Venice occupied a special place in both the lived and the imaginary world of Marcel Proust, and he's one of the great writers on Venice: though the actual number of words he devoted specifically to the city is far less than, say, John Ruskin or Jan Morris, and, alas, they only fully resonate within the context of his famous--and famously long--novel In Search of Lost Time. Walter Benjamin was a great writer on any number of subjects, but his essay on Proust stands out in my mind for the way he apprehends and describes the slippery subject of Proustian memory, a complex, mysterious, and vital conception of memory both perfectly suited to and profoundly influenced by Venice, a city in which evocations of the past present themselves almost unceasingly to one's senses. Which is a long way of leading to a quotation involuntarily recalled to my own mind by the image above.
Anyone who wishes to surrender knowingly to the innermost overtones in Proust's In Search of Lost Time must place himself in a special stratum--the bottom-most--of involuntary memory [that is, that realm of memory whose recollections come back to one without any conscious effort, accidentally, recalled to mind, for example, by an incidental taste or smell--as opposed to "voluntary memory": those memories which we consciously seek out and retrieve], one in which the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefinitely and weightily, in the same way as the weight of his net tells a fisherman about his catch. Smell--that is the sense of weight of someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu [lost time]. And his [Proust's[ sentences are the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body; they contain the whole enormous effort to raise this catch.
--from "The Image of Proust," in the volume of Benjamin's writing entitled Illuminations
With some regional visitors in town for Carnevale, gondoliers temporarily returned to their stations this past week. But in the weeks before, when the above photo was taken, no gondoliers were to be seen-- except, as chance would have it, the one captured above tutoring his son.
Though the official publication date of the children's picture book, Ciao, Sandro!, that I wrote and Luciano Lozano illustrated is 8 June 2021, I recently received 15 advance copies, of which you can see some examples above and below in what I suppose might be called their "native habitat."
During non-pandemic times, such advance copies would be among the titles displayed at the Abrams Publishing booth at the annual Bologna Children's Book Fair, the most important such fair for the children's publishing industry, attracting over1,400 exhibitors and around 30,000 visitors from around 80 countries, and typically held in March. Last year the fair was first postponed, and then canceled outright. This year its date has been pushed back from March to 14-17 June.
One need not be in the industry to attend, and along with a staggering array of titles and publishers from around the world, its exhibitions of the original artwork of illustrators from every corner of the globe would merit a visit all on their own.
I spent a full day at the 2019 edition of the fair, and look forward to doing so again in 2021. In terms of scale, it's rather like the Venice Biennale of the children's book publishing world, with as many things to see and almost as much ground to cover as the Biennale's Arsenale setting.
You can pre-order Ciao, Sandro!now if you'd like by hovering your mouse over the word "PRE-ORDER" on the Abrams Books for Young Readers site and then clicking on one of the choices that appear.
Or, more directly, you can pre-order it now if you're in the United States by clicking here.
(And both of the above sites benefit independent bookstores rather than monopolistic chains.)
The opening two-page spread of the book (a few other pages can be found at end of post)
A quick search also shows that is available for pre-order on sites in the Italy and the EU, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia.
All of the above links are to the US English language edition. The sale and purchase of translation rights between publishers is chief among the industry business transacted at the Bologna Children's Book Fair; no foreign editions have yet been announced for Ciao, Sandro!
The pandemic has been a terrible time for gondoliers and taxi drivers and delivery drivers (who have seen their volume plummet with the closure of hotels and restaurants) but, in the absence of water traffic, an almost edenic time for rowers.
The front window of Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche on Barbaria de le Tole
Shortly after we moved to Venice in 2010 I was walking with a visiting American friend over the Rialto Bridge when he asked me "So what are you supposed to buy in Venice? These silk ties, maybe?" he said, gesturing toward a display of them in a shop window.
We'd been talking of something else entirely, his question came out of the blue, but I knew what he meant. For I, too, when I first visited Europe as a teenager in 1982, had been told before leaving home that certain places were famous for the particular things they produced--eg, carved wood figures in Switzerland, lace in Venice, gold and leather in Florence--and I was, it seemed, almost duty-bound to purchase accordingly and return to the US with my loot.
In fact this compulsion was rather like the one that Venetian traders must have felt many centuries before our conversation, having been ordered by their rulers to return from their own voyages abroad with valuable objects--acquired by whatever means necessary--with which the city could be decorated for its greater glory. The basilica of San Marco, of course, became (and remains) Exhibit Number 1 of the loot thus acquired (or the acquisitions thus looted, as the case often was).
In spite of how much the city had changed between 1982 (when I first saw it) and 2011 (when this conversation took place), the things one was supposed to buy in Venice hadn't changed: lace and glass. But real Burano lace, as I told my friend, is produced by quite literally just a few remaining elderly women, as a long-time retailer of lace told me soon after I moved here, and is accordingly both scarce and expensive. While real Murano glass, though less costly than lace, isn't necessarily as ubiquitous as it first appears, as the cheap stuff is either made in the Far East or is such swift, shoddy work as to have little to do with the tradition it is supposed to evoke.
My friend wasn't a lace or glass kind of guy anyway, and so I concluded simply, "Don't worry about it. There's almost nothing you'll see here that you won't see any place else you go in Italy. Or Europe. And most of it isn't even made here."
This didn't stop him from asking me the same question again the next day.... After all, old habits die hard, and the late- and short-lived modern ideal of being a citizen of the world, seeking after some idealistic and unquantifiable sense of companionship with one's fellow humans, often seems to have been displaced by that of being a consumer of the world, avid for and defined by one's acquisitions, paid for in ready cash.
I feel the effects of this emphasis on consumption in myself, and not wanting to encourage it either in myself or others, I've rarely been inclined to write about things to buy in Venice. Besides, the great bulk of articles on Venice are ultimately trying to sell you something, so my contribution was hardly needed.
On the other hand, Venice has long been famous as a marketplace--in fact, as the great marketplace of Europe at a time long before "international emporiums" (with their batik prints and scented candles) became a mainstay in 20th-century American malls.
