Venice Post Scripts

St Mark's. Especially because of the gold mosaics that cover its ceiling, the church is opulence and splendor. Any sense of mystery, however, came across fragmented, and then re-formed, and fragmented again with each moment, as masses of tourists moved through the aisles, elbowing, pausing to stare, shuffling along in baby steps, chattering about lunch and what to see next, and taking flash photographs, though they are forbidden. The mosaics, the architectural lines, the gold altar screen, the decorative stone inlay floors--we enjoyed St Mark's in spite of the manifold distractions. The Square, for some reason, was sadly lacking in pigeons, who normally make the area look like a carpet of bubbling, hopping feather balls and swarm on anyone holding food like fruit flies on an over-ripe pear.

Murano...jaded...a canal runs through it. The tiny island of Murano is nothing but glass factories and shops selling glassware. Perhaps because we came way at the end of the tourist season, many of the shopkeepers, like the glass-blowing expert who gave us a demonstration, seemed bored. Maybe they are always like that. After we alighted from the water bus, we walked along the edge of the island in the noon sun; the unusually warm day added to the feeling of torpor. Although my camera lens failed to capture the scene well, I took a picture of a dog lying in the sun next to a wall, happy with a long, bent stem of yellowed grass, eyes half shut, oblivious to passersby, simply focused on the repetitive motion of chewing on the blade. Just beyond the pup we saw a sign inviting visitors to watch a demonstration of glass blowing. The demonstration was in a deteriorating building that had a large doorway cut into it, above which was embedded an arch of colored glass bits, a jeweled tiara for the drab entry. Beyond the doorway were the glowing hot maws of two open kiln doors. Other tourists from the water bus had caught up with us; a young man, who identified himself as an apprentice glass-blower, ushered us to a small set of wooden bleachers. A middle-aged man, looking as if he had led a very sedentary life, walked out and picked up a 6'-long pipe, one end of which he repeatedly spun in a bucket of special sand and placed in the furnace until he had built up a wad of molten glass, like a big Q-Tip. He blew through one end of the pipe to create a large bubble, and, as the material grew cooler, he would put it back in the furnace, and then bring it out and work with it some more, sometimes blowing, sometimes using a crimping tool to cut and shape it. He never made eye contact with us and looked quite bored the whole time as he went through the process of making a vase and then a unicorn, looking for all the world like the dog outside chewing grass.

After the demonstration, we were ushered to the factory store--long clear-glass shelves, all quite brightly lit, showed off all manner of tableware, jewelry, lampshades, and multicolored glass objects such as clowns, cats, ducks, fish, cars, and...you name it. We strolled through the aisles as if we were at an art gallery, admiring the work but not at all tempted to buy any of it. We spent the next 2 hours strolling the Murano canal and visiting the other shops. The window displays were often stunning; unfortunately, so were the prices, and we had little space to pack anything home in any case. Eventually, we also got jaded. Going in and out of the shops became our blade of grass.

How to tell when you are being treated like an American--I. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain writes of Mr Bixby, the steam boat pilot who trained Twain himself to be a pilot. Twain describes Bixby as having a temper like a pot of water on a stove. When he would notice a mistake, Bixby would simmer and from moment to moment boil over, rattling the pot lid and sending up expletives like clouds of steam as overflowing water hit the hot metal surface. We found Mr Bixby's descendants had made their way to Austria, and one of them was wearing the uniform of a train conductor. When we left the bus in Villach and boarded the train for Vienna, we were relaxed and relieved to be on the final leg of our trip, and on schedule. And then the conductor approached. He was imposing--a tall man whose red cheeks suggested the simmering choler within, and whose girth suggested he had devoured many a passenger. Linda handed him our last ticket, this for the fourth leg of our trip, and we could see a growl of impatience making his little red mustache twitch. Then he angrily exclaimed that it was not a ticket. "WHERE is the ticket?!" I saw my beloved's pupils enlarge. Every head in the car turned to witness the dramatic discovery of two people trying to thieve a ride from Austrian Rail. With the three of us mixing German and English--all quite loud--we asked for time to dig out the three portions of our ticket that we had already used, in the hope that he would believe the accumulated paper proved we had paid our fare. He announced to all the car that he would be back. Linda scrambled hurriedly through a piece of luggage and produced the other three portions of our ticket, which we handed (submitted?) to the conductor moments later. He agreed that we had paid. He looked disappointed. All our other interactions with Austrian Rail personnel transpired with them showing kindness and helpfulness.

