Venice Untour, Fall of 2004
by Sandra Kohler & Walter Hagenbuch, Selinsgrove, PA
NOTE: Those of you with Internet access can experience this trip log with its “better half”: Walt’s photographs from the trip. Go to http://walt.horde.org where you’ll find “Umbria” and “Venice” folders.
INTRODUCTION:
Our arrival in Venice was by car, because we were coming on from an Umbria Untour. We left our apartment in La Bruna at dawn on Wednesday October 20th for the drive to the Venice airport, where we returned our rental car and joined a group of Untourists met by Denny Jennings, our contact person. The drive was long but relatively easy, and in the early afternoon we found ourselves aboard Untourist’s hired launch, nearing the San Marcuola vaporetto stop, where we were met by Henrique, our landlord’s representative, who led us to the Casino apartment.The Casino lives up to its high rating by Untours; it was a luxuriously spacious, convenient and elegant apartment. (See Walt’s photos at http://walt.horde.org !). As to its location, we found it delightful. We were a short block from a main street in Cannaregio, Rio Terra San Leonardo, a pedestrian boulevard lined with restaurants and shops of every description, coffee bars with outdoor tables at almost every corner, and stalls selling fruit, vegetables, fish and other goods. We were only about three blocks from the vaporetto (water bus) stop, our main means of transportation aside from our feet.
Reading my Venice journal, I’m struck by the fact that on the evening of the day we arrived, we were already talking of wanting to spend a month here sometime. Strange as it sounds, Venice was love at first sight for both of us on this trip. It was also much more a unified experience than our Umbrian stay: we traveled to different places in Umbria, but in Venice what we did essentially, whatever the particulars of our activities, was to experience Venice. Another way of saying this is that we were travelers in Umbria, visiting different places almost every day, despite living at Casa Rossa; in Venice, despite eating most of our meals (except breakfast) in restaurants, and despite our typical tourists’ attempts to take in as much as we could digest of the riches of art Venice’s churches, palazzos and galleries offer, it seemed as if we were living there. Some of this had to do with the size of Venice and the accessibility of the apartment: we could spend the morning in one part of the city and come “home” for a nap or a few hours’ reading and resting before going off to someplace else. And some of it had to do with the Venice street life that I will try to describe in this trip log.
This log won’t be a day-by-day account but an attempt to describe our stay through some rough (and overlapping) categories: a city of water and walking, destinations, music, aqua alta and a Brunetti walk.
A City of Water and Walking: Calles, Canals, People
Imagine a large and sophisticated city without a single motor vehicle: no cars, buses, motorcycles, none of the fumes or noise or competition for space in the streets they bring with them. I kept being reminded while walking in Venice of what it’s like to walk a city or town when its streets are blocked off for a festival or street fair of some kind, from the annual Market Street Fair here in Selinsgrove to Super Sunday in Philadelphia. Venetian streets (called calles) are full of life, energy, a festive atmosphere, a great variety of things of interest almost as a matter of everyday routine. There were many tourists, but except at the most famous attractions like Saint Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco) or the cathedral and ducal palace there, there were really not crowds of them. On the main streets of Cannaregio and on the vaporetti we used constantly there was always a mix of Venetians and foreigners. We heard lots of English as well as Italian, but also lots of French and German, along with more exotic languages. We also found on some of our walks narrow calles where for blocks we hardly saw another person, never mind a crowd. And by the way, what a delight it was to be in a city where one could walk anywhere, at any time of day, without hesitation or nervousness (except for the fear of getting hopelessly lost!).Venice is a great city of the world, but it is really a small place. One can walk from one end of it to another in a matter of a few hours (and this in a place where there are no such things as nice straight through streets). One of my favorite adventures was a walk from our apartment in Cannaregio to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Dorsoduro (another sestiere, at the opposite end of the city) on a day when the vaporetti were on a 24-hour strike. I did this alone, because Walt was trying to nurse a bad cough (the one negative factor in our Venetian experience) and because he is less interested in modern art than I am. Despite my map, I lost my way several times (there is no such thing as a map of Venice with all its calles on it), but never went more than a few blocks wrong before figuring it out again. It took me almost two hours each way, along with an hour of walking around the Guggenheim itself, and I was tired and footsore by the time I got back to the Casino apartment, but I felt as if I’d seen almost the whole city on my peregrinations: an amazing variety of kinds of building and calle and canal.