In the opening chapter of his book Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book, Alessandro Marzo Magno points out that the shopping streets between Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge have changed less than one might imagine over the last five centuries:
[In 1520 Venice was] a city that, relatively speaking, was much more important than Italy today. Although Italy is now the world’s sixth or seventh industrial power, half a millennium ago Venice had a place on the podium. In the Europe of that time there were only three cities that we might call big; three cities with a population of more than one hundred fifty thousand: Paris, Naples, and Venice.
So, then, what would we have been able to find in the stores—which often were also workshops and homes—on the sixteenth century Mercerie? Cloth, for one thing, or rather the splendid red fabrics for which Venice was famous, dyed according to secret recipes inherited from the Byzantines. Or gilded leather; embossed leather panels decorated with gold leaf, used to embellish the interior walls of palaces, crafted using techniques imported from Moorish Spain, which in turn had inherited them from the Arabs. Or weapons, lots and lots of weapons: hankered over and vied for by plutocrats and sovereigns from all over Europe[....] The names of a couple of nearby streets, Spadaria (from spada, or sword) and Frezzaria (from freccia, or arrow) still speak to us today of that ancient vocation.
But what struck foreign visitors most were the books: the dozens and dozens of bookmaking workshops that were gathered here in a density unequaled anywhere else in Europe. Word has come down to us of authentic book-shopping tours, like the one described by the historian Marcantonio Sabellico [...]when two friends trying go from the Fontego dei Tedeschi at the foot of the Rialto bridge, [...] to Saint Mark’s Square, [are] unable to make it to their destination, overwhelmed by their curiosity to read the lists of books appended outside the shops.
But Venice's status as the great market place of Europe goes back even further. In Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, Philip Ball notes that Venice was trading with the Arabic world as early as the 9th century, and quotes Martin da Canal from his 13th century Chronique de Vénetiens (1267-1275), in which he writes that "merchandise passes through this noble city as water flows through fountains." Ball, whose eye-opening book examines the history of color in art in its material rather than theoretical or aesthetic sense--that is, as being intimately connected to trade and mining and chemistry and what might be called the proto-chemistry of the alchemists--elaborates thus on the offerings of Venetian markets:
From the Aegean Islands came sugar and wine; from the Far East, spices, porcelain, and pearls. Northen Europe supplied minerals, metal, and woolen cloth, while Egypt and Asia Minor were sources of gems, dyes, perfumes, ceramics, pigments, alum, and rich textiles.
And he suggests that this access to color exercised a profound effect on the work of the Venetian painters such as Titian, who "used an unusually large range of pigments, including orpiment and the only true orange of the Renaissance, realgar, available in Venice from around 1490."
Philip Ball writes that Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne "is a chart of nearly every known pigment at the time [of its painting]"--a benefit of having a wealthy patron who could afford (and demanded) the rarest pigments and of living in the great port city of Venice, unparalleled in Europe at the time for the array of exotic materials passing through it
Indeed, Venice, which Ball calls the "City of Color," was the major supply post for painters of the day with funds to spend on the best of materials. At a time when the contracts between patrons and painters went into great detail about both the type and quality of pigments to be used and the money allotted for their purchase he writes that:
The reputation of Venice as the best source of fine pigments is evident in the travel concession in Filippino Lippi's contract for the Strozzi Chapel; [and] Cosimo Tura came to Venice from Ferrara in 1469 to procure materials for his work on the Belriguardo Chapel.
So, in truth, Venice has always been about shopping, in some senses. The challenge these days of mass tourism and online sales is to locate something which truly is unique to this place. But it's not impossible, and for those who are interested in supporting the Venetian economy I'll put up some blog posts over the coming days (or weeks?) of places where I've purchased things myself.
Far from being definitive, this is nothing other than idiosyncratic, and I have no arrangement whereby I benefit from your patronage of any of these places. Nor have I arranged for you to receive a discount at any of them with the mention of my blog. I'll only briefly tell you what I've found and why each place has interested me, and leave the rest to you, to be taken up or not.
Which is a very long way of getting to a photography studio and archive, any one of whose photographic images is worth, as the old saying goes, much more than the thousand words written above.
Vittorio Pavan in Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche
The name of the place is the Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche, and it's located a short distance from the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo on Barbaria de le Tole (simply set off in the opposite direction from that which Verocchio's famous horse and rider face and in a few minutes you'll see the shop on your left, with its display window adorned by large black-and-white prints).
Its owner is Vittorio Pavan, who in addition to acting as the caretaker of more than 50 years of 20th-century Venetian history is also, as a publisher of fine arts books recently told me, the best printer of black-and-white photographic prints in the area.
His skill in this is amply evident in the fine art prints you'll find in his shop--and how nice it is to see fine art prints created in a dark room instead of by an inkjet printer! Though it's easy enough to get so swept away in the figures and scenes themselves as to lose sight of their developer's expertise.
For there's Igor Stravinsky reclining not-quite-comfortably in a gondola, or more at home conducting a rehearsal for the world premiere of his opera TheRake's Progress in La Fenice. There's a famous image of the young Sophia Loren and her impossibly tiny waistline on a balcony overlooking the Grand Canal. There's Picasso, Paul Newman, Orson Welles, Jean Cocteau, Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Hemingway, Richard Wright (dapper in a white dinner jacket outside Hotel Excelsior), Pasolini, Bardot, Denueve, Sutherland and Christie, Mick and Bianca, Keith and Anita, and nearly any other bold name cultural figure from the second half of the 20th century at work or at play, busy promoting or protesting, in the distinctive settings of Venice.
But no less worthy of attention--some would say more--are the images of Venetian life starting from 1946: fishermen and hunters, boat builders and lace makers, families and clerics, natural and industrial calamities, feste and special events, and even images labeled "Cronaca Nera": crime scene photos, including some graphic ones of, for example, the murder of Count Filippo Giordano delle Lanze in the reputedly cursed Grand Canal palace Ca' Dario, which you'll certainly not find in the real estate brochures offering the newly-created condominium units there for sale.
