VENICE. In an earlier chapter, the 1999 Music Tour started in Schwartzenburg and ended with eight days in Venice. The photo shows the Hogan group, organised from England by Madeleine, which lunched at Palazzo Smiley before walking back along the waterfront. The main part of this chapter relates to an earlier stay, also eight days, in Venice in 1993, when I had my sketchpad with me. Why a whole chapter on Venice? Because it is perhaps the most fantastic city the world has ever seen. It is built out in the sea on sunken tree trunks. Therefore its only traffic is along canals to buildings which are designed for such traffic. It was a successful republic for 800 years, it is a major centre of art and architectural treasures, and it was the home of Antonio Vivaldi. I think that says enough. This chapter will be based on our 1993 stay in Venice, our 2008 tour down the Amalfi coast, and some reflections on Italian history, architecture, literature, music and art.
VENICE 1993. Everyone knows that Venice is sinking. Except, apparently, real estate agencies. Mini-apartments for rent seem reserved for millionaires, so we cram into a mini-room in a hotel for the first night and, next morning, we comb the city for accommodation with a lift and as far from Saint Marks Square as possible. But one day, this most fantastic city in the world will become submerged, so we ought to make the most of it while it is still afloat. Pensione Seguso is a decaying, old-style establishment that sits on the Dorso Duro, a hard-backed island. It is reached by the wooden Accademia Bridge (from which I did this painting), the more famous stone Rialto Bridge, or by ferries from the docks to its Zattere waterfront. So it is therefore less well-known by tourists. Our room looks down onto a busy canal and across to the Waar, a square-rigged sailing ship registered in Gibraltar, and which appears to be occupied solely by a small dog and a line of washing. As in Perugia, rubbish is energetically collected before dawn by stone-deaf council workers, but driving canal barges instead of trucks.
Joan’s hip problem has been temporarily alleviated by the absence of hills here, by a hotel with a lift, and by purchasing open tickets on the waterbuses that go everywhere man. We have rearranged our plans around longer rests in selected places. Eight days in Venice was a fairly easy sacrifice to make. Regrettably, we have had to cut out the India stopover, and Hong Kong is now a bit of a blur on the horizon. Chris, trawling through our mail, has found out that our ferry back across the English Channel will now be in dry dock in November. This reminds me of Ann’s Calcutta conversation “Oh yes Madam, you can buy a train ticket here. Oh no Madam, there are no trains.” I think there is an alternative ferry from Caen to Portsmouth around November 22, 23, and I think Madeleine said they could have us until we fly London to Hong Kong on December 28. The traveller is always vague.
VENICE IS LIKE A TADPOLE with Saint Mark’s Square as its head and the Grand Canal as its tail, snaking back to the rail line connection to the rest of Italy. Fronting onto S. Mark’s Square is the Doges palace which seems upside down, the heavy bit at the top and the light stone tracery at the bottom. But it seems to work.
Round the back of the palace I caught this gondola gliding past a cascade of backlit arches.
And on the corner is the statue of the Four Tetrachs, the four rulers of the Roman Empire.
The tail of the tadpole is lined with palaces called C’a or Casa. Apart from those on the Dorso Duro, the hard back shoal, all the buildings in Venice sit on closely spaced wooden piles driven into the mud. Under water, in the absence of oxygen, these petrify into a stone-like substance. Layers of planks, bricks and waterproof stone then support all the palaces, churches and museums that have made Venice famous. To the right is C’a Dario sitting on its piles. The watergate opens onto an entrance hall running back to a courtyard.
These island communities, originally refuges from invading barbarians, became major trading centres connecting India and China with Europe. They then became powerful enough to produce fleets of warships that sustained a Venetian empire that stretched from northern Italy right around the Mediterranean.
The Doge, or president, was elected by an aristocracy whose members were prevented from seizing power by the threat of blinding, castrating or beheading. It worked so successfully that the Serene Republic lasted for 800 years.
IT’S A SMALL WORLD. “It’s amazing who you meet on a Vaporetto” said the voice behind us. Silvia Bembo, from Madeleine’s class in Sydney and from our class in Perugia, has Italian ancestry. And now, like a tour guide, she is pointing out C’a Bembo, a large palazzo fronting the Grand Canal. “One of the Bembos was the Doge of Venice. That was in my family’s better days” she said ruefully. Later I googled him, Pietro Bembo, also inventor of the world’s first classical typeface, now Linotronic 202 Bembo. We met with Silvia next day to do the Accademia Gallery and enjoy a pizza and a bottle of wine on the waterfront. We had crossed the Appenines in a rain cloud on Tuesday to find Venice also wearing umbrellas. But by Wednesday evening the setting sun was glinting through the windows of Santa Maria della Salute as our ferry took us past the Doges Palace in search of La Chiesa di Vivaldi. The Vivaldi concert turned out to be last night and Monteverdi’s Vespers and Orfeo are not till next week. But, in Venice, there are a million other things to do and see.
