Venezia

June 4th
Well, Venice is not exactly as I remember it. True, it is still the city where the boat trumps the car and walking is the easiest way to get anywhere. It is also still true that the place is a giant maze of shops and cafes, with piazzas scattered about at random, where no one knows exactly where they are going, but they pick a general direction to hopefully make it to Saint Mark’s before everything closes. I do not, however, remember all of the graffiti. I will accept both that graffiti will occur in alleyways, and that much of Venice is an alleyway. However, the extent of it, on the Grand Canal, and everywhere on almost every building makes the place look more like Venice California than Venice Italy.

Most of it was not even good graffiti, where one must draw the line between what is art and what is vandalism. Most of it was words; spray painted on without a stencil, or pictures done with the most rudimentary of stencils. There was no Banksy, few clever slogans, and almost nothing that did not look like a mess that someone was neglecting to clean up. There had apparently been a rally of some kind; either it was a bunch of left wing nut jobs, or it was a counter protest to a bunch of right wing nut jobs, but all over the city someone had sprayed “No Nazi” in red paint. Because acts of vandalism on buildings that are older than Nazis is really going to show the city who is boss.

June 5th
Apparently, there has been an earthquake that I did not hear about. A fair portion of the buildings are in some state of reconstruction, with tarps draped over their facades. Most notably, the Gallerie dell’ Accademia is completely under a tarp, with a donation box at the ticket window to help restore the paintings that fell. Both the Doge’s Palace and the Cathedral had some construction going on, as well as the Campanile. Every direction one could look on the Grand Canal, there was at least one building under a tarp. Even with the tarps and the graffiti, the beauty of the old city still shined through.

A thousand descriptions have been written about St. Mark’s Cathedral before, so I will be brief. The floor is a brilliant mosaic, built to withstand the church being flooded every time it rains. This mosaic is warped everywhere, but it still appears in perfect condition. On the ceiling are mosaics of saints and other notable people, all very well done, so much so that they appear to be frescos. Where there are no people on the ceiling, there is gold. Gold is the default color of the ceiling, and it is present everywhere in the Cathedral. It is free to enter, which I believe is a step up from the fifteen pounds sterling I paid to get into Westminster Abbey, but they nickel and dime everyone to death. Want to see the reliquary? It is three euros. How about the alter screen? That’s two euros. Would you like to ascend the steps to the bronze horses and see the real ones? That will cost you four euros. This has the unexpected consequence of requiring barriers in the church where barriers do not naturally belong, destroying a bit of the charm of the church. Also, oddly enough, the body of St. Mark is not in the reliquary, nor is its location particularly well advertised. We were leaving the area where the alter screen lives when I noticed a big stone box with Latin written on it. Most of my party had already left the Cathedral when I saw that the Latin read, “Corpus Divi Marku Evangeliste.” Mark, don’t you know that it isn’t nice to sneak up on people?

June 6th
Saint Mark’s square flooded at some point Friday night, and the only way to exit the Doge’s palace was by wading. It was quite lovely to see the buildings of the square reflected in the water, which was cool and looked clean. It was a welcome respite from the heat of the day, and seemed to certainly be one of the many things that could only happen in Venice. The Cathedral even had to be closed due to the water; apparently, the floor of the church was already warped enough, and did not need hundreds of pilgrims tracking water into the building. One lucky café’s patio was dry enough to keep it open and there were quite a few people sitting, eating and watching people traipse through the water. One poor woman even fell in, completely soaking her.

By the time we got to the Doge’s Palace, Alice could no longer stand around admiring the paintings and required a wheelchair to properly see the palace. This provided the usual disadvantages of a chair, but it did have an unexpected bonus. Apparently, the elevator is kept in a part of the palace that is not accessible to ordinary patrons; we were thus allowed to see some pieces that were not on display, a room or two that had not been restored, and we got to go into a few of the secret passages, hidden in the walls of the palace. Along the wall of the senate chamber, there are luxurious, carved, dark wood panels with seats for all of the senators. One of the wood panels opens up, beyond the reach of the normal patrons. That panel leads to the elevator.

The palace is every bit as gorgeous as I remember it. The governing chambers each have that excellent wood paneling, above which are paintings by Renaissance masters, usually Titian or Tintoretto. These would be framed in gold, with the ceilings painted, also by masters, and gilded sculptures. The armory had the usual assortment of muskets, pole arms, swords, crossbows, cannon, some armor, and a few pistols. They did, however, have two one handed axes and a one handed mace that also cleverly housed wheel lock pistols. My personal favorite had to be a crossbow that also housed a short musket and had a bayonet on the end. It was probably completely unbalanced, and almost unusable, but here it is the thought that counts.

June 7th
The Biennale was the most spectacular display of art I have ever seen. It is a biannual art show in which almost every country sponsors an art exhibit, and it is obvious that some representatives spent the entire two years between events planning this one. The Russian entry was called “Victory over the Future,” and featured an entire room dedicated to paintings of fake futuristic monuments. They also constructed what appeared to be an old, haunted coal mine with ghostly hands shaking the paintings hung on the walls. One room was painted in a cheering soccer crowd that vanished into white when a patron walked in. It was quite an experience.

Norway and Denmark collaborated this year on an exhibit called “The Collectors;” this was a series of houses where the owners were gone, but all of the requisite evidence to determine nearly every aspect of their lives remained. The first was a truly broken home, with crumbling stairs and the dinner table split in half. A child’s drawing remained on a bulletin board, illustrating a happy mom and crying dad. There was also a business card for a business that performed paternity tests. In the fireplace were burnt love letters; I am certain that if I could have scoured the house further for evidence, more would have been forthcoming.

The second house contained a homosexual novelist who was working on a novel, or perhaps autobiography, of a sexually depraved novelist writing a novel about his depravity. The man’s notes were still on his desk, as well as a copy of the abstract he used to try to sell the novel to the publisher that we could take. Both of these exhibits were quite interactive, and the second half even had workers dressed like patrons climbing on the furniture just to show that we could. At the end of this exhibit, the audience left out of the back door to find the novelist drowned in his own pool. I believe that those three exhibits have really spoiled me by showing me what an art show can be like.

I have never seen a system of transportation more completely out of control than Trenitalia. In many stations, the schedule, as well as the platform number, is posted on permanent billboards, with ones that can be updated near the ticket booth. This causes a problem when anything goes wrong; all of the platforms are changed, leaving the passengers to figure out what is going on. In Venice, the information desk is kept behind locked doors, presumably to keep the angry passengers who missed their train while looking for the proper platform from going postal on Trenitalia employees. After this misadventure, it is quite likely that the passenger will miss the subsequent trains waiting in the gigantic line to change their reservations. Luckily, once the passenger is on the train, there is very little chance of further error; the trains seem to run the railway rather than the railway running the trains.

Speaking of trains, something I have noticed here, that I have seen nowhere else. When assigned a seat on an American airplane, or a British train, nobody seems to care where they sit. A reserved seat guarantees a spot on the train, so everyone knows that there is a seat for everyone. Granted, a second class ticket cannot move to first class, and a train conductor might force a passenger to move; but the people rarely care where they sit. Even on airplanes where movement is a bit more restricted, few mind switching seats so that husband and wife may sit together. This assumption, however, does not hold in Italy. I was kicked out of my seat no less than four times, twice when I thought I was in my assigned seat, so close was the correct seat. The train was perhaps half full; there was no reason to complain about whose seat belonged to who, there were plenty for everyone. I do not think I can understand any situation that would require me to move across the aisle to a different unoccupied seat to satisfy someone’s need to be in the seat assigned them by the computers at Trenitalia.