On Not Having Visited Venice

[poliphilo]

No, I've never been to Venice....

 

Nor do I want to go....

 

Big cities can absorb the tourists they draw, as can smaller places that pull in people with a particular interest in whatever it is they have to offer, but Venice is a small city and the big boats come in and dwarf the buildings and send shock waves through the canals and the people they disgorge fill all the public spaces and the locals hide from them on the back canals and cheep and mutter or-if they're involved in the tourist trade- put on a smiling mask....

 

No, I don't ever want to visit any place where I don't feel I'm welcome.

 

Besides, in a sense I have already been there- and am very well acquainted with a Venice of the imagination- the city of any number of poets and painters who themselves may or may not have set foot there....

 

"Once she did hold the gorgeous East in fee...."

 

The Venice of the imagination is, oddly enough, not the Venice of the Golden Age- when she was a trading power, a great maritime nation- and produced world-shaping artists- Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto- but the Venice of the deliquescence- the decadent, 18th century city of mountebanks and spies and courtesans- the city of Casanova and Cagliostro- with the lumps dropping off the gilded plaster ceilings and the great frescos glazing over with damp- and its beautiful outsides being painted by Canaletto and Guardi and its trivial social life being painted by the that odd little artist, Pietro Longhi, with his masked doll-like figures and his dodgy sense of perspective.

 

That city, that city that may never actually have existed, I can visit any time I want. All I have to do is turn inward and I'm there.....

Comments

[cmcmck]

I've never been to Venice ot Florence for all our time spent in Italy and for much the same reasons.

[poliphilo]

I visited Florence. This was back in the 80s. I'm glad I did. But it wasn't a peak experience- apart, that is, from stumbling across the Masaccio frescos in Santa Maria del Carmine....

[mallorys_camera]

I wouldn't go back to Venice now, but I'm very happy to have visited in the 70s & 80s. You think you're gonna know what it's like because it must be the most painted city ever. But when you get there, it is so much more than you imagined.

I have a rather large collection of Venetian masks. 😀

[poliphilo]

I love Venetian masks.....