A Cityscape Transformed by the Unveiling of a Mountainscape

For many days of the year the Dolomites appear so faintly (if at all) in Venice that they're easily mistaken for distant clouds strung insubstantially along the hazy horizon--just an airy illusion of substance where none actually exists. At least that's what I thought I saw when I first visited Venice. So on those days--typically in the morning following a clamorous storm, or in the clear chill of winter--when they appear completely unveiled it's enough to upend your whole sense of where you thought you stood in the world, and to displace all the mediterranean associations clustered around the name of Venice with new, strange, and invigorating alpine ones. (photo taken: 27 November 2013)

Giambattista Tiepolo in Santi Apostoli

Comunione di Santa Lucia (19 November 2014)

What's At the Rialto Market These Days

The above image--not "styled" for the camera, but taken just as I found it in our kitchen one evening--shows the array of things to be found in the Rialto market as the holidays approach: persimmons, pomegranates, lemons, tangerines, apples, vine-ripened tomatoes, onions, garlic, fresh ginger... With these possibilities at hand I never found myself missing, or even thinking about the American Thanksgiving, as in themselves they were worthy of their own lower-case thanksgiving. I'm dismayed at the thought that some people might visit Venice and buy their fruits and vegetables from one of the city's chain supermarkets. Don't do it! (picture taken: 5 December 2020)

Late Night Reflections of Ca'D'Oro

16 November 2020, 12:20 am: Before the arrival of Covid it would have been rare to see the water of the Grand Canal so still at any hour of the day or night.

Sore Thumb Beside the Rialto Bridge, Designed By Rem Koolhaas's OMA Studio

The Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the second largest historical building in Venice, and most recently the city's central post office, was re-opened on October 1, 2016 as a large duty-free shop oriented toward Asian tourists after a significant re-design by the architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas and his OMA Studio that opened up some interesting perspectives within the old structure (see above). Unfrequented by Venetians, however, and despite its central location right beside the Rialto Bridge, this large building, with its foundations in the 13th century, sticks out (as they say) like a store thumb in what subsists of local life. (photo: 10 November 2016)

Sunset Over the Grand Canal

6 November 2016

 

A Venetian Childhood, South Lagoon

Our son, Sandro, aged 6, piloting our sandolo-sanpierota with an extended tiller (2 November 2014)