Venice-Art-Tours Blog

Venice in Winter

There can be no better time to live in Venice or to visit Venice than in December, January and February (Carnival, New Year's, Befana excepted). The weather now is cold and crisp. The water is low, so no threat of acqua alta. The tour groups and cruise ships are elsewhere. At night, when the delivery boats are long gone, and when walking down a narrow calle or crossing a small bridge, you could easily be back in time, whether 1595, 1795 or 1895. The mask, jewellry, and glass shops are empty and/or closed. Venetians are out and about enjoying their city with the small amount of tourists who wisely come at this time. Vaporettos and traghettos are never crowded, people have longer fuses, mountains of garbage are not seen, and shorts,T-shirts and sneakers are gone from view. "Students" don't congregate outside bars till 2AM making a racket.

With the exception of New Year's Eve, when 35,000 inebriates and fellow-travellers crowd S Marco, the winter here brings home to me Pound's lines and James's thoughts about Venice:

"O God, what great kindness have we done in times past and forgotten it, That thou givest this wonder unto us, O God or waters?" (Night Litany)

"It is a fact that almost everyone interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another... to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it, treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository of consolations; all of which today, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give."

Happy New Year

                                                                                                               

    

Music in Venice?

A few days from now Babba Natale will arrive laden with videos, hand-held electronic gadgets, gameboys (or its newer equivalent timewaster), mobile phones, Blue Tooth attachments, etc. But also with a starter oil paint set in case there's a budding Tiziano out there or maybe a junior sized violin or organ for the next Vivaldi or Monteverdi. I truly hope so, this city could use some good music.

This was the city of Vivaldi, Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Galuppi, Albinoni, and lots more. But you'd never know that from the music you hear in Venice. Every (and I mean every) restaurant, bar, shopping centre, glass shop, coffee bar, many hotel lobbies, and most public areas play a horrendous rock music (know as musica italiana) which often incorporates features of hip-hop and crap-rap. It is sad. One oasis of civility is a bar on the Strada Nova near Ca D'oro where the proprietor plays opera, bravo! That's the only one I know. 

In addition, the Fenice opera house, recently rebuilt after the fire, is mostly dark. And when it is lit, oh-oh. Since opera in Italy is government supported, i.e., no private sponsorship, the quality and frequency of operas is generally low. The Fenice appears to me the worst managed of the historic opera houses in Italy. Unions control things here, and, at a performance of Parsifal two years ago, as the lights dimmed we were expecting an overture; instead, we got a speech of 20 minutes (in 3 languages) from the musicians union's representative about the responsibility of the government to provide more funding...for the musicians. When the opera finally commenced, we were shown a completely empty stage: no sets, no nothing except the principle singers. For some unfathomable reason, the dancers/chorous were completely nude, covered in white makeup, but hiding nothing. Opera glasses quickly came out. We left during the beginning of Act II, went to a local bar which played junk music, and we lamented what they had done to Wagner.

       

Venice blogging

Dear Venice afficionados,

And on a quiet day, God created the Blog and saw that it was good.

My wife (lauriegraham.com) has been blogging for almost a year and I am ashamed to say that I was envious. Of course, she is a professional writer and has an outlet for her writing in her novels, radio plays, newspaper columns, pantomimes. Whereas I do not, until now.

This blog will attempt to provide a gimlet's eye view of Venice, where we have lived for over seven years. I will touch on its beauty, it bureaucracy; its art, its dinosaur politics; its sensual living (I hate the word lifestyle), its grossness and excess; its tourists, its tourist problems; its history, its commercial archaisms.

As I write this at 18:00 the bells of S Pantalon, the Frari, and the Carmini are sounding simultaneously, undoubtedly drowning the bells of the slightly more distant churches. A few years ago we travelled to Cambridge (UK) for Holy Week to attend services in our old parish. On Resurrection Sunday morning in Cambridge there were ...no bells ringing, none, zilch, tranquility base, shhhhh!, dead silence, zero. Apparently vicars and priests have caved in to complaining residents who like the Sunday morning lie-in. Or it's possible that the English Church does not wish to offend the sensibilities of non worshippers with a reminder of Christian belief. Or even its worshippers' sensibilities. I don't know, but I can tell you what happened here a few months back when Pope Benedict was elected. The moment the white smoke appeared from the Vatican, every campanile in Venice (and I'd say all Italy) rang out gloriously and continuously for 2 hours or more. Venice has about 150 church with 40% of them still active. It was a lovely racket. It is now 18:15 and and the bells are at it again. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we love Venice.