Thursday, October 8, 2015

The Light of Autumn, Yesterday in I Giardini


Yesterday struck me as the first of the year with a distinctly autumn light, with no mix of summer in it, even temporarily. At least it was the first one I've noticed.

Absent were those solid ringing blows delivered by the summer sun, the lagoon all-atremor with its glitter and glare like sound waves from a cymbals' repeated crash.

Instead, even at noon (as in the image above), the light had a powdery quality, as if sifted from my maternal grandmother's rasping tin sifter, sighing its flour upon home-made ravioli, before she sliced the extensive street-grid sprawl of them on her dining room table into smaller neighborhoods--each ravioli like an apartment building bounded by rectilinear streets--then layered them with wax paper into white square boxes for refrigeration.

Autumn in Venice is the season of such hazy blue light, and such memories: the natural setting for the approaching All Souls Day.

2 comments:

  1. What an excellent description of your grandmother preparing ravioli!

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