The Impostor (21 April 2015)

It's been ten years since I took this picture outside Santa Maria della Salute and at least 5 years since its subject was repeatedly exposed in Venetian papers as a spry able-bodied fellow who, when not working, showed not the least hint of any physical infirmity or impediment. 

 

My wife and I had seen him in Venice ever since arriving in 2010 and were uneasy when one of the first Venetian friends we made used to say she'd like to give him a good swift kick in the butt, as he was a complete fraud. Because this new friend liked to make bold statements that sometimes lacked foundation, we didn't really believe her. But in this case, at least, she was right.

 

The somewhat surprising thing was that even after numerous articles--complete with photos of him when he was not at work--had been published in the local paper, he continued to ply his trade in Venice (to which he commuted to work from someplace I've now forgotten). I suppose that, like Venetian restaurants whose food is notoriously bad, his income depended upon an unending stream of fresh tourists without the slightest clue about what was common local knowledge.

 

Yet I never felt the urge to give him a good swift kick for pretending to be something he wasn't, nor did I think he was "getting away" with not doing real work. His intentionally splayed feet, his contorted posture, his quivering arms--all of it, we were told, was fraudulent. But it never looked like easy work to me, and certainly no way I'd like to spend my days. He was earning whatever money he made, in his own way--and I wouldn't be surprised if he's still at it in Venice.

Lost and Found and Lost, or, Good-bye to Venice's "Secret Routes"

Will we remember simply the map on our screen and notice little beyond it? (17 July 2024)

It used to be that most maps of Venice, both the old paper ones and the early ones offered on screens, left much of the city uncharted or inaccurately depicted. And if you were a resident of Venice, as I was for nearly 11 years, this was a very good thing.

For the limitations of those maps left inviolate the obscure alternate routes used by residents to avoid the tourist throngs on the city's main thoroughfares, allowing a resident to zip from, say, Piazza San Marco to the Rialto Bridge, or from the Rialto Market to Campo San Polo, along a series of narrow calli rarely penetrated by either the sun or, thankfully, tourists. The only people I used to see on such routes were other residents hurrying along on their errands.

Last summer, however, I discovered that this is no longer the case.

The "secret" resident routes that played no small part in assuring that a certain minimal quality of life persisted just beyond the reaches of mass tourism have now been mapped and the days of breezing through those once obscure calli are over. Time and again I'd turn and corner and find myself completely blocked by tourists no less lost than they ever were, but now being directed by a computer voice, their eyes glued to their screens, in places I'd never seen them before. 

No need to go into how happy it made me to find that every last millimeter of the city has now been made accessible to tourists--the vast majority of whom are just in town for a few hours and contribute almost nothing to local businesses. After all, this has always been the city's non-resident mayor's chief aim--and it doesn't stop in the city itself. His goal is to turn the entire lagoon into one vast amusement park, constantly traversed by a variety of "rides"--one for every possible taste.

But what about those using the apps to get around the historic center? I wondered about what would be the effect on their experience of Venice, and on their memories of it. 

Tourists have long been advised by those who offer advice on such matters that the best way to enjoy Venice is to "Get lost!" Forget about maps and just see where you end up. 

This was probably helpful advice in the days of paper maps and I suspect it might be even better advice in our new age of apps. For I doubt that many people used to use paper maps as a daily part of their regular lives back home, so to do so in Venice already set the experience apart from the ordinary, might even have given it a bit of a treasure hunt feel. 

But cell phones have become a constant presence in most people's lives. A widely-reported study back in 2016 claimed the average cell phone user touched their phones 2,600 times per day(!) and there's no reason to think that number has declined in the past 8 years as more and more aspects of daily life, work, school, health care, etc demand one use a cell phone to receive/access information. 

So what do we lose when we depend once more on our all-too-familiar little device to literally direct us around Venice? What do we actually see, how much can we take in, what will we remember? 