All of the scores of images you'll see on display or stacked in archival photo boxes in the studio make up just a tiny fraction of the 320,000 negatives from the Venice-based photo agency, founded in 1946, which in its last and longest incarnation went by the name of Cameraphoto, and whose photographers supplied images to major newspapers and magazines around the world.
Vittorio Pavan started working for the photo agency in 1972 at the age of 14, and it is now Pavan who struggles with the challenge of digitally preserving what he can of an archive which is inevitably disintegrating. The best (and quite beautifully-produced) account of the Cameraphoto Archive and Vittorio Pavan can be found in a 4 1/2 minute documentary (with English subtitles), used as part of a crowdfunding campaign early this year (which, alas, did not meet its goal) that you can watch below:
The website offers Archival Digital Fine-Art prints in various sizes and at various prices, but, in fact, you can no longer order through the website itself.
Any online questions about images, or orders, should be emailed to info@bianconero-venezia.it.
Fine art dark room prints are also available. Cameraphoto can ship anywhere in the world, and for someone looking for a distinctively Venetian object, one made only here and at a certain moment--literally instant--in time, it is an invaluable resource. And if you're able to visit the studio itself the next time you're in Venice, and peruse the images in person, it's time well spent in a historical and cultural venture well worth supporting.
"Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice," writes William Deans Howells in Chapter VII of his great non-fiction book Venetian Life (originally published in 1866), "are those
ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed in
baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares by
the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their general
stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to their own
comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling ear-rings of
yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning streets of
Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of the country’s
clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great cream-colored
cows.
Fishermen, also, come down the little calli—with shallow
baskets of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles
and mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to
bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling drama
proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser’s own price.
“Beautiful and all alive!” is the engaging cry with which they hawk their
fish.
Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come to
exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely, but
glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all, chair-menders—who
bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a sign, with pieces of white
wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a hammer, and a sheaf of
rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait the rush bottoms of your
kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant whittlings with their
knives, and gossip with your serving-woman."
It was the last of these types of "provisioners" once common in the calli and campi of Venice that I thought I caught sight of today around noon in Cannaregio, hurrying along Fondamenta dei Mori with two wooden chairs stacked seat to seat in his hands, then dashing over a bridge as we puttered beneath it in our little boat and out of sight. Thinking of the Howells passage above, I was almost ready to take him for a ghost. But he's more likely to have been heading to Sunday lunch with a pair of extra seats for some other guests--in one of the few areas of the city still animated by Venetian life.
Last Sunday, on a cold foggy afternoon, I found myself for the first time in Palazzo Zenobio, which is also known as the Collegio Armeno Moorat Raphael, as it's been the property of the Padri Armeni Mechitaristi di Venezia since 1850, and remainsa center for Armenian studies. It was open to the public last Sunday day because it's currently hosting a large exhibition of contemporary painting, about which I think it best for me to politely refrain from commenting. It wasn't to my taste, but I encourage anyone in town to check it out and form their own opinion.
What struck me, though, was not the exhibition, and not only the notable late Baroque decoration of the palazzo, but the cold. The entire place was unheated--so that my ungloved hands quickly became stiff and numb--and the experience of walking among its many icy rooms reminded me that not all that long ago (at least in terms of the long history of Venice) it was not uncommon for even the grandest Venetian palaces to be without heating. After more than 7 years of living in Venice I recognized that I was finally experiencing first-hand and on a grand scale what I'd only previously read about, most memorably in William Dean Howell's marvelous account of living in Venice in the 1860s entitled Venetian Life.
Now that the end of winter is in view perhaps it's a good time to post a large excerpt from Howell's description of unheated palazzi and how, more generally, 19th-century Venetians made it (or suffered through) the season. On a sunny day like today in Venice, after a rather long stretch of wet gray weather (including a window-rattling run of bora winds from the northeast), it's finally possible to read the passage below without an uncomfortable shiver of sympathy.
The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much
favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure a
degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the
winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd
prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer equally
with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the cold,
objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the effort
to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It is not a
pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the affliction among
people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh you out sugar, by no
means reconciles the Northern stomach to its prevalence. I have observed
that priests, and those who have much to do in the frigid churches, are
the worst sufferers in this way; and I think no one can help noting in the
harsh, raw winter-complexion (for in summer the tone is quite different)
of the women of all classes, the protest of systems cruelly starved of the
warmth which health demands.
The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight
months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in summer,
and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very large, lofty,
and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of apartments—the
smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the winter, and the
grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for defence against the
insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most part, people must occupy
the same room summer and winter, the sole change being in the strip of
carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during the latter season. In the
comparatively few houses where carpets are the rule and not the exception,
they are always removed during the summer—for the triple purpose of
sparing them some months’ wear, banishing fleas and other domestic
insects, and showing off the beauty of the oiled and shining pavement,
which in the meanest houses is tasteful, and in many of the better sort is
often in-wrought with figures and designs of mosaic work.
All the floors in Venice are of stone, and [...] all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with
their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded
gowns. When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too
heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian
sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the only
legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous prices to
such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.
It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the utmost
rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as possible in
the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm afternoon sun in
its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders of every class,
condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines in the Piazza,
shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men crowd the close
little caffè, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration, and animal heat,
and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and beguile the time with
solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself, throughout this book, the use
of the expressive American words loaf and loafer, as the
only terms adequate to the description of professional idling in Venice]
and the perusal of dingy little journals, drinking small cups of black
coffee, and playing long games of chess,—an evening that seemed to
me as torpid and lifeless as a Lap’s, and intolerable when I remembered
the bright, social winter evenings of another and happier land and
civilization.
