Venice: Boats, Bells, Beads, Vivaldi, and a Little Lion

The mystery of the water; being always lost within it, in what can only be thought of as labyrinth.  Alluring wrong turns and dead-ends, retracings and decipherments intricating every journey.

Fog on the canals late at night.  A city already unreal partly erased.

The edgy masked and cloaked figures in wait, alone, outside the lighted doorway of a shop, ahead of you, unmoving, as you enter an otherwise deserted alley.  Mannequins—or not?  The confraternity of Carnivale.

The delight of finding something, suddenly, of looking up and finding yourself unexpectly just where you had wanted to be.

The bell to welcome the morning.  A low bell tolling, steadily, on and on, at first light.  As if summoning you from dreams, or in warning:  acqua alta, mass, a birth or death.

A boat piled high with bags of linens from one of the canalside
hotels, spilling out a skein of sheets.

Glass beads, gilded or milky, like a rosary of quiet pleasures.
Though I lose mine somewhere among the Etruscans later, the idea of them is with me, slipping through my fingers; the ghost of them in an earlier picture.

Vivaldi in a chill palazzo, with the usual elaborately painted
ceilings high above our chairs, escaping the reaches of the dim old electric lights.  Being let in oddly a few at a time, to climb the flights of stone stairs to where the instruments are set out for the concert.  The tickets I have ordered from across the world allow this view back, to another age.  Vivaldi where he lived and taught.  The music at its source; a spring, welling.  But there are concerts everywhere—Vivaldi in every church on every piazza.

At the Ca d’Oro, on a great stone balcony above the Grand Canal, the grumpy stone lion with a big raindrop hanging on its chin.



—Christie (February 2007)