What Do Women Want? (23 page)

The winged Lion of Saint Mark that adorns most public buildings reminds us that most of the hill towns of the Veneto were dependencies of the thousand-year Venetian Republic, La Serenissima. Starting in the sixteenth century, noble Venetian families began to build country estates in the foothills of the Dolomites to escape the heat of the summer, do some serious gentleman farming, cultivate vineyards on these steep slopes, and escape from Venice when politics or economics required a graceful retreat. Venetian noble families used to cruise up the Brenta from Venice with barges full of servants, retainers, animals, and enough clothes for the elegant court life they transported to the country. The fine art of making the pilgrimage to the rural estate was refined and perfected in Italy—like so many civilized pleasures.

Our outpost in the hills of the Veneto on this occasion (and many subsequent ones) was an artist friend’s farmhouse, perched on a precipitous hillside above Ásolo. It is reached by a breathtaking dirt road whose steep margins remind you not to drink after dinner (in one of the charming cafés in Ásolo’s main square) if you want to make it home. The road can be washed out in mud season, but in summer it usually holds. The house is simple and full of paintings; the view is stupendous. It is almost impossible to find. In short, it is the perfect place to write. As in many Italian places, you live outside in the good weather and eat overlooking tiny twinkling hill towns balanced on neighboring hills.

My friend’s farmhouse is within fifteen or twenty minutes of the Villa Barbaro at Maser, with its Veronese trompe l’oeil frescoes and extravagant fountains. It is also relatively near the Brenta River and the Brenta Canal, where the Villa Foscari (Malcontenta) stands. Vicenza, Bassano del Grappa, and the shoe factories of the Veneto (where nearly all the most beautiful designer shoes in the world are made) are also very close.

Ken and I spent a perfect day wandering through Marostica with its chessboard square and
castel superiore
(the fortress perched on a hill above the town). We discovered wonderful olive oils infused with truffles in the local trattorie and bags of dried mushrooms from the surrounding woods. Of the many good restaurants of the Asolean hills, Al Ringraziamento in Cavaso del Tomba is my new favorite. Even though it has a star in Michelin, it is extremely simple—white tablecloths, local wines, a fireplace. The great pleasure in the Asolean hills is just living
all’italiana.
There is even a verb for it in
la bella lingua—asolare
—the art of idling Ásolo style.

Ásolo and Venice are two halves of a perfect sojourn in the Veneto. If I want to conjure up Venice, I imagine myself lying on the bed in the room in Dorsoduro where I wrote
Serenissima,
looking up at the shimmering ceiling, seeing the light show of reflections of the rippling water. Laughter wafts across the canal. Fragments of conversation float under my open window. Dogs bark. Bells ring. Only the occasional plash of an oar or the furious roar of an outboard motor interrupts the silence. Venice remains a place where individual voices matter.

The first place where I stayed in Venice, when I was nineteen, was the youth hostel (
ostello di gioventù
) on the island of Giudecca, not far from Palladio’s church of the Redentore. Since then I have stayed in hotels of every sort—from modest
pensioni
to the deluxe Gritti and Cipriani. But the most Venetian way to stay in Venice is to rent an old house in Dorsoduro or a crumbing fifteenth-century palazzo on Giudecca (with a courtyard full of old roses), far from the tourist centers. You have to be enough off the beaten track to let the watery rhythm of the city infuse your consciousness.

Then there is the quiet—the unearthly quiet of one of the last places on earth without cars.

I recommend that you fall in love in Venice and pursue (or escape) your forbidden love down the narrow
calli,
through the
campi,
under the
sottoportegi.
If you can’t snare a lover for yourself, Venice will surely provide one—even if that lover is only the city herself.