TINTORETTO was still painting Paradise in the Doge’s Palace when he was 90. Perhaps not too surprising considering that the painting is 75 feet long. But San Sebastiano is a decrepit-looking church with grit swirling round the entrance. It sits in the poorer back blocks between our hotel and the slipway where they build and repair gondolas. The priest kindly turned the lights on for me to see the interior, so I showed him this scrappy watercolour I had done of his church (in the foreground is a pozzo or well). He made polite noises, then pointed to the Titian, and to a ceiling painted by Veronese, taking our art conversation from the slightly ridiculous to the perfectly sublime. Our hotel room is large with massive, ornate mahogany furniture, a convoluted floral glass chandelier of some sort of non-Euclidian geometry, and a mattress apparently resting on corrugated iron. We have no bath, but there are three bathrooms next to each other down the corridor, one without hot water and one without any taps. Always there is the peaceful sound of water lapping marble steps and, from the drawing room, furnished from a fire sale sometime in the 19th century, one can almost reach out through the mullioned windows and touch the varnished motorboats that purr past. This time last month our homework contained an extract from the Australian Bulletin, translated into Italian. I will try and translate it back into English.
“Heaven is a place where the police are English, the engineers German, the lovers Italian, the administrators Swiss and the cooks French. Hell is a place where the police are German, the cooks English, the engineers French, the administrators Italian and the lovers Swiss.”
MAGNIFICAT. Heavy rain on Friday evening sent us to the cinema for shelter. There were six people in the fleapit. The advertisements were deafening, punctuated by sequences of flickering semaphore with morse code as backing. At the climax of the main feature we were half way out before Joan translated “End of Part One” up on the screen. If you ever see Magnificat with subtitles, tell us what it was all about. The masculine “Let’s go sightseeing” translates to the feminine “Let’s go shopping”, but we did both in the Saturday markets near the Rialto Bridge. Back on the waterfront at the hotel Jim and Eloise are having coffee. “That your yacht tied up there?” quips Jim, pointing at the square-rigger with the British red ensign. They are from New York, enjoying retirement, and the four of us went to a concert that night: Handel, Tchaikovsky and Mozart. Sunday and, by way of eight island-hopping ferry rides we have heard a sung mass in Saint Mark’s Basilica (where they only illuminate the mosaics during mass), had a coffee on Murano (where they make the Venetian glass), visited the 9th century cathedral on Torcello (where the spectacularly grim Last Judgement mosaic fills an entire wall), wandered the streets of Burano (where every house is painted a different colour), skirted Cimitereio (the island cemetery), and watched the lights of Venice come on across the lagoon.
L’ESTATE DI SAN MARTINO. Saint Martin’s Summer, or Indian Summer, usually runs from November 11 to 21, as regular as the number one vaporetto. But today, the 9th, it starts early. We woke to strong shafts of sunlight dappling the lagoon and reflecting on our ceiling. Joan usually goes to mass at the Jesuati, the church round the corner with the Tiepolo ceiling, while I wander the canals and bridges with camera and sketchbook (here is the bridge where, a few years later, we will enjoy coffee with Madeleine and Chris, Santa Maria della salute, and more canals). But today was so beautiful we skipped breakfast, hopped a vaporetto, and explored the ghetto of Venice North. And at last we have found a warm overcoat for Joan. But it needs altering so we must stay in Venice another few days. Sometimes shopping has its advantages. Meanwhile,
Meanwhile, here are Santa Maria delle Salute, the bridge where we stop for coffee, some reflections, and a canal near Arsenale.
THE NUN IN THE GONDOLA. A traghetto is a workman’s gondola which takes workers across the Grand Canal for 50 cents and, early yesterday morning I caught one. It is considered wimpish to sit down in a traghetto so, as the swell from a passing ferry hit, I held the arm of an elderly nun, though I think she was really supporting me as much as I her. “Siamo Australiani e mia moglie e catollica” so she told me all about the rising costs of illuminating Saint Marks.
