Reflections of Venice 3

There are churches galore which, according to the tourist guide, all contain ‘important works’. We pass their façades, either as we sweep by on the water or as we walk through the web of waterways. The only one we enter, Chiesa della Pietá has an exhibition of violins and related woodwind instruments on account of Vivaldi being one of Venice’s favourite sons.

Other notable Venetians include Cassanova and Marco Polo – men of exploration and swagger; hedonistic rather than scholarly. I can’t imagine Leonardo da Vinci sitting down to his inventive drawings here. He would have been out partying in the streets, drinking and revelling, hiding behind a mask and not taking responsibility for his actions.

All is pretence in Venice, and not just the multitude of Carnivale masks. There are a couple of stone lions still in the city – the statues look friendly, but you used to be able to denounce someone by writing their name on a piece of paper and placing it in the lion’s mouth – the ensuing events were then far from friendly. I want to see these lions but we don’t seem to go their way.

The Venice Lion (St Mark’s symbol) is everywhere; in paintings and sculptures, carved on the side of buildings or stood atop pedestals – he is winged so could take off at any moment. I suspect those wings are clipped and his majesty is fading, otherwise I doubt he would remain here, and he looks sad rather than proud.

The Romanesque-Byzantine style of Saint Mark’s Basilica seems ostentatious with its gilt mosaics and five cupolas; its splendid marbles and gilded copper horses. The adjacent campanile was once a lighthouse although no longer, and the practical purpose of guiding ships into the harbour seems far preferable to me than a repository for a dead man’s bones.

The Torre dell’Orologio is something special with its blue and enamel face with zodiacal depictions to indicate the phases of the moon and its sundial and hands for pointing out the time rather more prosaically. It is familiar from having a baddie thrown through it by Bond in Moonraker and has pieced itself back together very nicely indeed.

Many of Venice’s treasure were hidden or removed when the Germans occupied the city during the war – the Venetians had learned their lesson from Napoleon’s previous plundering. Rooms were sealed up and ornate painted ceilings covered with tar to prevent the invading army from enjoying the gaze of cherubs – which might actually have put them off. But the Germans, with their love of art and fine things, did not destroy Venice; it remained intact throughout the war.

Long before the Germans’ arrival, however, there were specific areas for segregating the Jewish community. In 1516 the Ghetto was instituted by the Venetian republic as a compulsory place of residence for Jews. The word itself originates from Venice, being a contortion of the word ‘geto’, meaning to throw or cast as the foundries were located here in early times. There is an air of money-making with unfavourable connotations, which Shakespeare picked up in The Merchant of Venice.

But despite all this, I still like the place. I like the bustling market around the Ponte di Rialto; I like the occasional peaceful canals (literally backwaters) with the reflections of light from the water dancing on the brickwork.

I like drinking a glass of prosecco; the bubbles even eliciting laughter from a jolly gondolier who has popped into the bar for a break, his boater askew. I like watching the gondoliers negotiating the waterways and jostling for position outside the hotels, hitching their gondolas to the palina (the coloured striped pole painted in the noble family’s colours) while casually smoking cigarettes or chatting on cell phones.

And I like standing on the bridge, leaning on the balustrade and watching the lights of the shops and restaurants winking on in the dark; their reflection broken only by the watercraft that still plough up and down the canals with red and green lights hung for navigation.

Reflections of Venice 2

Time flies when you’re wandering about and we run out of it, so don’t get to go to Murano. I buy some of the glass jewellery on the main island. The shopkeeper is furious that we want to pay by credit card and he snaps at us and throws the card on the counter, but of course he takes our money.

It becomes apparent that nothing in Venice is for free. Every other place we have visited has offered a map to find your way around and a brochure with sights highlighted – not Venice. When we see a drinking tap we hurriedly fill our water bottles, glancing around to check we will not be fleeced of our Euros or arrested.

There is a clear attitude that your money is welcome but you are an inconvenience, and hardly anyone smiles. Him Outdoors remarks that it seems like a theme park and I guess it does, visited each year by more than 12 million tourists.

The shops all sell glass, lace and masks to tourists (my favourite is the one with the hooked nose which is the Black Death Doctor; the beak was filled with medicinal herbs and essences to disinfect the air and protect the doctor from contagion during outbreaks of the Black Death).

Everything is retail and ‘hospitality’ – I use the term loosely. Venice used to be a hive of ship-building, fishing and trading, but now there is no discernible genuine industry save the men who make the gondolas (with wood from the Cadore region) but there are only a handful of them, and they exist to service the tourist trade also.

We visit the squero, the boatyard in which the gondolas are made. Only three or four are made each year to exact specifications – strong, fast and black. The laws concerning their build were ordained in the sixteenth century. They are 11 metres long, made of 280 pieces of wood, and coated with seven layers of water-proof paint. They are deliberately lopsided to counter the weight of the one-oared rower at the stern.

I like the boats – from the big noisy vaporetto to the silent (unless you get a gondolier who fancies himself as a singer) gondolas. Police boats cruise the canals and the bright red fireboats wait at the Ca’ Foscari ready to rush to emergencies.

It seems incongruous that a city built on water should have problems with fire, but most of the buildings are made of wood and highly flammable, so there are many fires – such as the inferno that destroyed La Fenice in 1996. I even love the private motorboats that drift about waiting to get to open water so they can open throttle.


But if Venice weren’t built on water, would anyone come? Would it be any different from any other town? There are Save Venice funds and campaigns to which people (mainly Americans) give money to restore artworks, buildings and churches, hoping to prevent bits falling off or entire edifices crumbling and collapsing into the lagoon.

So should we save it or not? I suppose the argument is similar with the Elgin Marbles or shrunken heads – if the natives aren’t going to look after them, then we should preserve them for the future. But isn’t this patronising? Should we let nature take its course, Ozymandias-style, and destroy things if need be? Aren’t there people in poverty who deserve our attention over artefacts?

If Venice is sinking, it is because she always has been. She is built on stilts submerged in the muck of the water – the caranto formed by alternate layers of sand and clay – which slowly subside with the inevitable passage of time. What would Darwin make of our attempts to maintain this patently inapt and inadaptable regime – is it like saving the Kiwi?

So yes, it is like a theme park, and it’s full of tourists and advertising hoardings – you can’t even see the Bridge of Sighs because the iconic structure has been prostituted to the marketing dollar.