How to tell when you are being treated like an American--II. Although we did very well, on the whole, with our dining out in Venice, one evening we tried another of the restaurants recommended by our B&B: La Mura. Unlike the other establishments we had visited, which had more the feel of neighborhood clientele and long years in the local business, La Mura looked sleek and new, with large plate-glass windows and much chrome and brass; the others had been small, with worn wooden floors, dark paneling, and wooden tables and chairs that had seen a lot of service. The prices at La Mura were about 25 percent higher than at the other restaurants we had visited. The house wine tasted thin, as if it had been watered. Linda and I each opted for a pizza, those being more modestly overpriced than the other entrees. The pizza was okay--unremarkable, but no complaints. Then the waitress pressed a particular dessert choice on us: homemade apple strudel topped with cream. I chose it, though Linda opted for another item. When my dessert arrived, its pastry crust was cool and leathery, and its interior was bubbling hot; it had obviously been microwaved, and microwaved too long. I doubt it had been fatto a casa, and I suspect it had seen more than one sunrise. Just before it was brought to our table, I had noticed two waitresses at a side counter hovering over a plate (which they soon served to me). One had a can of Redi-Whip (or the European equivalent) and had no idea how to use it, since, I presume, they normally serve real whipped cream. She and her colleague took turns shaking the can, looked at it quizzically, turned it upside-down and sideways and upside-down again, shook it again, twisted the top, and then finally figured out that they had to bend the nozzle to dispense the white chemical froth. When they saw it come out, they looked delighted, with big smiles and little squeals--as if they were having an erotic experience. I have not determined whether the chemical substitute was made purely out of cheapness or whether they thought that they were doing me a favor, believing Americans were likely to prefer the ersatz version to the real thing.

Water World: Trip to Venice

Yesterday we visited the Belvedere Palace in Vienna to see, among other things, the collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt. "The Kiss" is gloriously bright, in oil and gold and silver leaf. The embracing figures first appear as a unified mass of gold, and then the woman's face and the man's head become discernible, and then the figures are finally apparent: a man's face over the woman's, kissing, their robes blending them into a single form before the eye can sort them out. Awesome. Truly. On Sunday we returned from Venice. The canals, the boats, the bright lights, the rows of buildings, the streams of humanity, and the sky--all blend into one wonderful form before the eye begins to sort them out. Awesome. Truly.

How nice it was to be back in the land of good bread, good wine, good sauces, good...all food. Venice, unfortunately, is known for its mediocre (by Italian standards) and expensive restaurants. The B&B we stayed at gave us recommendations to five local restaurants, and we tried three of them. Only one was disappointing, with thin house wine and microwaved desserts; the best, a hostaria, had a fine house red and pasta as good as what we normally found in Rome. I still remember with fondness the lasagne stuffed with cheese and shrimp. Details--a few, at least--will be in a subsequent post. And, because I am overwhelmed at the thought of recounting our visits to St Mark's and the other prominent sites of the city, I will just offer a few accounts (for my dear friend and reader Joyce, vinaigrettes) of some of what shaped our experience of the visit.

Getting to Venice

The Austrian rail system--efficiency in motion--took us through landscape that could not be in greater contrast to the cityscape of our destination. Last Wednesday morning we rolled out of bed early and caught the 7 a.m., #38 tram. After one more city transit connection, we were at Meidling Station, where we joined schools of morning commuters swimming through turnstiles and up and down stairs and escalators; finally we emerged on the platform near our track, and then onto the train--which departed on the minute--on our way across Austria. Four hours later, at the town of Villach, we boarded a large, comfortable bus for the remaining 3 hours of the trip. Although we could have taken the night train directly to Venice and dispensed with the bus leg, we opted for the daytime travel in order to see the countryside: snow-edged gray crags and ridges, dark fir and pine trees mixed with yellow-leaved birches, steep and stark rock mountainsides, waterfalls, mountain streams colored pale jade and cream from the calcium they carried, farms, well-balanced cows on sharply sloping meadows, and villages with spiked church steeples and orange-roofed houses. We crossed the border into Italy without slowing down. Once we reached the industrial city of Udine, the vista turned to unrelenting flat and farms--all looking very much like lakebed.

