What to see in Venice

It's been several weeks since we returned from our too brief trip down to Italy, and it has taken me about that long to begin to sort out my thoughts on it. It is always terribly disorienting to actually do something that you always knew — at some level — you would do. And I've been dreaming about Italy since who knows when. 

I had a few days on my own in Venice, where since I was trying to do things on the cheap, I spent a lot of time walking around and getting as much out of a three-day vaporetto ticket as possible. It is the kind of place that makes you glad you have eyes -- so that was quite enough, to just see how the different parts add up to something fantastic. I spent a lot of time in the Cannaregio district -- a place that is somewhat off the well-beaten tourist track, where you are more likely to see boats toting things like kegs and mail than gondolas ferrying around other tourists. I had the strange sensation of stopping every now and then to look at a bridge, or a view down a canal, or a somewhat crumbling building. You stop, and then twenty minutes vanish. 

There were so many particular things that caught my eye:

— The floor of San Marco Basilica. Sure, the whole thing is a marvel, and you'll kink your neck for weeks from all the looking up, but don't forget to really look at the floor, the Escher-like patterns, and think about the long, deep roots of the Renaissance's revolution in pictorial perspective. 

— The color of the water. I took dozens of photos of the water, at different times of day, sometimes when it glowed gold reflecting the sun, or pink reflecting some fancy facade on the quay. Or sometimes when it was just its normal glow, from turquoise to slate blue. 




— As every responsible guidebook will tell you, getting lost is most of the fun. There is something delirious about stopping to check a map, getting your bearings, setting out, and instantly getting lost again. 




— I think my favorite thing to see, and I'm as surprised by this as anyone, was the roomful of Jackson Pollock's at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. There are four of them on display in one of the rooms facing the Grand Canal. On each wall is a different moment in Pollock's career, and each work is both perfectly representative of what he was doing but individually quirky (the colors seemed somehow more elemental and lively — reds, oranges, yellows). And in such a perfect setting, with the blue of the water, the bright white walls of the palazzo, the lingering sense that this may have been the very room where Peggy treated her famous guests for bellinis... it adds up. 


— Seeing things like this: when it was time to leave for Florence, I bought my ticket at Santa Lucia and went back out onto the steps to gaze at the Canal and the square for a few more minutes. Out walk two young American backpackers, who looked just like the nicest, friendliest two kids to step off the campus of Vassar. They step out, quite literally wide-eyed, and stop in their tracks. "Wow," the boy exclaims. "I can't believe we made it!" the girl says. They gaze joyfully into each other's eyes and kiss like they're in a goddamn movie. I was so surprised there is a place on earth where unself-conscious things like this happen that I couldn't even bother to roll my eyes. I was too drowned in self-pity because I was leaving. 

The city gives you a long time to think about decay and the long slow end of things. You know that the city is doomed. You've heard about the glory days, the Republic and the Doge's who ruled the Mediterranean like it was their backyard. You know about the end of the Republic, the long years as a tourist mecca. The fact that the floods are getting worse as sea levels rise, that the foundations and stones aren't getting any younger. That more and more people are moving out of the city (to be honest, I thought this process was much further along: I was astonished at the number young parents bringing kids to school in my sestiere, or little old ladies with carts to carry their shopping. I had expected it to be full-on Epcot by now). You know all these things.

There is a lesson in there. Riding along the Grand Canal, looking at all the grand old palaces that line the waterfront. Many of them are empty, I heard. The conservation restrictions are so stringent, the cost of repair and maintenance so high, the uselessness of your often-flooded ground floor. It is the most splendid facade on earth. And I thought to myself about that day maybe three hundred years from now, when groups of Chinese tourists are traveling through Times Square. Once, I can hear the guide saying, this was the center of the universe. All over the world people saw the plays and films imagined here, read the books written and published here, bent to the will of the financial geniuses who ruled the world from their offices not a mile from here. And the tourists will admire it all, and struggle to imagine what that lost world was like.