Venetian love affairs, like Aschenbach’s with Tadzio, inhabit some ideal realm, but they rarely prove durable when reality dawns. Perhaps that’s the whole point. Venice accretes into the form of a yearned-for lover to teach us something about time, about beauty, about mutability. If a thousand-year republic can fall, Venice tells us, then even the greatest loves are transitory. Venice is our earthly correlative for mutability. Her most moving shrines—the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Lido, the mortuary island of San Michele, the ghetto in Cannaregio, the Redentore and Santa Maria della Salute (both built after plagues ended)—are shrines to Thanatos as much as much as they are shrines to Eros.

Venice is the place where those two great powers marry.

Sometimes I think I go back to Venice especially to dream. My Venetian dreams are always rich and strange. The water breeds them as I fall asleep, floating on Venice as if she were a boat. There are always many-chambered palazzi where princesses dance until their shoes are full of holes. All the players in my past mingle as they glide through the same dream ballroom. I wake up to the air shuddering with bells and aromatic with the scent of coffee.

—JOSEPH BRODSKY

 

 

 

It is like no other
place on earth. You arrive from Tokyo, New York, Paris, Delhi, Rio, Rome, and the first thing you notice, descending from whatever earthbound vehicle has brought you—train, plane, automobile—is that your equilibrium rocks a little with your first step onto the shimmering liquid surface. For this is the lagoon city (or rather it is two cities: one above and seemingly solid; one below and reflected in the waters), and that slight wobble tells you everything about its essence. It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone. The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise. Many noted artists, after all, died here: Wagner, Browning, Diaghilev—though some, like Dante, merely died of maladies contracted on their last visit. These illustrious deaths have given the city a certain spooky patina and a faintly macabre reputation—like New Orleans, only more so. Or maybe it is the time-stopped nature of the place, the fact that so many vistas still look exactly as they do in Carpaccio or Bellini paintings (except for the television antennas, of course), which gives you the sense that you can turn a corner and stroll into the past.

The first time I came to Venice I was a student of
la bella lingua
in Florence. I came alone, by second-class railway carriage, a small spiral notebook in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other, for I already knew that Venice existed in part for English-speaking writers to write about. Shakespeare, Byron, Browning, Ruskin, James, all had succumbed to its spell.

I came down the steps of the railroad station and was at once elated by the gleaming band of water I saw before me. (I had yet to spot the dead cats floating, or the raw sewage, or the masses of detergent bubbles, or the plastic bottles.) I was besotted with the idea and the reality of Venice, and that besottedness has never quite left me—despite the fact that I now know La Serenissima far too well to be a rhapsodist merely of her beauties. Still, on my many return visits, I have never failed to reexperience that first burst of elation, that Aha! of recognition, part physical, part literary.

On my first trip to Venice, I remember sitting in the Piazzetta reading Byron, amazed to be just a stone’s throw from the place that inspired these words:

 

 

And then a very Venetian thing happened. A young man attracted by my dreamy expression, the poetry I was reading, the notebook, or something sensual in the ancient stones themselves, came up to me bearing a bunch of violets.

He was a tourist, too, a Chinese doctor from Australia, and he was shy—not the sort of person who accosts American college girls with violets. As we spent the day touring the palaces, the works of art, I realized that only Venice could have released him from his shyness. Venice does that to people. Just as it releases their longings, it also allows unpredictable things to happen.

One summer night a few years ago, I was dining with friends at a little outdoor restaurant on a canal in Dorsoduro. Another acquaintance came by in his boat, a brightly colored Torcello fishing boat, stopped to join us for coffee, and then invited us for a ride along the canals at midnight. One of our party was a violinist from the Fenice Theater, and he took out his fiddle, sat cross-legged on the prow of the boat, and played Mozart for us. As we rowed through the maze of little canals, the oars dipping and splashing in the inky water, the music filling the air, Venetians opened their windows and came out on their balconies to shout “Bravo!”