A CHIESA DI ANTONIO VIVALDI. Actually his church was built after he died, on the site of La Pieta, the orphanage for whose young musicians he composed, inter alia, some 400 concertos. Last night, after a dish of black spaghetti, seasoned with the ink of cuttlefish, we went and listened to flute sonatas of Vivaldi and Albinoni. Wandering home late through the huge and deserted square of Saint Mark, Albinoni’s Adagio floated from behind some misty columns and we joined a small cluster of admirers to applaud a piccolo player going through his baroque repertoire. Later, Joan was to write a moving account of this experience and unwisely show it to her colleagues back at work in Sydney. And later still one of her colleagues was to win an essay competition with it, with a trip to Italy. Each morning at breakfast the English-speaking guests compare experiences with the hotel’s hot water system and attempt to forecast its behaviour over the next 24 hours. My discovery that the third floor bidet always runs hot water was considered interesting but not very useful.
THE NORTH AMERICAN SPOTTED SNAIL. I would not describe Jim Plessey, the retired American lawyer as a Greenie. He blames Walt Disney for most of the problems of the younger generation, particularly Disney’s fixation on cute little animals. “The entire lumber industry of the USA West Coast has ground to a halt, because there is a chance it might disturb the spotted snail”. Walking back one evening we passed two teenagers kissing passionately. “Oh, they shouldn’t do that there” said Jim. I thought he was being puritanical, but he was concerned they might fall over the edge of the dock.
WE WALK THE PLANK. In our last few days in Venice the high tides had begun to lap the steps of the Jesuati next door. “Better make the most of it while we can” said Joan so we visited in quick succession the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Scuola di San Rocco, and the C’a Rezzonico on the Grand Canal before packing our bags. Next morning, as we carried our bags to the ferry, the wind was whipping up a salt spray. We were glad of the long line of trestles stretching past Joan’s favourite Jesuati chapel. The Fiat, which we had not needed for eight days, started at a touch.
ASTI SPUMANTI, CINZANO AND A MISTRAL. The Po valley was a huge, wet, flat, cold triangle wedged into Italy’s Adriatic coast. We left its apex and headed past Milano to Alba to enjoy a bottle of Arneis with dinner. Next morning, passing through the towns of Asti and Cinzano, we climbed up through heavy frost almost to the snow line of the Maritime Alps before plunging through a long tunnel and into the sunshine of the French Riviera. Saturday night at Senas, past Aix-en-Provence and talking with an ancient school teacher, straight out of a Jacques Tati film. Sunday night at Nimes, past Arles. We didn’t know then that the dazzling blue skies had resulted from a Mistral, clearing the skies and anything else that got in the way.
RAVELLO, ROME AND HOME 2008
Now in November 2008, the hotel is out of season and so we breakfast with the only other guests, Americans Bill and June Sacco. I assumed he was a retired salesman until I was surprised to find he had pioneered a branch of mathematics that I had drifted through in the fifties. Then, there were only a couple of text books on linear programming, dynamic programming and the theory of games. Finding it all too hard I had moved on, while Bill had followed its massive evolution into computerised war games for the US Department of Defence. So we chatted over breakfast about his latest paper on Triage, which I discovered meant planning to deal with large scale disasters. His other fascination was the Cimbrone gardens and here are some of its courtyards.
The gardens lead to the Terrace of Infinity, a vertical cliff edge down which we can see the winding road to Amalfi. The painting, from our bedroom window, looks back the other way along the rugged Amalfi coast, past Minori and Maiori, to Salerno.
During a very long sermon in the Duomo I closely examine the mosaics on the pulpit, dated 1272. On the left Jonah is being chomped by the whale, and on the right regurgitated. Above Positano is a roadside cafe and I have just ordered Spaghetti Marinara.
After a last dinner at Netta’s with Bill and June, we rise early next morning for a bus to Amalfi, another to Salerno, and the train to Rome. I don’t remember where this copper door is but I do remember our welcome back to Sydney.
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND
THE ARCHITECTURE OF ITALY
Etruscan. The massive city gates and walls were built by the Etruscans. They spoke a language that today has barely been deciphered, but it is clear that their art was influenced by the Greeks. In Perugia we walked daily through the gigantic Arco Etrusco on our way to classes. Porta San Angelo leads out to the later Roman temple, while Porta Trasimeno leads to the lake where Hanibal defeated the Romans.
Roman. Here is the Arena at Verona, ready for our concert all those years ago. The temple of San Angelo is post-Roman though the columns inside are Roman.
Byzantine architecture came from Constantinople, Saint Mark’s in Venice a very good example.
In Perugia Medieval architecture kept me busy with its fascinating arches, winding alleyways, and stairs that often went nowhere.