The experience of Venice (of anyplace, really, but especially Venice) is a full body one: it offers unfamiliar experiences to all of one's five senses, not just one's eyes. (Which, if you'll allow me to plug my children's picture book published by Abrams, is one of the main themes of Ciao, Sandro!) 

You don't, for example, get the feel of the city just through your hands but through your feet (eg, while walking the uneven, I'm tempted to say gently billowing floor of the Basilica of San Marco). 

The map apps, like so many if not all apps, reduce us largely however to a disembodied brain. 

I doubt that this is a good thing in ordinary life, but I can assure you this is a very bad thing in Venice. 

 

Ending on a High Note

As the gondolier approaches the end of his route in Bacino Orseolo the hired singer in the front of the gondola hits his final note while playing to passersby on the fondamenta (17 July 2024)

Gondola Bacino Orseolo

3 August 2024

Chiesa della Santa Selfie, or, Church of the Holy Selfie

23 July 2024

Viewed from afar within the vast space of the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo the object looked liked a  rectangular wood dining room table suitable for a party of eight, its top surface tilted at a 45 degree angle in the direction of the church's stained glass window. Only when I got closer could I see that it was actually a wood-framed mirror, mobile and adjustable like a larger version of the full-length mirrors people use to look at home to check their outfits.

This mirror hadn't been in the church when we moved from Venice years ago, and at first I thought it must have been put there for a similar reason that square-framed hand-held mirrors are available in the Great Hall of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco: so that one admire one of the feature's of the place without straining one's neck. In the case of San Rocco it's the refection of the ornate ceiling high overhead that you study in the mirror (if you're not snorting a line off it, as Geoff Dyer's protagonist does in Jeff in Venice); in Giovanni and Paolo I assumed it would be the stained glass window.

But I quickly realized there was no advantage to looking at the mirror's reflection, as I could easily study the window straight-on with no undue strain on my neck or eyes.

Then I noticed the blue label in one corner of the mirror--just like the one you see above (though that one is reflecting a ceiling painting by Veronese in a side chapel)--and noted how the height of the mirror was such that I could readily position myself before it to take, yes, the perfect selfie. 

Me--nearly all of me!--centered and foregrounded against a brilliant colorful background of stained glass, its sacred subjects reduced to compositional elements and a filtered backlighting that really popped!

But I didn't take that shot. Nor one in the mirror captured above that offered me the chance to appear in a celestial scene with Mary Herself. 

Instead I found myself wondering about a lot of things that I won't bore you with here. If you haven't been in the church yourself lately the news of these selfie mirrors might make you wonder some things of your own. I didn't see them in other churches, but, then, I didn't go into many other churches last month. Perhaps they're in a lot of churches now. 

It was one of the stranger differences I encountered in this new old Venice I returned to after being away for three years--a Venice that had been my family's home for over a decade but wasn't/isn't anymore. Perhaps I can get to some of the other differences soon.  

Venice in July

9 July 2017

The Less Serene Side of "La Serenissima"

Five years ago today the police and carabinieri were out in full force (and riot gear) to keep a huge protest against cruise ships in the Venetian lagoon from taking place in Piazza San Marco. At some point after this it would be declared that cruise ships would no longer pass through the basin of San Marco (right past the Doge's Palace and Piazza San Marco). But, of course, this had been declared years earlier, to international acclaim, and yet the cruise ships had continued on the same route. As of spring 2023, however, it seems the largest ships have been forbidden from making this passage--but not from entering the lagoon. The damage that massive ships cause to the lagoon, both in themselves and because of the deep water channels which have been (and will be) dredged to allow their passage, is well-documented. But a real and complete ban of them has consistently been resisted, and protests against them subjected to sometimes perilous degrees of intimidation (as when police boats and helicopters intentionally menaced protesters rowing small traditional flat-bottomed Venetian boats, threatening to overturn them). (photos: 8 June 2019)

 

 

Upon the Second Bridge of Sighs

This is the time of year when the Ponte della Paglia--the bridge from which one views the Bridge of Sighs--is likely to provoke as many expressive exhalations of distress from those crossing it as the famous landmark bridge was said to have elicited from condemned prisoners crossing it. But in the case of the Ponte della Paglia, the sighs are of the frustrated rather than mournful variety, as one tries to find a path across the crowded span. But in the above image, taken on 16 June 2013, traffic is moving nicely and shutterbugs are only one deep along the balustrade.

