Then there is the plane flight with its attendant miseries of shoeless passengers pushing clear sacks of shampoo and diarrhea preventives before them like the damned, the inevitable flight delays (our pilot had to be driven from Boston to New York!), the queuing for narrow berths, the airline food (if a square yellow piece of plastic can be called an egg), and eventually the arrival with its joys and wonder. There is the travel itself and the negotiating of a new landscape and in some cases a new language. With enough time, there is the homesickness for familiar routines; co-travelers may find the mismatch in each others' strategies and plans; eventually there is the return with its attendant miseries and delights.
Somewhere there is the acknowledgement that the trip has ended, the vacation is over and the real stuff of life re-emerges.
I am there. The plastic sacks of bandaids and three ounce tubes of toothpaste have been stowed in the bathroom cabinet. The laundry has been done and travel clothes (most of them anyway) put away. Herb is back in Boston though he inherited a flu-like bug from me on my last day in Venice, and he has spent much of the last few days under bedcovers. I have loaded my share of wood back in the boxes beside the wood stove, and am sharing its heat with our beloved cat.
We were lucky to have someone who loves animals and is skilled with house care stay here while we were gone. There was snow (12 inches or so) and cold (14 below zero), and it was calming to know that the systems were being attended to and the cats were not licking themselves raw with anxiety -- something that our Ed did on our last extended trip away.
But truth to tell, Venice seems very far away in ways that have little to do with the complications of travel or the efforts to figure out how the snow blower works. I find myself wanting to hold a bit of the magic of a landscape without cars; of omnipresent water, and transportation by foot and by boat. I find myself listening for the languages of fellow tourists who walk the narrow streets in shared amazement at what they see. Herb spent a major chunk of the camera chips on taking pictures of people taking pictures of each other with Venice as a background. But there is a sense of wonder that pervades the city, and as our friend Grazyna has said, it is like walking inside a work of art. I find myself repeatedly wishing that I could paint; words seem inadequate, though they are all that I have...so to wit, a portion of the random memory list from my mental journal:
The beginning:
We arrived at the airport, and rather than finding a rental car or a train, we walked about ten minutes from the terminal on brick pavers to the "bus" in the form of a vaporetto or ferry that would take us the 1.5 hour trip along the Grand Canal which bisects Venice, to our stop a block from the apartment we had rented on a piazzetta shared with the Swiss consulate. It was indistinguishable from other buildings in the neighborhood, other than in its signage and the painted ceiling rafters visible through the window at night.
To arrive by boat would have been amazement enough, but the trip to and along the Canal was a stunner. Cormorants dry themselves atop channel markers, their wings outspread, like mythological guards to the gates.
Ancient buildings (many shuttered from the precipitous drop in residential population) breast the water's edge. The famed Piazza San Marco with its basilica and the Doges Palace challenge Palladio's Il Redentore for attention. And everywhere there are boats and black gondolas that list to one side, designed to accommodate a gondolier who rows only from the right side stern position.
We arrived at our "bus stop" (the Zattere) in the sestiere (neighborhood) of the Dorsoduro, the vaporetto driver assisted us in dragging the suitcases onto the landing, and we thanked him in Italian! (Grazie mile Mr. Pimsleur for your help!) We walked beneath a sortoportego or archway tunnel through the joint between two buildings, to our quiet piazzetta. These archways are omnipresent parts of the streets, and make it possible to walk between, beneath and through buildings.
The nature of the street form is still surprising to me... the narrow calles that were at their widest two person's shoulder widths from building to building, and in many cases, too narrow for an open umbrella to be held upright.
They wound through Venice's streetscape and connected innumerable piazettas, many with "just another" church of no particular distinction, but each with its own beauty and its own congregation, though some have been transformed into storage facilities for archives of the local church or government. There are innumerable cafes and we learned early from our friend and guide, Grazyna, to avoid the cafes on the piazettas for the ones on narrow streets, which were less likely to have a menu turistico and food geared to those who were not likely to care enough or be there for a second visit.
We made our initial discoveries of the barriers at doorways to keep the water out during aqua alta (high tides) that can raise the water two feet high on all the streets. There was a canal at one end of our calle (street), where a boat was tied up, loaded with bags of what appeared to be laundry. There are no service trucks here and any merchandise must be transported by boat and a heavy metal rectangular wheeled cart.
The result (I suspect) is that while there are many dogs in Venice and they are welcome in restaurants and in the public square, almost all are small terrier types that can easily be carried, when needed, and that don't require the transporting and stocking of twenty pound sacks of food. Like their Italian owners, most seemed affable if not enthusiastic about our attentions. None responded to the kissing noises and high pitched baby talk that are common solicitations to play between American humans and their pets.
I was struck by the bells that seemed to ring inside each other with one beginning while another was still sounding and ending each in its own time. They seemed to bear no relation to the time of day other than beginning on the quarter or half hour.
I was struck by the weather--which was comfortable on all but one day; the fogs that came in at dusk and shrouded morning sun, the filtered light that lit sections of cupolas and warmed the air on sections of piazettas while the calles stayed cool--something that must be welcome in heat drenched Mediterranean summers.. I was struck by the stone paving everywhere, the layers of wood and tile and stucco and marble on every building...and by good inexpensive house wine at every meal, and branzino and langoustine for lunch and dinner, and closing times for the stores from noon to three or four, and by the switch from a sense that all things were grey and sage in the landscape to an awareness of brilliant color in the Fortuny silk scarves skeined like hanks of silk yarn in a shop window, to paint pigment in another, sacks of dry beans, pointillist heads of radicchio, and shop cases of magenta meats (including horse meat) in the arcade market in Padova.
There was an hour spent with a forcole maker (the black walnut carved supports that a gondolier uses for his oar) and his assistant who wanted to know where we were from and asked if there were many "beers" there. "Yes," we replied laughing--"many craft beers are made in Vermont." "No! I meant...how do you say?...bears!" "Yes, and catamounts," He was confused. When we explained they were like small mountain lions, he described them to his master as "piccolo lions". And there was the young woman in the pharmacy who responded when I asked for a cold cure: "Do you have a rainy nose?"
But I have gone on too long....There will be more to come and H will have his own observations to add. This much is clear....From a place of sensory delight - even overload - I have returned to a land of white snow and charcoal trees. There are no bells ringing here, but there is a cold that is palpable. I can feel in my back muscles, the bags of wood for the fire, as I felt my knee aching from the climbs up and down stepped bridges at Accademia and Rialto and hundreds more.
These are the markers of how a place changes us. We learned that we could not navigate by means of street names, but rather by a body sense of directions and diagonals, between piazzettas and canals. Our days were shaped by mulled wine and the rich Italian layer cake of past and present; by a sense of what is visible and of what is possible.
There is a tradition in Venice that we were happy to join. People hang padlocks from the railings on the bridges - most seem to be on the famed Accademia bridge. They are markers of the intent to return. They are markers of some portion of oneself that is left in this miraculous place.
We inscribed ours with a silver pen and hung it on the 7th bracket from the Dorsoduro end of the bridge. We hope to see it there when we return. But for now, our padlock hangs from the trees of home, here, and what is visible is a horizon line of mountains and maples where the sap for maple syrup may be starting to rise.
No comments:
Post a Comment