Farce and Tragedy

If Venice's leaders have their way you'll see less of the above in Piazza San Marco, and more everywhere else in the city and the lagoon

History repeats itself--Marx famously claimed in his essay "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon"--"first as tragedy, then as farce."

Well, maybe in the 19th and 20th centuries. But these days it dismays me no end that both Venice, in which I've lived for six years, and America, my native land, seem so determined to invert and abbreviate Marx's old temporal two step. In Venice, and in Trump's America, decisions of great historical import appear first as outright farce, before flowering into full tragedy.

In both places the would-be satirist, no matter how clever and keen his or her sense of the absurd may be, is forever being trumped by policy makers, pursuing their disastrous follies (or crimes) in all earnestness.

In Venice, for example, the novelist, essayist and literary critic Gregory Dowling, author of a number of well-regarded novels (including this new historical one set in Venice on my To-Read list), and a resident of the city for over a quarter of a century, recently posted an account on his blog of "the gleaming new turnstiles installed at the entrances to St Mark's Square", complete with a very convincing photo of these turnstiles in the archway beneath the clock tower.

Though the post appeared on April 1, it was so well done that a number of people took the account and the photo-shopped image to be true.

But, really, an entrance fee into St Mark's? Who would take such a ridiculous idea seriously?

Well, last week, we received an answer: those sagacious folks in charge of governing the city, that's who.

Response to this new plan was swift. With one writer, Jackie Bryant, declaring "Why I'll Boycott Venice If It Charges Entry", and two others coming out in favor of the idea or similar ideas ("Why Venice Needs to Charge Entry" and "Do We Love Italy Too Much?").

Each writer makes interesting points. Each, I think, misses the single most important problem with charging an entrance fee to Piazza San Marco: It is a solution to an imaginary, or at least a secondary, problem.

Are there too many people in Piazza San Marco? Yes, sometimes there are. And on holidays or during special events the overcrowding in and around the Piazza can be so extreme as to be a public health hazard, with a real threat of deadly stampedes in the case of a panic of some kind.

But the cherished response of people like Mayor Brugnaro to such concerns about dangerous overcrowding in the historic center--their fond fantasy of spreading ever-growing crowds into less trafficked areas of town and out into the lagoon--strikes me as disingenuous if not plain cynical.

Studies have been done on the maximum number of people the city can tolerate on any given day without having its very fabric compromised, and these numbers, no more than the city or lagoon itself, are not infinitely elastic (see Chapter 3, for example, of The Venice Report, Cambridge University Press, 2009).

But a belief in such infinite elasticity is exactly what underlies the main "solution" that Brugnaro is trying to fob off on UNESCO as a serious response to that organization's concerns about the physical, environmental, social, and cultural destruction of the city and its lagoon.

An entrance fee to Piazza San Marco strikes me as a diversionary solution. One whose function is to contain the debate, providing a nicely circumscribed little topic to heatedly argue about, while the larger issue, the real issue, about the proposed exploitation of potentially every meter of the city and the lagoon remains in the shadows--where such proposals can be carried forward without international interference, or even awareness.

And, despite the best intentions of the three writers on the entrance fee proposal cited above, this diversionary solution seems, thus far, to be working rather well. Commentators are taking the most impassioned stances in regard to one or two trees--arguing in the terms set out for them by those with clear economic interests in mind--while all around them, unnoticed, the rest of the forest is brought under the ax.

A Backward Glance

In the image above a gondoliere deftly backs his boat one-handed down Rio de San Barnaba in the direction of the Grand Canal. This area is perhaps most famous these days as the setting for the Katharine Hepburn film Summertime. The little antique shop owned by her love interest in the film is now a toy shop, worth checking out, and Rio de San Barnaba itself is the canal into which she takes a memorable pratfall--from which she emerged in real life with an eye infection that would bother her for the rest of her long life.

As the weather warms and some few tourists begin to treat the historic center as though it's Cabo San Lucas (yesterday I had my first sighting of the season of an undressed couple with two large bottles of beer reclining alongside the Grand Canal on the pavement of Campo San Samuele as if it were a beach), I only wish more of them knew of the possible ill effects of going for a swim in the open sewage system that is the city's canals.

The 57th Venice Biennale Prepares for Launch

I must admit that my first sight of the ongoing installation alongside the Grand Canal in Campo San Vio of what I've since learned is a 66-foot-tall gold tower created by the artist James Lee Byars (1932-1997) made me think not of art at all, but of my first visit to Europe (and Venice) as a teenager in 1982, as then President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev tussled over the deployment of nuclear missiles located in, or directed at, Europe.

I couldn't help but think that if the economic and sexual Predator-in-Chief currently occupying the White House reached an agreement with Venice's similarly self-promoting non-resident mayor to deploy an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile or two in the historic center they'd both be inclined for them to have the kind of bling factor evident in the image above.

Once the scaffolding has been removed, however, I trust that Byar's The Golden Tower will come into its own as art, installed in a public space (as per the artist's original hopes) for the first time since its creation in 1990. It's one of the many official "Collateral Events" of this edition of the Venice Biennale.

The 57th Biennale itself opens to the public on 13 May (with previews beginning on the 10th) and runs through 26 November 2017.

Man's Best Comrade, This Afternoon

Il Sorpasso

The Distinctive Pleasures of The Venetian Game

photo credit: Louise Stockfeld

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.

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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.  

Stage Set Venice

A section of the Grand Canal near the Rialto is lit up for a film shoot on 18 April.