Negotiating those canals was (except for the day of the strike) a part of our everyday life. Forget the romantic and schmaltzy image of gondolas and gondoliers. Vaporetti are cheap and practical; though at times they offer wonderful and leisurely views of the day or night city, they can be as crowded as a New York City subway at rush hour. Being able to hop on and off them at any stop made for spontaneity and flexibility in our plans each day. We were amused to see that dogs were allowed, and touched at noticing how even during crowded times people in wheelchairs or those pushing strollers or prams were given help in getting on and off the boats as a matter of course.
One more crucial element of “street life” for us was people-watching. There were two cafes on Rio Terra San Leonardo, a stone’s throw from our apartment, and we learned that sitting outdoors at one or the other, especially for an hour or two from 5 p.m. on, was a rich source of entertainment and pleasure. We started to recognize some of the passers-by because they took regular daily “passegiatas” (strolls) at this hour; one memorable grouping was a woman who looked to be a frail 90-some supported between two chic young women – her granddaughters? – greatgranddaughters? – strolling first in one direction and then back each evening. Walt took his camera along for some of these sessions and captured some of what made them so rich for us. This main street was also a route for political demonstrations, some of which Walt photographed.
Cafes and people-watching lead me to the subject of restaurants. The food in the restaurants we went to in Venice was not as good as that in Umbria, despite costing more. We didn’t go to the highly recommended expensive restaurants, however (but neither did we do that in Umbria). Despite this we had some delicious meals and good experiences. Two restaurants close to the Casino apartment, Benti Godi and Antica Mola, were very good and yet affordable. Antica Mola boasted a headwaiter who reminded us of the legendary waiters on New York’s Lower East Side: he treated some patrons with a grandmotherly combination of warmth and iron rule, telling you what wanted to eat and disregarding what you happened to think you wanted. We returned there several times and enjoyed the experience as well as the food. Antica Mola was also the kind of restaurant where you are seated at large tables along with strangers. We had some conversations with our fellow diners there that added to the interest of the experience. The best meal we had in Venice, however, was actually out of Venice: at Ristorante alla Fornace in Malcontenta (a suburb of Mestre, on the mainland), which Untours contact person Denny Jennings and her husband Luigi own and run. We had a wonderful lunch there, well worth the trip..
Destinations: The Ghetto, Churches, Scuoles, Galleries; Two Lagoon Excursions
Some of our fellow-Untourists in Umbria seemed a little dubious when we told them we were planning two weeks in Venice: would there really be enough to do? In our two weeks, we scratched the surface; it’s hard to imagine exhausting the city in two months or two years. This chronicle will also skim the surface so as to avoid exhausting its readers. In a way, we neglected the “biggies” in Venice in order to see places that were more accessible and more easily “taken in” on a single visit. Though we went to San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale those visits left us feeling we’d scarcely done them justice, though overwhelming us with impressions. Other destinations, including some almost as well known as these, were richly rewarding. Walt’s photographs (http://walt.horde.org ) capture details of art and architecture, including that of Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square), that I won’t try to write about. I urge you to view them.On the day we discovered the vaporetti were on strike, we spent a morning visiting the Ghetto in Canareggio. We took the Jewish Museum’s tour of synagogues open to the public and found it offered both insights into history and aesthetic pleasure. It was also moving to see the two monuments, one to all the victims of the Shoah and one to the Jews of Venice who died in it, in the Campo Ghetto Nuovo. We ate lunch nearby at a kosher restaurant, Gam-Gam, which offers a fusion menu of Middle Eastern (Israeli) and Italian food, well prepared and appealing. What was startling to us though was to find the restaurant had connections with the followers of the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachim Schneerson, believed to be the Messiah by many of his disciples in Brooklyn and elsewhere.