After crossing a long causeway, we arrived on the edge of Venice at Piazzale di Roma, a euphemism for acres of buses--private tour buses by the score, double-decked and with bright lettering, and dozens more local buses, yellow and arrayed in parallel slanted parking lanes, and others lumbering and grunting their way in and out of the lot, puffing black diesel smoke. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and pale yellow-orange street lights were beginning to come on around the square in the deepening gray. We collected our bags and headed past a dozen dirty, tumble-down kiosks with suspended naked, bright lightbulbs illuminating t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, glass pendants and dishes, and other small, junky curios, over a pedestrian bridge and to the edge of the Grand Canal. Although it had been more than 7 years since I was in Venice, the city still filled me with wonder. At first sight it magically rises out of the water to be embraced and wrapped by the sky, like the robe on a Klimt figure. As we waited for the water-bus, the lilting motion of the floating pier that we stood on might have enhanced the magic, though that dissipated as a jam of tourists awkwardly wielding suitcases pushed and elbowed to improve their position for boarding.

After a 10-minute ride on a very crowded water-bus, we disembarked at San Silvestro, a small stop with little to recommend it but deteriorating, ancient brick walls and a mysterious alleyway leading into a dark stone tunnel. We leaned our bags and our tired selves against one of the walls and called the B&B where we had reservations. Its practice, fortunately, is to send someone to greet guests at the water-bus stop and lead them to the establishment; there is no way, otherwise, that anyone unfamiliar with the neighborhood could find it. Ten minutes after our call, Mario, proprietor of the B&B, emerged from the tunnel, shook our hands, took Linda's bag, and led us through dark alleys, over small, arched stone bridges that spanned rios, or narrow canals, and around blind corners, until we reached our residence for the next four nights.

La Bella Citta

I have usually found only in natural scenery the enjoyment I find in Venice. For me, much of what makes the city inviting to the eye is not just the variety and manifest age of the structures but the color and motion of the crowds: the lights from boats and restaurants and shops ripple over the water, and the great numbers of people are in motion day and night, gliding like watercraft, on and over the bridges, looking in shop windows, working their way on the walks to St Mark's, to the Doge's Palace, to the Accademia, to the Rialto, to the restaurants and hotels and stores.

Venice at Night

Friday night, from the Rialto bridge--itself lined with shops--we eyed the brightly lit restaurants with outdoor tables stretching along the sides of the Grand Canal, and the dozens of kiosks and shops that illuminated gold and silver masks and Murano glass, the crystal clear and the brightly colored. The bridge was lined as well with tourists looking out on the Canal and the city, and sporadic camera flashes from the bridge returned the camera flashes from the gondolas and water buses that passed below. We left this vibrant scene for a long walk to locate the Accademia, the city's main gallery, which we planned to visit on Saturday morning. Having found our destination, we headed back--we thought--toward the Rialto on the opposite side of the Canal, the area through which we had just come. Venice is small, and I did not think it was possible to get lost for very long, but we soon began to feel that we were in a gondola without an oar; we kept turning toward what we thought was the direction of the Grand Canal, but the concrete walks grew darker and darker, and soon we saw nothing but huge apartment blocks, no people, no shops, no lights except dim ones behind window shades and shutters. We finally came across a tiny grocery with a light on, and a very kind clerk pointed the way to us--the opposite of the way we were headed--and perhaps 4 miles later, winding back to the Canal and then along well-lit walks to the Rialto and beyond, we were back at our B&B.

Churches. Unlike in Rome and much of the rest of Italy, the churches of northern Italy (and Austria, for that matter) are for the most part marked by spires and spikes, not by domes, and seem more masculine than Rome's churches, more, perhaps, like the military fortress Luther may have had in mind when he wrote his best-known hymn. Venice is no exception. There is less emphasis on the Virgin and the Santo Bambino, and more on male saints. At night the churches of Venice (though I exclude St Mark's from my observations since I was not in it after dark) are cold places. Each that we went in lost its warmth and richness in the shadows. Each was illuminated by two or three bright spotlights, usually placed high on the nave walls; they created blindness, deepening the dark areas with shadows whose edges were as sharp as the weapons of the Crusaders who stole back the body of Santa Lucia and the bronze horses and the relics of St Mark variously from Constantinople and Cairo.

In the early evening, the churches provide, by their very presence, an important social service: they are built with facing piazzas, designed so that crowds could congregate. These stone squares--there is very little green to be seen in the city--provide much-needed play space for children. During the late afternoon hours, we saw skate-boards and soccer games underway. In one piazza not far from our B&B, there was but one tree, and nearly all its yellow leaves had fallen from its branches to the stone below. In that square, children would play not just through the hours of dusk but well into the dark, kicking a soccer ball around until its white shape was only a rolling shadow. We saw no playgrounds. As in Rome, the land is, I presume, just too expensive to turn over to children.

