gnimmel (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gnimmel) wrote,@ 2006-03-18 16:48:00 |
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The Most Serene Republic
They say that when you drown, you surface twice before the water drags you down for ever. This thought remained stuck at the corners of my mind as we walked around a gloomy, rain-wet Venice after nightfall; not because I thought that I might fall into the lagoon, but because the very city itself seemed to have lately risen from under the water, and might sink back at any moment. Come darkness, the backstreets, squares and passageways of Venice are deserted. There are no cars for miles, of course; and the footfalls of those few travellers still out in the maze of streets and canals fall quietly. So you turn a corner or two, you stop at the old well, and the only noise is the soughing of the wind and the gentle lap of water. And everything is wet. Once, finding our way around by the Arsenale, we came upon a small courtyard in which the only sounds audible were the padding feet of a stray dog, nosing around for food. And I thought, what if the city really is drowning and coming up for air, and the only beings here are us and the dog? and What the dog could tell us, if it could talk! How did it survive? And I shuddered a little, and we went on our way, and eventually we came to a square where some people were drinking at a bar and the vision passed away.
This is the thing about Venice, though; as soon as it is night, you are never very far away from that image of the lonely, sinking city making its final descent into the waters.
Of course, it's not entirely my imagination: the city really has been sinking, and the sea level is rising to meet it. Many of the ground floors of the city are below the surface of the lagoon now. The famed Piazza San Marco is frequently underwater: there is a system of raised walkways, barricades across shop doorways and alarm bells to deal with it. It makes me wonder if the shiny, masked jewel-bright facade of the place by day is a mirage, and if the real Venice only becomes visible at night. And it occurs to me too that there is another legend; that one may preserve one's life indefinitely by certain magics in which one removes one's heart and hides it in a place where it might never be found. Now, Venice displays itself in glass to the adoring tourists in their thousands: take some home today! and woos them with glass sweets on glass plates, glass baubles, glass roses. At the edge of Murano there is a shrine to a glass Madonna. So I think Venice's heart would be made of glass, a bright, fragile thing like a Chihuly chandelier in many colours, and it would flow with the glass-green waters of the lagoon. As to where it might be buried: who knows? That is part of the mystery. We spent our days there looking for things. There is hardly a spot in the place that isn't imbued with some sort of significance. It is a small group of islands after all, and its glorious heyday lasted a thousand years. Here we found a statue with a metal nose, said to be a merchant who tried to cheat an old lady and was turned to stone. There we sat on the steps which are said to be haunted by the ghost of a mad Turk who fell down them to his death in fright after he had ripped out his mother's heart and it spoke to him. We didn't hear a heartbeat in any of the silences we passed through, but then again perhaps it is buried deep.
I could hazard a date upon which this bargain took place, though. Venice was conquered by Napoleon in 1797 after some thousand years of independence, falling after that date into indolent disrepair. On our last day there we followed a map deep into Dorsoduro where, the book informed us, lay a small, rather intimidating shop which had, among other things, made the Carnevale masks for Eyes Wide Shut. This shop proudly proclaimed its date of formation: 1984. I was surprised: Carnevale, after all, is a tradition dating back over seven hundred years, and sometimes masks were worn for much of the rest of the year as well. The thing is, after 1797 it stopped. After 1797 the city was a hollow trophy, passed from country to country, held up mainly in these later years by tourism. It is only recently that Carnevale has begun once again, and this time it is not the giddy day-of-misrule attractions of abandoning your identity for a time that drive it; these days, Carnevale exists because it is (I imagine) extraordinarily lucrative. This is the flipside of the modern-day city: a greedy place with few true residents, displaying a painted smile as it slips you a further surcharge. A city which buried its heart, desperately, frantically, before it lost its independence? Perhaps.
At midnight on the first day, having consumed for sustenance a black risotto of seafood and squid ink, we wandered through San Polo in the rain. After many wrong turns and many paths ending suddenly at water, we found ourselves at the Ponte Delle Tette: that is to say, the bridge of tits. In the 15th century, concerned that the gentlemen of Venice had become a little too fond of sodomy, the city fathers decreed that the prostitutes of this area should lounge about bare-breasted in the windows nearby in the hope of tempting wayward men back down the path of the cunt.