Sometimes you find a heated stove—that is to say, one in which there
has been a fire during the day—in a Venetian house; but the stove
seems usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged
only in diffusing a very acrid smoke,—as if the Venetian preferred
to take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove itself
is a curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and plastering,—whitewashed
and painted outside. It is a great consumer of fuel, and radiates but
little heat. By dint of constant wooding I contrived to warm mine; but my
Italian friends always avoided its vicinity when they came to see me, and
most amusingly regarded my determination to be comfortable as part of the
eccentricity inseparable from the Anglo-Saxon character.
I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in his
northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his
severity is the scaldino, and this is made chiefly by the yielding
sex, who are denied the warmth of the caffè. The use of the scaldino is
known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are most
addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware, having
an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and the pot
full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana’s defense against cold is
complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room to
room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been my
fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting over
the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while she
sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with religion,
baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino. In one of the
public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the walls, intended
to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea of the four seasons.
There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization of Spring, Summer, and
Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by a fine lady dressed in
furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned foot-stool, and a scaldino in
her lap! When we talk of being invaded in the north, we poetize the idea
of defense by the figure of defending our hearthstones. Alas! could
we fight for our sacred scaldini?
It's one of the best books from any period that I've read on Venice, and I can't imagine another 19th-century book in English that even comes close to giving such a full and entertaining account of Venetian life.
At the recent launch party for his new novel The Venetian Game, Philip Gwynne Jones acknowledged that anyone thinking of setting a thriller in Venice immediately encounters a formidable, if not insurmountable challenge in the corpus of Donna Leon. With Inspector Brunetti on the scene, Venice is hardly in need of another Italian detective. And while that traditional protagonist of the genre, the private eye, could plausibly be imagined to make a living in the larger city of Mestre, Philip noted that there wasn't yet much of an international market for books set in Mestre.
Philip, whom I first met when we both worked as readers of Marx's Das Kapital during the run of the last Venice Biennale, came up with what I think is a brilliant solution--and no small part of the pleasure I had in reading his first novel stemmed from its inspired premise. Nathan Sutherland, the first person narrator of The Venetian Game, serves as England's Honorary Consul in Venice.
It's a pretty impressive title, but the post has lost a good deal of its luster since the grand old days of Joseph Smith, great patron of Canaletto (among many others), and one of his era's real movers and shakers. The "Honorary" signals that the position is unpaid, and Sutherland carries out its duties from his modest apartment on the Calle dei Assassini, between Campo Manin and Campo Sant'Angelo, aiding English tourists who have lost their passports, or are looking for a lunch recommendation. To pay his bills he works as a translator-- not of Dante, nor even Goldoni, but of a lawn mower manual when we first meet him.
Philip Gwynne Jones reads from his new novel at its launch party in Venice
Sutherland is a distinctly engaging narrator, his knowledge of Venice and of culture carried lightly and leavened by a dry wit, a gift for observation, and a modesty that threatens to topple at times into self doubt. His Watson, as it were, is a cantankerous cat that haunts his home office like a malevolent familiar, and is perfectly described in a way that both cat lovers and cat haters will find apt and gratifying.
Sutherland is also perfectly positioned in the social milieu of Venice for maximum dramatic and comic effect. No less than the classic private eye of someone like Raymond Chandler, he occupies a liminal place, both insider and outsider at the same time. As the traditional private dick operates at the boundaries of the law, his authority always a little dubious and extending no further than what he's able to pull off or assert in any given situation, so does Sutherland. For all the diligence with which he pursues his consular duties, it's still a bit of a confidence game. Lacking a paid position, as he also lacks a detective's badge, Sutherland must improvise a certain authority for himself in increasingly complex and perilous contexts; trying to inspire a certain confidence or respect in the minds of other even as he struggles with it in his own.
Most important, though, for this first novel is that Philip Gwynne Jones does an excellent job of vividly and astutely conjuring Venice. While the charms of the narrator and the skills of the author may assure an audience for the second Nathan Sutherland novel--due out a year from now--no small number of readers will pick up this first one because of its setting. And they won't be disappointed.
Sutherland's official duties and his own personal relationships and amusements take him all over Venice, and the Venice that the author delivers is the living, breathing local Venice which persists like a secret society amid the teeming, and all-too-often trashy, mass tourist Venice. Those who have themselves lived in Venice will recognize with pleasure the city Sutherland inhabits; those who haven't, will get a strong sense of what it's like to do so as a resident.
But as well as Sutherland knows his way around the city, this is not Brunetti's Venice, and it's Nathan's distinctive vantage point as both a knowledgeable and sometimes perplexed non-native that opens up interesting perspectives on, and insights into, the city. That makes up, in fact, much of his appeal.
The plot of the novel revolves around stolen art and there's no lack of tension and drama. (In a particularly inspired scene, Sutherland is nearly drowned not in one of Venice's famous canals but in one of its paved streets during acqua alta.) But as much as it may involve various unsavory characters up to no good, this is a book about friendship. It's a book with its own distinctive voice and perspective, but there's also something of the spirit of the classic Venice film Bread and Tulips (Pane e Tulipani) in it. As was true in that film, the appealing protagonist of A Venetian Game finally comes to establish himself in the city not through his position as consul, nor even his crime-solving, but through his bonds of affection--and the testing of those bonds--with an assorted cast of local characters.
------------
The Venetian Game is published in the UK by Little Brown in both a paper and an e-book edition. An Italian translation is forthcoming. The book can also be found in various bookstores in Venice; most reliably in Libreria Studium, a short distance from the basilica of San Marco. It is not yet available for direct sale in the US.
When certain Italians want to suggest the utter corruption of their own
country they'll refer to it bitterly as "the country of Pulcinella." In
his classic study of commedia dell'arte Pierre Louis Ducharte
describes the stock character of Pulcinella as "selfish, strongly
inclined to sensual and epicurean gluttony..., self-centered and
bestial, [with] no scruples whatsoever, and... exceedingly cruel." In
other words, Giandomenico Tiepolo's image of a crowd of them above (from
Ca' Rezzonico) might depict today's inauguration.
