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)