Rainy Day Tourist #1

When it rains non-stop through the few hours you've set aside to visit Venice (5 April 2019)

Photo Ops on the Rialto

19 February 2020

Still Point

24 June 2013

 

Reds, Piazza San Marco

16 June 2013

Away From the Crowd While In the Thick of It (The Reader at the Danieli)

27 June 2013

 

Via Garibaldi, 6 May 2013

Clock Watchers

A tourist group directs its attention to the clock tower of San Marco (4 June 2019)

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)

Crossing the Rialto Bridge: 11 August 2017, 11:48 am

 

Pigeon's Eye View, Piazza San Marco

9 July 2017

First Flight, Rio Fuseri

27 July 2015

 

Dark Reflections at Dusk on Riva Dei Sette Martiri

21 June 2015

During each Biennale the line of yachts anchored along the Riva dei Sette Martiri a short distance from the traditional seat of the exhibition in the Giardini tends to represent a rogues gallery of international oligarchs: mobsters from around the world, like Russia's Roman Abramovich, who've made a killing (quite literally: see Russia's "Aluminum Wars" of the 1990s) in the kleptocratic privatization of their home country's assets, or monopolists like Microsoft co-fonder Paul Allen. 

The yacht above belongs to the billionaire Les Wexner, founder of the clothing chain The Limited, whose holdings would eventually expand to include Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works. But Wexner is now most notorious as the man who in the 1980s developed a very close personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, becoming the "main client" of the money management firm of the college drop out, and staking him with the means that would allow the latter to forge ties with American presidents, British royals, and other prominent international power brokers in the construction of what was Epstein's real business: sex trafficking.

What Epstein was selling to men rich enough to buy whatever they wanted with impunity, was indeed the idea of life without any limits, a life lived well beyond the reach of national or international law. 

It also seemed to me at the time I took this image to be one of the primary strains of American thought: this fantasy--decidedly infantile in nature--of a world without any kind of constraints, or restraint. You know the words and the associated myth: "liberty," "freedom," so vague as to be meaningless, and often used as justification for all kinds of abuses and violence. At the very least, with a kind of sociopathic selfishness.  

In the summer of 2015 the grotesque embodiment of this infantile, sociopathological strain in American thought was running for president. He was not an anomaly then, he is not one now. Nor are his followers, nor the party which he heads, which is now overtly fascist, with its threats of violence, its openly anti-democratic aspirations, its aim to destroy all sense and reason in public discourse, its substitution of histrionic self-pitying displays of grievance for any actual policy proposals or interest in governance, its aim of destroying the state with its admittedly imperfect checks and balances with a one-party rule of limitless power... 

Limitless corruption, limitless oppression, limitless exploitation: this is the promise of those who are euphemistically called "nationalists" or "populists" (though they are inevitably in the pocket of corporate interests and promoting a ruling party whose rules are essentially written by corporations). 

There's an irony in seeing nations such as England and the US once accused of the crimes of colonialism turning the brutal practices of colonialism upon their own citizens in their home countries: for example, one no longer needs to live in the Niger Delta to be subjected to a poisoned water supply, it's common throughout the US, and one need not live in a Native American reservation to be subjected to sub-par schools, medical access, and infrastructure.

The limitless, unbounded proliferation of cells in the body is known as cancer. In the body politic the fantasy of limitlessness is no less cancerous and no less deadly.