So, I say, I grew into early sympathy and friendship with Venice, and, being newly from a land where everything, morally and materially, was in good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of everything about me here.
This is one of the strangest sentences in one of my favorite books about Venice: Venetian Life, by William Dean Howells.
Originally published in 1866, it's the most comprehensive and observant book written in English that I've read about the experience of living in Venice.
Howells was just 24 years old when he arrived in Venice in 1861 as the newly-appointed US consul to the city. He'd written a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln and, upon the latter's election, this post was his reward. He would occupy this post until 1865, before returning to the US.
During these years Venice still groaned bitterly under Austrian rule--and all the more bitterly for having recently watched almost all of the rest of the Italian peninsula be unified in the new Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed in March of that same year by Vittore Emanuele II. Venice's economy, its buildings, and its morale all were in shambles, and Howells vividly details both the shambles and the enduring splendor, ever wary of how the city's charms lead most chroniclers into all sorts of romantic falsifications.
In fact, Howells readily admits that he himself isn't immune to those charms, and a central vivifying tension in the book is between Howells the young literary realist and government official--committed to close observation of all classes of contemporary Venetian life and its economy--and Howells the ardent young man who can't stop those Byronic notions of the place and its history from crowding into his head every time he comes upon some marvelous sight.
A century later another ardent young man, James Morris (who would become Jan Morris), would ultimately succumb to the charms of the place--and the pleasures and excesses of his own prose style--and produce an excellent book on the city that at times sacrifices credibility to intoxication. Howells, however, never loses his balance so completely. And he's honest enough, as above, to admit that part of the pleasure of the city comes from its very decrepitude.
This is a classic Romantic theme in Venice. But because Howells is a detailed chronicler of both the individual human and larger social suffering that make up that decrepitude, his admission carries with it--in his own opinion, and not just that of some of his readers--a certain amount of ethical culpability. This is in contrast to, say, Bryon, whose own exquisite suffering as he imagines the suffering of the unfortunate seems to trump his subject's own actual pain.
Or another way of putting it: Byron philosophizes and sighs over the once great Republic's fall while he blithely--as his friend Shelley recounted, and criticized--purchases Venetian girl children from their destitute pimping parents. Howells details the city's desperate economic and political conditions and imagines the real world changes, the modernization, that must at some point be made to improve the lot of its citizens--while guiltily admitting he'll miss the "picturesque" aspects of life that must be lost as a result of such salutary changes.
But that's not what I find to be the strange part of Howells's sentence at the top of this post. No, the part I can't get of out my head these days is his rather astonishing claim that he is "newly from a land in which everything, morally and materially, was in good repair."
In fact, by the fall of 1861 when Howells arrived in Venice, his native land was well into its own bitter and bloody Civil War: the rout of Union forces on July 21, 1861 in the first Battle of Bull Run having quashed any delusions that the Confederate secession was going to be easily put down.
Perhaps, based upon a very selective and limited perusal of the US states of the north in 1861, one could declare that "everything" in America was "materially in good repair." But for as long as slavery continued (and, alas, even thereafter), Howells's claim that his native land (whose economy, north and south, rested on slave labor) was "morally in good repair" was just plain hogwash.
And at least part of him knew this. For later in his book, after making an explicit comparison between the boats of those "dauntless traders" of earliest Venice and "our own [ie, American] western steamers", he immediately turns to the subject of the early Venetian "slave-trade, [which] formed then one of the most lucrative branches of Venetian commerce, as now it forms the greatest stain upon the annals of that commerce." He then summarizes, with obvious censure, the various forms that slavery assumed in Venice during its centuries of existence there, which "continued as late as the fifteenth century, and in earlier ages was so common that every prosperous person had two or threes slaves," before concluding:
The corruption of the citizens at this time is properly attributed in part to the existence of slavery among them; and Mutinelli goes so far as to declare that the institution impressed permanent traits on the populace, rendering them idle and indisposed to honest labor by degrading labor and making it the office of bondsmen.
Of course any time we write about a foreign place we're also writing about our native land. We can't help but engage in an extended series of comparisons--at least implicitly--between the culture we come from and the strange place we've gone to. Better travel writers are aware of this, and often do so explicitly; the worst are utterly clueless, and fall into a tiresome chauvinism.
Perhaps one way of talking about travel writing is to start with the question of what function does the foreign place serve for the writer? What does it do for her or him intellectually or emotionally or spiritually or aesthetically?
Some travel books end up telling us more about the place (culture) from which the writer came than about the place that is his or her ostensible subject. Take Tim Parks's An Italian Education, for example, in which I think I learn far more reliable information about certain English attitudes than I do about the Italian ones he's describing. His narrative arc is the familiar Anglo-American-in-Italy one about his corruption by the latter.
Other Anglo-American travel writer find themselves "liberated" from the strictures or blind spots of their native land after arriving Italy. Though typically pitched in terms of the "ecstatic," these narratives can be as tiresome and dubious as the chauvinistic ones, as they're simply the flip side of the same either/or coin.
But in spite of his "early sympathy with Venice," in spite of his susceptibility to the spirit of idleness he finds in the city, Howells holds tightly not just to American ideals of industriousness, but to an ideal America--an America which, in spite of the Civil War and slavery, is somehow "morally and materially in good repair."
This fictional good repair at home, this supposedly solid base, is what in fact allows the young man to safely "riot sentimentally" on the picturesque ruin and hopelessness and idleness of Venice. With such a solid nation to return to, Howells need not fear drifting irretrievably into the seductive laxity of Venice. (That's to say, writing even before Lawrence and EM Forster, much less our recent best-sellers, he's too early to imagine himself "eating, praying and loving" his way to self-realization in Italy.)
What I wonder about, though, is what would have happened to Howells--at least in his own mind--if he'd admitted that, in fact, while he lived in Venice his divided nation was in real danger of collapse? Was it guilt that he himself was not involved in the struggle at home, sheer defensive pride in his homeland (and employer), or a sop to his subsequent readers that made him so completely whitewash the situation in his own country during the years he spent in Venice?