The mythical Venice may be hard to grasp on a steamy day in midsummer when this city of 338,000 seems to swell to twice that number, with the tourists milling about the Piazza San Marco, dutifully feeding scruffy pigeons, having their pockets picked, and listening to wheezy bands playing “New York, New York” (for reasons that will never be explained). But come back in November or December, in February or March, when
la nebbia
settles upon the city like a marginless monster, and you will have little trouble believing that things can appear and disappear in this labyrinthine city, or that time here could easily slip in its sprockets and take you, willingly or unwillingly, back.

Most of the summer tourists make a predictable forty-eight-hour pilgrimage from the railroad station to Piazza San Marco, swarm there briefly between the two columns (not realizing it was here that criminals were strung up and that Venetians believe it brings bad luck to walk between them), see Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace over the heads of thousands of others of their kind, take a gondola ride, for which they pay about one dollar a minute and during which they have the curious pleasure of seeing the ubiquitous Japanese tourists rowing six abreast down the Grand Canal to the strains of Neapolitan music (“Come Back to Sorrento” is played for the same reason as “New York, New York,” I guess).

I have a friend in Venice whose family has been historically prominent for the last thousand years, whose palazzo looks down upon one of the main serenade routes of the gondolas. Last summer, a merry family of Americans with four boys rented the
piano nobile
of this palazzo, and it was the younger boys’ great joy (and my daughter’s as well) to watch for gondolas and as they went by to throw things down to them: not bucketfuls of water (as sometimes happens in Venice) but trinkets, sweets, paper gliders. Such largesse suggests another of Venice’s sly realities: the age-old pecking order of tourists.

There are the yachts that dock for a week or two, discharging mysterious international billionaires and setting all the gossips in Venice abuzz about who has been invited to cocktails, who to dinner, and who to set sail for Yugoslavia and Greece. There are the movie stars, who go to the Hotel Cipriani to toast and tryst, or to rest up after toasting and trysting. There are the affluent Americans, who schlepp from the Cipriani pool to Harry’s Bar and back again, buying gold jewelry en route at inflated prices.

Those who rent a palazzo on the Grand Canal look down upon those who merely stay at the Cipriani or Gritti for a week, who in turn look down on those who come to the railroad station, stay for two days in a fleabag near the Piazza San Marco, and go away, sure that they’ve seen Venice and that it is ruinously expensive, dangerous, full of tourists and pickpockets.

All these things it surely can be, in any season, but it is also true that there are parts of Venice—the Giudecca, Dorsoduro—where you can live in midsummer and rarely see another American, and that many of Venice’s most faithful recidivists never go near the Piazza San Marco in season and wouldn’t, if caught there by mistake, dream of buying a gelato there. Not only is a San Marco gelato four times the price of a gelato in a true Venetian neighborhood, but there is no place to stroll and eat it in peace.

Venice has always attracted artists from abroad. Some, like Turner, found in her their true subject; others, like Corot, admitted that Venice defeated them. Venice still attracts artists. Arbit Blatas, the Lithuanian artist who first visited Venice in 1934, when Black-shirts were marching on the Riva degli Schiavoni, now lives and works on the Giudecca (one of the largest islands of Venice) with his wife, Regina Resnik, the retired opera singer.

Arbit Blatas explains that Venice attracts him as a painter because its surface “is constantly metamorphosing. Painting Venice is almost like being a restorer, peeling off the layers to find the picture after picture underneath. Venice is inexhaustible because the shifting light and the drifting fog keep changing her face. In the winter, Venice is like an abandoned theater. The play is finished, but the echoes remain. When you walk in the winter fog, there seems to be no division between water and embankment. You feel that you can walk through walls, through sky, through time.”

Regina Resnik reminded me that “the Giudecchini say that the Venetians see only the Giudecca, while the people on the Giudecca look always at Venice.” This is true. From her kitchen window, La Resnik sees the Dogana, the Doge’s Palace, the campanile in the Piazza San Marco. “There are times when the fog is so thick, you can’t see out,” she said. “But when the fog lifts, the Serenissima is always there. She’s the anchor of my life.”