It would be overwhelming to list all the churches and works of art that we saw in Venice; I will have to settle for a brief sketch of those which are most vivid in my memory. From the overkill of the green marble imitating swags of fabric on the altar in the Gesuiti to the utter simplicity of the tiny chapel on the Desert Island of San Francesco, Venice has a church for any taste. For me it was individual works of art, mostly paintings, that were especially striking. In Canareggio, two nearby churches (which together make a pleasant walk), San Alvise and the Madonna dell’ Orto, were notable, respectively, for charming medieval paintings that Ruskin called “baby Carpaccios” and huge powerful Tintorettos. We spent a morning in the San Polo sestiere, visiting I Frari and the nearby guildhall, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. I Frari has one of the loveliest Bellini altarpieces in Venice (another is in San Zaccharia, and yet a third, painted when he was 82, is in San Giovanni Grisostomo), as well as a spectacular Titian. The Scuola Grande di San Rocco has been described as Venice’s Sistine Chapel, with its huge rooms of walls and ceilings painted by Tintoretto over a quarter of a century. This enormous and imposing guildhall is a sharp contrast to the comparatively modest Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, but the latter guildhall is a jewel not to be missed: here one finds Vittore Carpaccio’s exquisite cycle of paintings on the life of St. George. Carpaccio’s name may not be as familiar as that of Titian or Tintoretto, but his painting of St. George slaying the dragon is probably the one in your mind’s eye when you think of that subject. Carpaccio’s paintings, whatever their ostensible subject, are all “set” in Venice, infused with the light and life and architecture of the city, wonderfully detailed and alive. For me Carpaccio was the discovery of the trip, as far as artists went. His paintings at this guildhall and the series on the life of St. Ursula in Venice’s great public art gallery the Accademia were extraordinary delights.
The Accademia is another inexhaustible place. Interestingly, it is not crowded despite being on any list of “musts” in Venice’s guidebooks. I visited twice, once alone and once with Walt, and could have gone back repeatedly. Carpaccios and Bellinis were probably my favorites there. Two rooms stand out: the room with Carpaccio’s paintings of the life of St. Ursula and the one with paintings by different artists of scenes from the Legend of the True Cross. We also visited Ca D’Oro, a palace turned art gallery close to the Rialto, and I went to the Peggy Guggenheim, as I mentioned, where Rene Magritte’s painting “The Empire of Light” struck me as as beautiful and spiritual as any I’d seen on the entire trip. And then there was the very different spirit of Marini’s equestrian statue, “The Angel of the Citadel” in the Guggenheim garden, saluting the Grand Canal with raised arms and erect member.
Statues of a more sober caste were also among the art works we enjoyed, both in churches and in campos (squares) where we often came upon them unexpectedly, as we did that of Paolo Sarpi, Venice’s great intellectual priest, a friend of Galileo, whose arguments for the separation of church and state have led to comparisons to Luther. Sarpi’s monument stands just off the Strada Nuova, an enormously busy shopping street leading to the Rialto Bridge.
I am passing over many other works of art, including San Marco itself, the amazing cathedral, but I have to mention one group of works that were striking and strangely emblematic of Venice to us. In the Museo dell’ Opera of the Ducal Palace we wandered through a forest of columns from the loggia of the palace, carved with figures representing all the categories known for describing the world: people of different races, ages, cultures, sexes, all the different crafts, the months and seasons, the zodiac. These columns were parts of the structure of a building which represented the Venetian state; they suggest an empire not xenophobic but inclusive, an empire with claims not to what Venice controlled but to all that it drew in, drew on, explored, traded with, traded in, touched, reached.
We made two excursions to islands in the lagoon during our stay: the first to Torcello, the second, an Untours special event, to the Desert Island of San Francesco. Torcello is described in guidebooks as a hidden gem, but the gem has been discovered (perhaps because of all the urgings to get off the beaten path and go see it). The vaporetto that took us there did get somewhat less crowded as people got off at Burano and Murano, but there was still a large group that embarked at the rather dismal pier that greets you at Torcello. And as it approached the cathedral, Santa Maria Assunta, which is the destination of visitors, the road was lined with souvenir sellers. But the cathedral with its spectacular mosaic is well worth the trip. The cathedral itself dates from the seventh century, and most of the mosaics in it from the twelfth and thirteenth, though they have been restored in the nineteenth. The spirit of this church seemed quite different from any other we saw in Venice.