Venice in the Morning

Each morning as we left the B&B, the odor of sewer gas assaulted us. Mario, the proprietor, told us that sewage washes into the canals after each high tide because some building owners have failed to install appropriate valves and sewerage pipes. When he was a child, he said, the water was blue, and he and his friends could swim in the canals. It was expensive for him, he said, to bring his building up to code, and it is a law that irresponsible homeowners can evade relatively easily. Effluent from their structures turns some of the canals green for much of the day, and the smell lingers into the early afternoon. The gewgaw sheds, the t-shirt kiosks, the glass and mask and candy shops do not begin to waken until 9:30 a.m. at the earliest, when the rising metal shutters send clattering echoes through the narrow stone streets.

Venice Immersed

"Acqua alta"--high water--tends to wash over much of St Mark's Square at high tide, and occasionally the water becomes an inch or more deep in the church itself. The two mornings we visited that area, large puddles would have washed the feet of pilgrims as they entered the narthex but for the raised platform walks that were erected in the trouble spots. As the buildings, walks, bridges, and canals of Venice may eventually give way to rising waters, its skilled artisans and its dialect are also slowly disappearing. On the nearby island of Burano, a once thriving lace-making industry has been wholly replaced by products from China. The glass-blowers of Murano are threatened as well. Throughout the city are glassware shops proclaiming "50% off!" Two shopkeepers told us, as did our B&B host, that those are the shops selling fake Murano wares from China, and signs in many store windows in Venice protest the theft of the local artisans' reputation and livelihood. The language, too, is being immersed in standard Italian. Mario at the B&B and our tour guide at the Doge's Palace both mentioned that the Venetian dialect is eroding quickly. Children from Venice's schools have difficulty when they get to Italy's universities because they cannot distinguish certain phonemes, such as double consonants, and their spelling and other features of standard Italian literacy are also affected.

Getting Home

Throughout the city maze of narrow, often dead-end streets and alleys, yellow and black metal signs affixed high on intersection walls point the way to one or more popular destinations--the train station, Piazzale di Roma, the Rialto bridge, St Mark's. Sometimes, however, the signs are ambiguous or missing. Sunday morning we chose to walk to the train station--having done more than one reconnaissance trip to it already--rather than rely on the water-bus. After losing our way a few times--only briefly each time--we made it to Piazzale di Roma and sat on a stone wall until the bus showed up. And it did. And so did the Villach-Vienna train. The trip home went off on schedule. More details in a subsequent post.

Filler

-- Each time we went to and from our B&B, we passed a small restaurant that had sloppy, hand-lettered sheets of paper in clear plastic envelopes posted next to the door, saying that any question about how to get to the Rialto or the train station would be answered for 2.50 euros (about $3.75). Another hand-lettered sheet said that the business of the establishment was not about giving out information and not to bother them with questions.

-- One early morning in Venice, in a narrow stone passage, we passed a very old man with a tall walking cane cuffed around his right forearm. He was walking a small dog, a terrier mix with long white fur with brown patches, high furry ears, and an erect fluffy tail. The man's right leg was severely bent, and it swayed in almost enough to touch his left shoe as he stepped, his effort made all the more difficult by having to manage his dog on its leash. The dog, clearly eager to investigate each scent as they moved along, paused every couple of seconds to look back at the man's face and gauge his motion, never stretching the leash taut.

-- Sam the Pet-Sitter was recommended to us by others here at the Embassy. Sam told me he is an American Indian who was born in Montana and adopted as an infant from an orphanage by a Greek Jewish couple, who soon moved with him to Mexico. He has lived in many places since, including Israel, and has been in Vienna for 6 years. Sam said he is fluent in English, German, Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. He is middle-aged, about 5'5", with a barrel chest and a thick gray head of hair that falls over his red-brown face. Over multiple layers of thin, long-sleeved t-shirts, on that chilly day, Sam wore a short-sleeved t-shirt with Israel Defense Forces emblazoned on it. Sam pet-sits for a living. He seems exceptionally humble and deferential. When he came to pick up the key, he entered our apartment slowly and tentatively, as Earl and Walter approached, tails erect in greeting. Sam looked at the cats as I would expect of someone who loved animals, with eyes of warmth and an invitation to friendship. We entrusted our key to him. When we came home, all was in perfect order. Sam came the day after we were back to collect his pay and return our key. When I paid him, he seemed embarrassed to take the money. He never looked at the cash I handed him; as he looked at the floor, he folded the bills into a small square and put them in his pocket. He told me he wanted to leave Austria 2 years ago, but he is still here. I gathered that he likes best caring for the pets that were adopted from shelters. He loves Israel...a country for many who were once homeless.