Renaissance. Perhaps the most beautiful example we saw was the facade of S. Angelo in Lucca, the most elegant the Oratorio S Bernardino and the Presbyteries in Perugia. In Venice the canals have shaped the architecture, with amazing reflections on still days.
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND – HISTORY
Most history books attempt to explain progress, poverty and conflict in terms of the charismatic actors associated with political events. It is therefore refreshing to find, in A Traveller’s History of Italy (Lintner, V. 1989, Gloucestershire, Windrush Press), explanations in terms of land ownership structures that created poverty.
Let us start with the Etruscans, warrior kings and elites maintained in luxury by conquered tribes whose resources were ruthlessly exploited. The Etruscans were replaced by the Romans, with a larger but similar form of aristocratic government in which the majority lived in a kind of economic bondage. ‘The problem of wealth distribution concerned mainly land ownership. The Patricians owned most of the land and exploited the poor by charging rent, in kind or in cash for its use.’
The Romans obliterated much of Etruscan culture (Rule one of colonisation is: take the land. Rule two is: remove any political objections to this by banning the language and discouraging their culture). But the Romans copied and developed the Etruscan class structure. The new aristocracy, who now owned all the land, exploited the poor by charging them for the use of this land. Not surprisingly there were objections from poor Romans and even poorer slaves. These objections were met in three ways. Landless Romans were given land in conquered territories, troublesome slaves such as Spartacus were ruthlessly crucified, and senator Tiberius Graccus, who had suggested land reform, was clubbed to death in the senate.
Gibbon attributes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to ‘the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness’. Today we might describe it as the result of punitive taxation needed to maintain the elite in a state of conspicuous consumption, while rent seekers called Vandals, Franks and Visigoths came and saw and conquered. The Franks eventually did a make-over, the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted for 1000 years during which time power was divided between the popes and the aristocracy, often interchangeable. But while part of the rents of church lands did trickle back to the poor in a rudimentary form of social security, a feudal lord was more prone to spend his rental income on funding military excursions against another lord. The payback in plunder, ransoms, and new lands usually far exceeded the initial outlay.
Thus, by the eleventh century Italian “cities were essentially administrative centres which lived, one might say parasitically, from taxing the countryside”. In the fourteenth century, after the Black Death which had reduced populations, supply and demand caused rents to fall and wages to rise. Then, anticipating the French Revolution, popular communes emerged. In these the urban middle class seized power violently from the aristocracy, but they could not eventually hold out against the “organised resources of land and big money”. And so, by the time of the Renaissance, Italy “saw an even greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the few powerful nobles who controlled the city states. The poor, needless to say, became poorer, while the interests of the majority were almost completely ignored….The peasantry were in general completely oppressed, living in abject poverty, much as they had done for centuries.”
By the eighteenth century land was being increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer owners. In the Agro Romano around Rome 13 families owned 61% of the land, most of the rest belonging to 64 ecclesiastical bodies. In central Italy most peasants were now share-croppers typically handing over half their production to the landlord in rent. Not surprisingly, in conditions of abject poverty, exploitation, ignorance and illiteracy, peasants would fall into debt. Merchants would give exploitative loans of wheat to peasants, which were repayable in kind at harvest time when prices were much lower. Responses to this were often migration, or initiatives for land reform. But by the time of the French Revolution most such enlightenment reforms had petered out.
In the nineteenth century poverty was driving some 80,000 people each year into the rest of Europe and around 20,000 to America, while a neo-Roman-Empire was colonising land in Eritrea, Somalia and Abyssinia. In the twentieth century Italy annexed Libya and hoped for territorial gains in Europe out of WWI. These hopes turned out to be disappointing and not worth the cost which, as in most wars, was borne by the poor and not the elite. Joining the wrong side in WWII, Italy then lost the rental incomes of her African colonies as a punishment. However, while land rent in the south continued to be conspicuously consumed, in the north this surplus was now productively invested in an industrial takeoff that, while it did not remove inequality, removed the abject poverty that landed elites have inflicted on Italy throughout its history.
JOURNEYS OF THE SOUL
My journeys into the soul of Italy are many. To wander amongst those Etruscan and medieval rough-cut stones that have held each other up in massive, spectacular arches over millennia. To listen to that cascade of sparkling gems called the Baroque. To experience close up all the Renaissance splendour crammed into those tiny islands called Venice.