That can be said also of the chapel on the Desert Island of San Francesco, which can only be reached by private transportation. Our Untour-arranged visit to this shrine provided not only Denny Jennings, our contact person, as guide, but a charming old Franciscan monk who took us through the monastery. The original chapel was supposedly founded in 1220 by San Francesco (St. Francis of Assisi) himself when his boat ran aground on the island. Not long after, his followers established the monastery, an enclave of simple buildings, cloisters and lovely gardens, with wonderful views of the lagoon and Venice. One of our fellow Untourists described our Franciscan guide as “speaking Italian using English words” because his accent was so thick; nonetheless he communicated the story and purpose of this retreat very well.
Music:
Venice is Vivaldi’s birthplace, and we’d heard that his music was played regularly in the churches. There were posters all over town advertising various concerts. We chose somewhat blindly but it turned out happily, going to the deconsecrated church of San Vitale (which boasts a Carpaccio altarpiece) to hear Interpreti Veneziani, a chamber group. They performed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a J. Sebastian Bach concerto for pianoforte and winds, and the Andante e Rondo for contrabass and winds by Domenico Dragonetti. We’d never heard of Dragonetti, an 18th century composer born in Venice; that piece was an unexpected delight. Since our return we’ve ordered a quartet of the group’s CD s from their web site.The other concert we attended was even more of a stab in the dark. While searching for a restaurant one day, we noticed a poster in a café window advertising a production of Rossini’s Barber of Seville. We decided to take our chances. The performance was in the huge main chamber of another of Venice’s guildhalls, this one the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista. We weren’t even sure whether it would be a full performance or a concert opera; we were delighted by a production, superbly acted and sung, and imaginatively staged, by a young yet polished troupe, of an opera we love.
Aqua Alta and the Brunetti Walk:
As our time in Venice grew shorter, we decided that we had to take a “Brunetti walk.” To explain: for the last couple of years, Walt and I have been avidly reading the mysteries of Donna Leon, set in Venice and featuring a Venetian policeman, Dottore Guido Brunetti, as protagonist. We’d begun to realize that the restaurants, bars and shops mentioned in the books were actual ones, and wanted to experience Brunetti’s Venice if we could. But the day on which we planned to set out for this walk began with another Venetian adventure, one which provides the title for one of Leon’s books: Aqua Alta. High water – we’d heard of it, we’d noticed that the tides varied and the height of the waters in the canal varied with them, we’d even seen some puddles in low spots in the street outside the Casino apartment, but we had no idea what to expect on the Sunday morning when we heard the sirens which alert Venetians to this phenomenon sounding long and loud. We were comfortably ensconced in our apartment eating a typical Italian breakfast of “cornetti” and caffe latte, watching the water gradually rising in the street outside, and the more or less inventive methods of people attempting to negotiate it without soaking their feet. By sheer luck I glanced at the vestibule near the front door in time to notice that water was beginning to seep under the door. We rescued the shoes and the umbrella stand, and then began to watch in earnest to see just how high the water was going to get inside our apartment. The rest of the apartment was a step up from the vestibule: a step measuring exactly 18 centimeters. The water crested at 11 centimeters, and to our relief the tide began to go down. We were “marooned” in our apartment for a morning. We learned afterwards that this was one of the highest “high waters” in Venice in a long time; 80% of the city was flooded and even the vaporetti had to stop running because the water in the canals was so high they couldn’t get under the many bridges that they run beneath.We made a start on a Brunetti walk after the aqua alta receded, then continued it the following day, having equipped ourselves with the outlandish “emergency boots” street vendors were selling – something resembling plastic bags on a sandal-like sole that you put on over your shoes and which came up to mid-thigh. We didn’t want to lose another morning to being housebound. (You can see these beautiful garments in Walt’s pictures – wearing them is a sure way of identifying yourself as a tourist).
The walk, like almost any in Venice, provided unexpected vistas, pleasures and serendipitous finds. We found the Questura where Dottore Brunetti worked, the street where he lives, his favorite florist shop, Biancat, one of his favorite cafes, Rosa Salva, a favorite bar, Ai Do Mori (but were too footsore to have a standing meal, which was all that they offer), and Campo Manin (named for the great Jewish Venetian patriot Daniele Manin, who was a leader of the 1848 revolt against the Austrians), the square where in one novel, Brunetti’s wife Paola throws a stone through a plate glass window (with good reason!).