Maybe what I'm wondering about here is something long the lines of: if the relationship between home and abroad is always at play in travel writing, how does the nature or tenor of that relationship change when the situation in one's own home country is dire? Other writers from around the world have written in and about just such circumstances. But have American writers, even when the very survival of their nation was in question, ever copped to it? Ever given up the security of this fiction of a country "morally and materially in good repair"--and not simply to assert that Italy (or some other place) was the solution to whatever they thought ailed the US? What would it mean to do so?
In recent months, and on this day in particular, this question is always on my mind.
An image from Dream of Venice Architecture (used with the permission of Bella Figura Publications)
I went to a book signing last week at Libreria Studium, a very good bookstore with an interesting selection of books in English and other languages (in addition to Italian), and one that's often overlooked (not least of all by me in this blog), it seems, in spite of the fact that it's just a few hundred meters from the Basilica San Marco and just down the canal from the Bridge of Sighs.
It's an excellent centrally-located resource for those looking for books in English about Venice and Italy, as well as contemporary and classic literature by American and English writers.
The book signing was for the second in a series of books about Venice that I've also overlooked, probably due to the fact that the last thing I want to do lately is write a book review (the recent one I did on Lucy Hughes-Hallett's lively biography of D'Annunzio began as something else and only accidentally turned into a review of a book I'd read some time before).
But Dream of Venice Architecture, featuring the photography of Riccardo de Cal and a broad selection of original texts written specifically for the volume by acclaimed architects, such as Tadao Ando, Mario Botta and Louise Braverman, and acclaimed writers on architecture such as Witold Rybczynski, merits the attention of anyone interested in the both the long-enduring masterpieces of this city and the more recent ones: in Carlo Scarpa as well as Palladio.
Photographer Riccardo de Cal, left, with editor and publisher JoAnn Loktov at last week's book signing in Libreria Studium
In fact, the enthusiasm with which a number of contributors write about Scarpa and how he inspired them serves as an excellent introduction to the work of Venice's own 20th-century master for those whose attention has been, understandably enough, largely monopolized by past masters like Palladio, Longhena, Sansovino, Codussi, et al.
And the photos of Riccardo de Cal manage, without straining for effect, to present compelling perspectives on this most photographed of cities. Even his images of, say, Piazza San Marco represent that area in the way it strikes me as someone who lives here--rather than with the alienated and alienating sheen of the tourist-oriented image.
Dream of Venice Architecture, in short, is worth a look.
You can also find out about the first book in the series, entitled simply Dream of Venice, with photos by Charles Christopher and a Foreward by Frances Mayes, here.
The pleasant sight of a room full of readers in the yet-unfinished space of Marco Polo Kids during last Saturday's Open Day
In the nearly 6 years I've been writing this blog I feel lucky to have never had to worry about advertising or conflicts of interests. I've never taken ads or "monetized" the blog, nor had lodgings or guided tours or anything else to sell. There's nothing wrong with doing any of these things--and maybe I should have been doing some of them for all I know. But it seemed pleasant to do something in which financial considerations were not woven into the fabric of the project, as they are, unavoidably, in so many things we do these days.
If I recommended a store, for example, it was because I'd had good experiences in it or found its merchandise especially interesting before I ever thought of doing a blog post about it or came to know its proprietor.
This was the case with Libreria Marco Polo, the local bookstore about which I find (after using the "Search This Blog" widget in the right hand margin of this page) that I've done five different posts: the first of them on 4 December 2011, the most recent on 27 September 2015.
The last of these posts was about the grand opening of a second Libreria Marco Polo in Campo Santa Margherita, a beautiful bookstore which seems to be thriving in its new location.
A busy bookmark workshop outside Marco Polo Kids during last Saturday's Open House
Today's post is about the transformation and grand reopening of the original Libreria Marco Polo-- located just behind Mauro Codussi's lovely little ruddy church of San Giovanni Grisostomo, not far from the Rialto--as a children's bookstore: Libreria Marco Polo Kids.
Considering how much I've enjoyed both Marco Polo bookstores over the years, and considering how important they've been as a site of community activity and spirit, I'd almost certainly be posting about this news in any case. But this time it's a little different, as my wife Jen is--along with Elisabetta Favaretti, the long-time co-proprietor of the Marco Polo bookstores, and four other women--one of the founding booksellers involved in the creation of this new store.
A reading during last Saturday's Open House
Marco Polo Kids will stock books for children and adolescents and, along with its Italian books, include a selection of titles in English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic. But in addition to its books, the store will also offer a range of activities for kids: readings, workshops, courses and special events. It aims to be a cultural center for both local kids and their parents and for visitors alike.
A young visitor helps decorate the bookshop entrance
Last Saturday's "Open Day" at Marco Polo Kids was the first chance for people to get a look at the
changes
taking place in the new store and, in some cases (as at right), to quite literally
leave their imprint on the space. With the store still in an unfinished
state, its bookshelves not yet filled, it was a chance for people to
meet the booksellers, sample some of the activities the bookstore will
offer (last Saturday: a bookmark-making workshop outside, readings indoors), enjoy
snacks and beverages, and offer their input on the kind of cultural and
educational place they'd like it to be. There
was nothing yet for sale--in spite of how many people saw things they wanted to buy. It was all about the free exchange of ideas and building a sense of community.
The official Inauguration of the store will take place this Friday,
28 October, beginning at 5 pm, with home-made cakes and beverages for
kids. At 6 pm live music will be added to the mix of activities, and
apertifs will be available for adults. And this Friday, in contrast to last Saturday's Open Day, the store will
officially be open for business.
As important as the idea of local community building is to the bookshop is the idea that visitors to the city and their children will also be welcome to participate in a space where real Venetian life--not simulated or costumed or commodified versions of it--is taking place. A Venice of the present and the future, not just of the past; a present and future that visitors themselves can participate in.
