Preconceptions and First Impressions - Venice (I)

For a long time I used to associate Venice with the kitsch.  The childhood recollection of a plastic gondola on top of my grandma's cabinet - ubiquitous in northern English council homes - meant that the city on the lagoon was low down on a list of places to visit.  Gradually, that ridiculous prejudice has been washed away, and the idea of Venice has been reclaimed from those childishly silted depths.

'A small boat made in China ... going nowhere on the mantelpiece'

Touchstones in my late twenties and thirties brought the city back into my ken.  Not least Marcel Proust and his narrator's artistic ideas, and the eventually remembered reality of its treasures.  And then, rendering that reality murky, there was Nicolas Roeg's sublime Don't Look Now, where Proust's high art is usurped, giving way to terror and the uncanny which is pursued relentlessly down a spiderweb of alleyways.

This year the urge to visit has reached fever pitch.  First there was the Bellini exhibition at the National Gallery and the absence of a pair of stunning altarpieces that can, understandably, never cross the sea; and my favourite film of recent times, Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir, with its soft Venetian interludes; and finally, the re-release and recasting of Lagoon Blues, an album that traces a meandering and lovelorn path through the city.  The latter is the work of one of Scotland's finest bands The Bathers.

'Laughing in the face of the devious sea'

Listening again to Chris Thomson, the lead singer of that band, channelling Wordsworth on the opening track - "Once she held the golden east to fee" - had the weight of an ambassador's summons.  Venice had sent out its siren song.  Little else to do but purchase a ticket, book a hotel, and head south.

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"A ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak - so quiet, - so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow." (John Ruskin, 'The Stones of Venice')

Arrive by boat, definitely, but by night?  I would have said 'No', but as the vaporetto threshed its way across the lagoon, I reconsidered.  Ruskin's suggestion of something spectral, a 'mirage', made me think that, as with any ghost worth its salt, it must reveal itself gradually.  Indeed, if you cannot summon up a bank of sea-fog that will slowly and theatrically part, darkness is the way to approach the city.  Gazing across the water, three times I declared for Venice's most famous building, but each time, the boat's onward trajectory denied me.  When the Basilica did appear - a profusion of domes rising discretely behind the Doge's Palace, guarded by the towering Campanile - the flush of excitement at seeing the familiar made physical for the first time coursed through my body.  Perhaps only the towers of Manhattan, glimpsed from the windows of a Greyhound bus, had caused a similar frisson.

After stepping ashore and checking in to our shabby-genteel hotel, the urge to explore overwhelmed.  And not in any 'tick off' way.  There are individual sights aplenty that must be seen and they dazzle as much as any building or construction on earth.  Yet it's the whole of the city, its personality and character, that captivates.  The first full afternoon brought that home to me.  To pass from the sharp, postcard glare of a sunlit piazza into the narrow gloom of one of Venice's dark, unpredictable alleyways - or a calli as they are known here - brings about a wonderful infusion of physical chiaroscuro.

Thibaud Poirier - 'Sleeping Venice' series

Proust's narrator had already sown these seeds, and had set me on a futile mission to find a mysterious square, one that had eluded his own attempts to return:       

“On the following day I set out in quest of my beautiful nocturnal piazza; I followed calli which were exactly alike one another and refused to give me any information, except such as would lead me farther astray. Sometimes a vague landmark which I seemed to recognise led me to suppose that I was about to see appear, in its seclusion, solitude and silence, the beautiful exiled piazza. At that moment, some evil genie which had assumed the form of a fresh calle made me turn unconsciously from my course, and I found myself suddenly brought back to the Grand Canal. And as there is no great difference between the memory of a dream and the memory of a reality, I ended by asking myself whether it was not during my sleep that there had occurred in a dark patch of Venetian crystallisation that strange interruption which offered a vast piazza flanked by romantic palaces, to the meditative eye of the moon."  (Marcel Proust, 'In Search Of Lost Time')

I imagine that searching never ceases in Venice, even for those who have lived here for years.  There is a strange and satisfying pleasure to be had in following a dark, seemingly purposeful calli that, nevertheless, brings you only to a watery dead-end.  You retrace your steps wearily, but with a smile on your face.  It is easy to forgive this city its mischief.          

And then there is the water.  As a wild swimmer, the Venetian canals could not seem more inviting. These green, half-Alpine, half-Adriatician furrows are as enchanting as any tropical sea.  To stand at the top of the curve of a bridge, holding back the imp of the perverse  who is willing you to dive head first into the depths - hoping that a gondola, as silent as a submarine, isn't about to appear - is a considerable challenge.  Predictably, swimming in the canals is forbidden.

Unless, that is, you are trying to recover a holy relic.  Encountering The Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo at the Galleria dell'Accademia, a huge canvas by Gentile, the lesser regarded of the Bellini brothers, confronts you with six bathers desperately trying to retrieve a fragment of the 'true cross'.   

The Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo, Gentile Bellini (c. 1500)

To my mind, not all of the bathers are taking the task seriously, and the man on the far right is certainly about to exercise his license to dive and swim, even though the fragment has already been secured.  And just look at how inviting that water is?  Five hundred years may have passed yet the water remains exactly that shade of emerald green.  Later I will learn it is the algae - remember those swimming pools at the Rio Olympics -  that lend it this distinctive hue, and I was suddenly a little more reluctant to take a plunge.

Venice is also a city of windows.  The ogive arched windows, particularly those that look out over the Grand Canal, are wonderful.  But it’s the smaller shuttered ones that enchant.  England is not big on shuttered windows, but in the medieval towns and cities of Europe they are common.  Even so, these Venetian apertures seemed to carry extra appeal.  And it took me until my second full day to work out what it was.  The buildings, particularly at night, cast a magical reflection onto the canals.  Mirrored and lengthened, their aesthetic quality is heightened, and it is the reflected image of those windows - sometimes closed, sometimes slightly ajar - laid on top of the barely perceptible ripples of a liquid surface, that fall upon the eyes like balm.

Thibaud Poirier - 'Sleeping Venice' series

Thibaud Poirier's collection of photographs in his 'Sleeping Venice' series capture this effect wonderfully.  They also highlight how quiet the city can be, particularly away from the main sights and thoroughfares.  I anticipated throngs, and whilst there were occasions where you felt like you were being channelled towards a turnstile, more often than not you would find only yourself standing on a bridge or looking at some exquisitely mesmerising view.  Venice is the only city that, quite literally, feels like a dream: the sense of the surreal combining paradoxically with the real.

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That plastic gondola has a lot to answer for.  Venice is the most singularly beautiful city that I have ever seen.  Indeed, Arbit Blatas, the Lithuanian sculptor has already set my mind racing.  "In the winter, Venice is like an abandoned theatre.  The play is finished, but the echoes remain."  A return in the silent depths of January or February?  Why not?