I was struck by the stark and unique beauty of particular phrases, but lost in the maze of mythology and footnotes about arcane references. I didn't worry about the footnotes today. I just read the poem, got into its flow, into its sequence of situations, dissolving, like film dissolves, one into another, or jump cutting away. The language of the cinema was only just being developed, but Eliot and/or Pound understood the concepts of montage and the principles of film editing. The poem is "cinematic" the way Puccini wrote movie music before there was any and movie music as we know it would have been far different had there been no Puccini. Similarly, Eliot was modern before there was Modern, when all he had to go on was The First World War with its astonighingly bloody trench warfare. Airplanes and bombs made it bloodier than Austerlitz or Waterloo; but nothing, for sheer barbarism, compared to what was to come. Eliot's vision reverberates with the rest of the Twentieth Century; its style is the style of the Twentieth Century par excellence; it was in 1922 and remains so today. In that sense, it is a timeless masterpiece.

And that says nothing about its sensibility. It is the outcry of the parched soul, the spirit and the intellect, for salvation, and that is why it ends in that thundrous rain of grace, undeserved perhaps, but that's what grace is all about.


"And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
 I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

This could have been written in sands of the Almagordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, Los Alamos, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, the year that I was born. It could be about the apocalytic power of the universe released when atoms collide at high speeds. When the twin shadows of the blast merge, and the fire consumes the sky and time.

There's fear and repentence, anger and forgiveness, love and betrayal and expiation. It is as vast a saga as The Ring of the Niebelungen; but ruthlessly cut to a few surgically precise lines, the parts that stand for the whole because the whole is beyond comprehension and we only get clues. Ever.

And then there's this:

"At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
 Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
 I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
 Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
 At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
 The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
 Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
 Out of the window perilously spread
 Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
 Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
 I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
 Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
 I too awaited the expected guest.

Biennale: Lithuanian Pavillion, East-West Divan

I went to the Scuola Grande della Misericordia to see the Lithuanian Biennale Pavillion and, upstairs from it, the East-West Divan show with four artists from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Aside from the art, I have always been curious about the Misericordia. Since I have lived here it has been derelict; a hulking brick structure with no ostensible purpose. The Palasport sign over the side door is a remnant of its brief incarnation as a gymnasium, and the upper floor was home to the local basketball team. The plain brick exterior gives you no clue about what is inside.

The building is attributed to Jacopo Sansovino, who was the the favored architect of the Venetian Republic in the sixteenth century. Outside the brick is spare and unwelcoming; inside, the scale is luminous and transparent. Crossing the brick portal, you step into the high renaissance. The Renaissance ideal was to breathe life into ancient Rome, from the lifelike frescoes to the monumental architecture. The enormous double-high space is a recreation of the Grandeur that was Rome. The idealization of the past is romantic in its essence; but the buildings are, in fact, perfect. One pass through the Pantheon settles that question forever. Only the heavy weight of the church, aggressive in policing against the pagan spirit of Rome, prevented the renaissance architects from recreating the Roman temples for their churches.

The art inside was interesting in several different directions. The primary Lithuanian installation was "Tube" by Zilvinas Kempinas, built amid the triple colonnades of the first floor. The tube, big enough to walk through and as long as the space, is comprised of horizontal stripes of thin metal alternating with transparent spaces. To walk through is to enter an Op Art world. The effect is mesmerizing.

But I found the art upstairs even more fascinating. The show is called "East-West Divan: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan." Their literature describes the exibition as follows:

The exhibition will present recent works by ten artists from three countries, better known in the West for stereotypes of terrorism and Islamic extremism than for their rich artistic heritage and vibrant contemporary cultures.

East-West Divan meditates upon links between the artistic traditions in Venice and the Persian artistic heritage shared by these countries, revealing the tightly knotted relationship between East and West - both in life and the imagination.

The artists vary in style, but all share the integration of traditional techniques with today's content. If you look at some of these, and their accompanying statements, in the GALLERY, you will get a sense of the mission of these artists, to express the identity of real people who are more than stereotypes, who are not driven by a lust for world domination, and who simply want to live their lives in their way in peace.



It is a beautiful and startling revelation. The art is gorgeous, never provocative simply for the sake of being provocative, but always thoughtful and therefore persuasive. Culturally diverse people dream the same dreams.

Art can do that. At its best, that's what it does. It is an expression of our common humanity.

MISERICORDIA GALLERY