If you're in town this Friday, stop in for the Inauguration, or, at any time thereafter, to see what you think.
Two kids read while another draws on the bookshop's chalkboard wall
A panorama of Ca' D'Oro's androne mosaic photo credit: Sandro
The ground floor courtyard (or androne) of Ca' d'Oro is probably the most exotic and evocative space of its kind in Venice. But while the palace's famous facade exemplifies 15th-century Venetian architectural taste at its "most decorative and florid" (according to Deborah Howardin her Architectural History of Venice), the androne displays the connoisseurship and refined turn-of-the-20th-century taste of Baron Franchetti, who restored the "Venetian-ness" to a space that had been gutted by the famous ballerina Mademoiselle Taglioni in the mid-nineteenth century. (Taglioni, to John Ruskin's horror, had torn out the palace's beautiful external 15th-century staircase, its ornate portal over the street entrance, and its wellhead, among many other barbarous alterations.)
In 1896 as Franchetti himself was busy on his hands and knees arranging the rare colored stones of the androne's beautiful mosaic pavement (modeled on the 12th-century floor of Murano's church of Santa Maria e San Donato) another well-known, highly-cultured, connoisseur of the time was often right beside him, helping out: Gabriele D'Annunzio.
The colorful, elaborately-patterned floor of Ca'D'Oro serves as a guiding image of the biographical method of Lucy Hughes-Hallett's excellent 2013 biography of D'Annunzio, entitled The Pike in the UK, and Gabriele D'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War in the US.
Though little-known in the US, where his extravagant language and self-consciously-literary decadence isn't really to the national taste (even if his militarism and twin obsessions with youth and conscienceless individual power might find a ready audience), D'Annunzio serves in Hughes-Hallet's book as a fascinating and complex prism through which to see the young state of Italy at the end of the 19th-century and its disastrous attempts to forge a strong national identity in the first decades of the 20th.
In this sense, it's an overview of Italian culture and politics of this period, using one of the country's most famous and influential figures as a focal point.
Though bearing no physical resemblance to his virile ideal, D'Annunzio was something of a proto-rock star: with all the fame, the crowds, the mass adoration, the groupies, the excess, the drugs (he loved cocaine), the world-famous lovers (eg, Eleonora Duse), the celebrity perks, the influence, the entitlement, and the unquestioned authority.
But not even the most celebrated of rock stars has managed to do what D'Annunzio did after World War I in the former Venetian territory of Istria: establish his own little proto-Fascist nation-state in the port town of Fiume, with himself as dictator, which he held for nearly a year and a half while the allied victors of the Great War tried to figure out what to do with both the region and him.
D'Annunzio's time in Venice makes up just a part of his mad life, but it's such a significant part--and he plays so colorful a part in the history of the city--that I'm tempted to call Hughes-Hallett's entertaining and well-researched biography a must read for any lover of Venice.
Forget about the famous love affairs he carried on here, the theatrical premieres of his work and all the other kinds of drama, the years he spent here during World War I alone will alter your sense of the Grand Canal and the Casetta Rossa: that little red palazzo set back from the water by a small garden right beside the immense facade of the Palazzo Corner (now seat of the Province and Prefect of Venice), and across the water from the Guggenheim Museum.
The Casetta Rossa this afternoon: an engraved commemorative plaque of D'Annunzio's habitation there is set into the garden railing at right, but its worn letters are almost impossible to make out even in person
Having used his celebrity to obtain an officer's commission in the newly-hatched Italian Air Force (though by this time he was already over 50 years of age), D'Annunzio would be chauffeured in a motor boat from what he called this "doll's house" on the Grand Canal--rented for a pittance from his pal the Austrian Prince Frederick von Hohenlohe--to the airport on Lido, from which he would set off on regular bombing raids against those he described in unceasingly inflammatory public pronouncements as Italy's "ancestoral enemies" and the loathsome spawn of a nation he likened to a "vulture vomiting human flesh": the countrymen, that is, of his landlord.
Then after quite literally dropping bombs, or sometimes, in the case of a dangerous foray over Trieste, pamphlets of his own creation; after surviving anti-aircraft fire and the brutally frigid and perilous conditions of early air warfare, he'd return to his palazetto on the Grand Canal to soak in a hot bath, powder and perfume himself and, amid the 18th-century furniture and ornaments collected by his Austrian benefactor, entertain one of his many female friends or admirers.
After a year of increasingly daring raids, D'Annunzio's luck ran out. Temporarily, at least. His plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and D'Annunzio was blinded when his head smashed into the machine gun mounted in front of his seat. He'd eventually regain sight in one eye, but only after three months of lying motionless on his back in a completely blacked-out room of the Casetta Rossa.
He would, in fact, return, one-eyed, to his bombing raids--against medical advice. And, having escaped death, he'd go on to even greater prominence, power, and influence, not least of all with Benito Mussolini, with whom he had an uneasy relationship. (D'Annunzio recognized that Mussolini had basically stolen some of his best material and methods and, though uncouth and vulgar, was enjoying the power that D'Annunzio believed rightfully should have belonged to himself. Mussolini, meanwhile, keen on presenting himself as the political heir to Italy's world-famous nationalist poet, felt obligated to flatter the older man, and showered him with extravagant gifts (such as installing the front half of an actual battleship, complete with sailors, on D'Annunzio's property near Lake Garda), saying "When a decayed tooth cannot be pulled out it is capped with gold.").
For anyone interested in Venice, Hughes-Hallett's book does what all all the best books about the city do: it enlivens and enriches one's sense of this peculiar little place which, in spite of its long history, can sometimes subside into merely the collection of beautiful monuments and picturesque views it's long been sold as. It re-orients one's personal map of the city, freighting previously unnoticed areas with new significance, and, more generally, it offers a compelling perspective on the early years of the nation of Italy.