POST SCRIPT – JOAN’S DIARY – OCTOBER 1999
2/10 Venice It is almost with reverence that the butcher next door to our apartment slices and trims the meat and wraps it carefully. Similarly the lady in the delicatessen as she cuts some cheese for us – tiroler, pecorino, gorgonzola, compagnana, parmiggiano to mention some we have tried. The francescini breadrolls are crisp and delicious and the fruit and vegetables are of prime quality and full of flavour. Doing our own catering is so much better and more nutritious than relying on the menus touristica.
We set off for the vaporetto thinking to use our twenty four hour ticket for a trip to some of the neighbouring islands and walk along the Riva dei Schiavone – the wide marble embankment with the waters from the Grand Canal lapping against and sometimes overflowing. The day-trippers and crowds who have arrived by giant cruise liners, train, plane, car or on foot are already gathering in all the popular places and the Asian and African street vendors have displayed their wares on cloths easily rolled up when a policeman arrives. They sell fake handbags, mechanical toys GI Joes in battledress sprawled on the ground shooting with appropriate flashing lights and gun sounds. I have to resist the urge to stamp on them. There are also tiny Mickey and Minnie Mice dancing in the air. We buy one for one of the grandchildren and find they don’t work ! We pass
A conversation between two American as we pass a jewellery shop. She “Would you like to go inside?” He “No you said you didn’t want to buy anything. Why should we go inside?” She “Well it would give us an idea…”.
Speaking of Americans we met a charming foursome outside the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua after having spent hours gazing in wonder at Giotto’s marvellous frescoes almost seven hundred years old. We had chatted quite frequently during this time. They were staying in a villa in the Eugenian Hills once occupied by Henry James – fitting because they were very interested in literature. One of the women constantly rereads Jane Austen. David was at his best, swopping quotes from A man for All SeasonS or the play about CS Lewis and his American wife who when being rudely addressed by one of the Oxford dons said , “In America we have a different mode of discourse. I do not know if you are trying to insult me or if you are merely being stupid!” this went down well
We have met or at least heard many Americans on our travels – some trying to air their lack of knowledge to the whole neighbourhood. They do seem a very extravert race. One very large woman on a train was travelling with three friends – she said they hadn’t slept much in their two weeks holiday but they were certainly highly organised, having done all their research and travel arrangements via the Internet.
3/10 we are sitting having excellent coffee not far from our apartment along the Fondamente del Osmarin, every few minutes a gondola glides by with sometimes bored, blase or excited passengers. The action of the gondolier as he negotiates passing craft or the low ponti (bridges) is one of grace and skill as he leans forward with his oar and makes a wide sweep backwards on the right side of his body. Characteristically they wear navy and white striped tops or white sailor jackets, black pants and sometimes straw boaters.
4/10Ten o’clock solemn Mass in San Marco gave us a wonderful opportunity to gaze in wonder during the sermon at the mosaic domes above us. Unaccompanied singing from a balcony above the high altar reminded me of the John Elliott Gardiner video we have of the Monteverdi Vespers. As we were chatting to a couple of English tourists behind us after Mass complimenting her on her knowledge of the Latin Creed and Gloria who should appear but Marg and Jane. What a grand reunion followed near the Campanile and afterwards at Palazzo Smiley with Ann, Jane and Michael followed soon afterwards by Madeleine Chris Faith and Anya looking marvellous after their two day marathon across Europe when Madeleine sang nursery rhymes and told stories about her imaginary friend Morgan to Faith, navigated for Chris and fed the baby at regular intervals. There was much merriment as we shared experiences and as Jane put it, it was good to have a day off from serious sightseeing. We saw them all off on a vaporetta as the sun was setting behind Santa Maria della Salute.
5/10 Faith is intrigued, as no doubt we all are, by the gondolas – the most gracious beautifully crafted boats, gleaming in their black lacquer and silver prow with decorated seats covered in lace, and a little vase of flowers in the bow. We watch the slightly self-conscious tourists, six at a time being serenaded by a tenor with piano accordion or guitar accompaniment and although some of the gondoliers look rather tough they invariably have a smile for Faith and the baby. David is sorry we don’t have a little doge’s cap for Anya who is much admired by the Italians.
12/10 We wander for the last time through the misty Piazzale di San Marco; stop to admire yet again the Doge’s Palace ; take a last lingering look across the Canal at the Salute; watch the rows of elegant gondolas rising and falling in the tide as David says like fairground horses; listen to one of the four little orchestras competing with each other for custom at the coffee bars round the Square and walk slowly back to our apartment past the small basin full of gondolas parked for the night. One solitary gondolier us exchanging banter with a friend on the fondamente – it’s like a set from an opera. We wonder if we will ever see Venice again and agree that of all the places we’ve seen so far we would love to revisit La Serenissima