And now? The windows are shuttered, the streets are empty. And the only sound at night is the lapping of water and the gentle fall of rain.
They say that when you drown, you surface twice before the water drags you down for ever. This thought remained stuck at the corners of my mind as we walked around a gloomy, rain-wet Venice after nightfall; not because I thought that I might fall into the lagoon, but because the very city itself seemed to have lately risen from under the water, and might sink back at any moment. Come darkness, the backstreets, squares and passageways of Venice are deserted. There are no cars for miles, of course; and the footfalls of those few travellers still out in the maze of streets and canals fall quietly. So you turn a corner or two, you stop at the old well, and the only noise is the soughing of the wind and the gentle lap of water. And everything is wet. Once, finding our way around by the Arsenale, we came upon a small courtyard in which the only sounds audible were the padding feet of a stray dog, nosing around for food. And I thought, what if the city really is drowning and coming up for air, and the only beings here are us and the dog? and What the dog could tell us, if it could talk! How did it survive? And I shuddered a little, and we went on our way, and eventually we came to a square where some people were drinking at a bar and the vision passed away.
This is the thing about Venice, though; as soon as it is night, you are never very far away from that image of the lonely, sinking city making its final descent into the waters.
Of course, it's not entirely my imagination: the city really has been sinking, and the sea level is rising to meet it. Many of the ground floors of the city are below the surface of the lagoon now. The famed Piazza San Marco is frequently underwater: there is a system of raised walkways, barricades across shop doorways and alarm bells to deal with it. It makes me wonder if the shiny, masked jewel-bright facade of the place by day is a mirage, and if the real Venice only becomes visible at night. And it occurs to me too that there is another legend; that one may preserve one's life indefinitely by certain magics in which one removes one's heart and hides it in a place where it might never be found. Now, Venice displays itself in glass to the adoring tourists in their thousands: take some home today! and woos them with glass sweets on glass plates, glass baubles, glass roses. At the edge of Murano there is a shrine to a glass Madonna. So I think Venice's heart would be made of glass, a bright, fragile thing like a Chihuly chandelier in many colours, and it would flow with the glass-green waters of the lagoon. As to where it might be buried: who knows? That is part of the mystery. We spent our days there looking for things. There is hardly a spot in the place that isn't imbued with some sort of significance. It is a small group of islands after all, and its glorious heyday lasted a thousand years. Here we found a statue with a metal nose, said to be a merchant who tried to cheat an old lady and was turned to stone. There we sat on the steps which are said to be haunted by the ghost of a mad Turk who fell down them to his death in fright after he had ripped out his mother's heart and it spoke to him. We didn't hear a heartbeat in any of the silences we passed through, but then again perhaps it is buried deep.
I could hazard a date upon which this bargain took place, though. Venice was conquered by Napoleon in 1797 after some thousand years of independence, falling after that date into indolent disrepair. On our last day there we followed a map deep into Dorsoduro where, the book informed us, lay a small, rather intimidating shop which had, among other things, made the Carnevale masks for Eyes Wide Shut. This shop proudly proclaimed its date of formation: 1984. I was surprised: Carnevale, after all, is a tradition dating back over seven hundred years, and sometimes masks were worn for much of the rest of the year as well. The thing is, after 1797 it stopped. After 1797 the city was a hollow trophy, passed from country to country, held up mainly in these later years by tourism. It is only recently that Carnevale has begun once again, and this time it is not the giddy day-of-misrule attractions of abandoning your identity for a time that drive it; these days, Carnevale exists because it is (I imagine) extraordinarily lucrative. This is the flipside of the modern-day city: a greedy place with few true residents, displaying a painted smile as it slips you a further surcharge. A city which buried its heart, desperately, frantically, before it lost its independence? Perhaps.
At midnight on the first day, having consumed for sustenance a black risotto of seafood and squid ink, we wandered through San Polo in the rain. After many wrong turns and many paths ending suddenly at water, we found ourselves at the Ponte Delle Tette: that is to say, the bridge of tits. In the 15th century, concerned that the gentlemen of Venice had become a little too fond of sodomy, the city fathers decreed that the prostitutes of this area should lounge about bare-breasted in the windows nearby in the hope of tempting wayward men back down the path of the cunt.
And now? The windows are shuttered, the streets are empty. And the only sound at night is the lapping of water and the gentle fall of rain.