Amin Maalouf (center) speaks in the 16th-century Aula Magna Silvio Trentin of Ca' Dolfin yesterday; at right is the interviewer Marie-Christine Jamet; at left, the interpreter Lidia Bogo
Having missed, unfortunately, last week's Incroci di Civilità International Literary Festival (http://www.incrocidicivilta.org/), I made sure to at least attend yesterday's talk by the Lebanese-born French author Amin Maalouf at Ca' Dolfin, part of Venice's Ca' Foscari University. The author of fiction (including the Goncourt Prize-winning Le Rocher de Tanios), non-fiction, and a number of opera librettos, Maalouf was in Venice not only as part of last week's literary festival but as a resident writer in the Waterlines Project: Residenze letterarie e artistiche a Venezia.
Twice a year, in winter or spring and fall, Waterlines invites an internationally-known writer and an artist to take up residence in Venice for three or four weeks. While here, the writer and artist are encouraged and given the opportunity to engage with students at Ca' Foscari, local artists and writers, and with the general public in conversations or presentations open to all. The aim of the project, now completing its second year, is to "reaffirm the role of Venice as a place of artistic and cultural production (ribadire il ruolo di Venezia come luogo di produzione artistica e culturale )". To reaffirm it as a place in which art is still made, rather than simply shown.
Few writers seem better suited to last week's Incroci di Civilità (Crossroads of Civilization) Literary Festival than Maalouf, a Lebanese Christian whose mother tongue is (as he discusses in his non-fiction book On Identity) Arabic, the language of Islam, and who has written extensively in both fiction and non-fiction on the rich, complex cultural history of the Mediterranean. Not to mention the fact that his work as a young Arab-language journalist took him to more than 60 countries (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2002/malouf.interview). Yesterday, his conversation (in French and Italian) with Prof. Marie-Christine Jamet provided an excellent overview of his career, including his relationship with the three primary languages in his life (Arabic, French, and English), and the inspirations and aims of specific works, which have been translated into over 20 languages.
The Waterlines Project itself is an extremely interesting one, and gives visitors to Venice in the autumn and winter the chance to attend (at no cost) presentations by writers and artists of the high caliber typical of the annual Incroci di Civilità in the spring.
To find out more about the Waterlines Project, its past participants, and future programs visit: http://waterlinesproject.com/
Some of the still-arriving audience before the start of yesterday's Amin Maalouf event in the Aula Magna Silvio Trentin, whose walls and ceilings are frescoed in the style of Tiepolo and which once held ten historical canvases by Giambattsita Tiepolo that are now in the Hermitage Museum.
A poster-sized version of Venice recently created by my son's second grade class
The New Year holiday invites us to look backward at the past and forward to some projected future, like the Roman god Janus from which the month of January takes its name. In truth, I suppose most of us can't help but do this at all times anyway, even if we don't make a point of it, even if it's not one of the designated themes of our evening, as it may be on New Year's Eve.
Of course in Venice the past is always with us: you can quite literally trip over it, bump into it, and, in some rare architectural instances, be in danger of it falling on you. In fact, for some Italians (and not just Venetians) the very presence of the past in all its immense splendor becomes too much to bear.
A detail of the above poster
I used to know a native Florentine with a PhD in Italian Renaissance art who'd come to regard all the world-famous cultural treasures of his hometown with something like horror. They exerted an oppressive chill upon his attempts to establish his own life. So he fled to New York City and opened a contemporary art gallery in Chelsea. And though the art he showed there all hearkened back to the formal beauty of, say, Raphael rather than the conceptual aridity of Duchamp or the violence of Vienna Actionism, he used to talk about a chat he once had with Julia Roberts--and a parting kiss on the cheek she'd given him--as if it was worth more than everything Michelangelo had ever created.
In a similar vein, when Austrian forces dared to bomb Venice during World War I Italian Futurists were outraged, proclaiming that the foreigners were impinging upon the Italians' own right, privilege and necessity of destroying their own burdensome past.
Of course the relationship between the past, present, and future isn't a linear one, and doesn't simply go in one direction. Past events may (or may not) influence the present, but our present needs and wishes certainly seem to influence how we think of the past.* There are any number of versions of the past and the way anyone talks about his or her preferred one usually tells you at least as much about what they aim to accomplish in the present as it does about anything that happened in the past. Even in--or especially in--a historical place like Venice, in which the past seems so solid, it turns out to be no less malleable.
All of which is intended as something like an introduction to the short piece below from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver and published (in the US) by Harcourt, which deftly transforms the simple two-way interplay between past and present (a simple interplay that destinations like Venice trade on) into a dazzling (and dizzying) multiplicity of versions of what we tend to think of as one and the same place.
CITIES & MEMORY
In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits: admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old post cards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one's eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.
Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards don't depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.
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*The American novelist (and New Yorker editor) William Maxwell wrote, "in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw."
A view of the store, with the Scuola Grande dei Carmini at right
After 13 years of doing business just behind the pretty little church of San Giovanni Grisostomo, a short distance from the Rialto Bridge, Libreria Marco Polo inaugurated a second store last night, just opposite the Scuola Grande dei Carmini, and the turnout of supporters (as you can see in the images above and below) was impressive.
While the store behind San Giovanni has a large selection of used books in English, the new store looks to focus more on new books in Italian, including a good selection of children's books. The new space is beautiful, with mullioned windows, brick walls, a beam ceiling, and a raised floor that will keep the shelves well above the aqua alta that sometimes enters into the other location and necessitates the use of a pump.
Formerly an antique shop, and before that, a small neighborhood grocery, the space was in such good shape, according to Claudio Moretti, its proprietor, that he was able to sign a lease on the space on 4 September and have it ready to open last night, the 26th.
With its series of author appearances and discussions, various courses, and community-oriented events, Libreria Marco Polo plays an important role in the cultural, grassroots life of Venice and, as the turnout last night indicated, residents are enthused about the possibility of that role expanding. For anyone interested in a glimpse into local life, beyond the tourist trade--and in concretely supporting that life--either of the two stores is a good place to start.
