The Itineraries

Each location, each  reference, as it was noted was checked individually on the spot by personal inspection in the various places.

In Lorenzetti’s book, the itinerary is all-pervasive.  Not only do the twelve explicit paths through Venice form the bulk of the work, the general principle of the itinerary runs through the rest of it like a hidden thread.

The idea was a stroke of genius, at once obvious yet audacious.  Lorenzetti wrote a book which said: turn left and you will see a beautiful building; walk on a little further, and you will find a church,  He took tourists by the hand and guided them.  Hitherto, travel books had done anything but that: they did not guide, they rambled loquaciously over a certain physical, historical and artistic region.  If most of the principal sights of a town were covered, it was in no very systematic way.  Lorenzetti’s achievement was to take the huge and rich collection of experiences we call Venice, and to weave them into a tapestry of brilliant colours and - most importantly - bold designs.

In this, he was undoubtedly aided by the city itself.  Nowhere else in the world is so much concentrated into so confined a space.  It is as if by some miraculous form of cultural osmosis, the lagoon itself has leached out of the myriad islands which make up Venice all trace of mediocrity or ugliness, leaving only a sifted sediment of masterpieces. As a result, it is not only easy to find adjacent works of art, it is almost impossible not to.  Every building has an equally interesting neighbour, every church has a famous campo, every canal two or three historic palazzi.

Lorenzetti’s task, then, was to select from all the possible routes past these masterpieces, and to construct a path which was both coherent and practical.  After all, however much the itineraries may smack of artistic surfeit, they are intended as realistic and useful.  If we find them too demanding, it can only be that we belong to a race of cultural dwarfs after one of giants.

The choice of the Piazza San Marco for his first itinerary was easy.  It is not just physically the centre of the city, the largest open space, but has long been the historical centre, where secular and sacred sit together in artistic convocation, the ducal palace and the procuratie alongside the ducal chapel of San Marco itself.  Moreover, both of those two main buildings offer such a wealth of art within their confines, that if the tourist could see nothing else, visiting them would provide memories enough.  So rich in fact are they, that Lorenzetti not only provides one of his characteristic little fold-out maps of the whole itinerary, but he also offers four others showing the internal disposition of the buildings.

Thereafter, with the exception of the final itinerary, he remains committed to the Piazza San Marco as his starting point.  But granted this pivot, in the second itinerary Lorenzetti ranges as far away from the circumscribed world of the first as he possibly can, perhaps offering a contrast to the claustrophobic examination offered there.  Now the tourist is encouraged to stride out right to the easternmost tip of the main island.  The accompanying map seems to partake of this vertiginous foray: the red, spidery line of the path veers madly away, almost out of control, until it is finally reined in and returns to the safety of the Piazza San Marco.  It is almost as if Lorenzetti had not yet learned how to curb the powerful concept of an itinerary: it charges away and is barely saved from a headlong dash into the lagoon itself before Lorenzetti finally masters it and brings it back home.

Perhaps in reaction to this, the third and fourth itineraries are more compact again; they delight in diving through mazes of tiny backstreets.  After showing us the macroscopic scale of Venice, Lorenzetti seems to be concentrating on the almost invisible details, on the microscopic life it exhibits.

More confident now, Lorenzetti takes off on three more wide-ranging walks in the fifth, sixth and seventh itineraries.  Moreover, none of them ends up back at the Piazza San Marco.  Instead, like children who have learnt to cross the road, the tourists are allowed to take the vaporetto back to the landing stage outside San Marco.  The map of the seventh itinerary is notable for the number of canals indicated in addition to the thin red line.  Hitherto, the plans have sketched only brutally truncated forms of the canals; from now on, we are allowed to see a little more of that other logic which underlies the city.  Once more, it is as if Lorenzetti has grown to trust us with this extra knowledge, this extra responsibility.

Appropriately enough, after all these far-flung excitements, the eighth and ninth itineraries stay nearer home: the former investigates the very kernel of the city, wrapped around on three sides by the Grand Canal, while the ninth restricts itself to the equivalent region on the opposite bank.

The tenth and eleventh itineraries explore the remaining region so far untouched.  The latter concentrates on that area encompassed by the first of the two great oxbow bends which go to make up the reverse ‘S’ of the Grand Canal, while the former takes a long path through the southernmost part of Venice.  The map of the tenth itinerary is noteworthy for the way the appearance of part of the island of Giudecca makes the Grand Canal look like some subsidiary to the Giudecca Canal below it - as if the Venice we know had been embedded in a larger, embracing one.

Lorenzetti’s last itinerary is another master-stroke.  Perhaps poking gentle fun at our new-found mastery of his paths through the city, he concludes with one that is particularly challenging: the twelfth itinerary requires the tourist to walk down the Grand Canal.  One problem is that such an itinerary involves two paths, one along each side of the canal.  Lorenzetti solves this by the simple expedient of using the left-hand pages of his description for the left-hand bank, and the right-hand pages for the other.  Each spread’s facing pages mirror the facing banks.  The map of the Grand Canal itinerary is also striking: with its numbers running along both sides, it resembles an anatomical drawing of some giant segmented millipede; its legs are the stubs of the canals which empty into it

Given the itinerary’s origin in a desire to impose form on a dizzying profusion, the walk along the Grand Canal is the logical conclusion. Just as each itinerary is like a thread which binds together a series of sights and objects, so the central cord of the Grand Canal binds together each of them into a larger fabric.  It is a fitting end to Lorenzetti’s grand design; but he still has much to tell us, and the obsession with itineraries grips him still.

Even before the twelve formal itineraries, Lorenzetti had preceded them by three others: the first an itinerary through the idea of Venice, the second through its history, and the third through its art.  Now he follows those twelve named itineraries with yet more: some which wind their logical and unswerving way through the art collections of Venice, room by room, picture by picture; still others which sail out into the lagoon, taking in successively the islands of San Michele, Murano, Burano and Torcello.

At Murano, the old urge to embark on a codified walk re-asserts itself: pointing out that Murano is curiously similar to Venice in its general aspect, Lorenzetti uses this as an excuse to provide another mini-itinerary, complete with a small, and rather half-formed map.  Once on Torcello, he admits defeat: so little is left on this island - a street, a piazzetta, and the glorious but lonely cathedral - that even he cannot conjure up an itinerary from it all.  Just as the islands in the lagoon seem to be fainter and fainter echoes of Venice itself, so the itineraries they give rise to fade away to nothing.

As if exhausted, almost admitting defeat, Lorenzetti makes his final itineraries covert and disguised: the obsessive indexes, that is, walks through the alphabet, new ways of ordering the information he has already gathered, explained and structured.  Aptly enough, this great work of paths and directions closes with that ultimate itinerary, that walk through the itineraries themselves, the General Index.

Walks with Lorenzetti

Preamble

For the love of my city I have gathered these pages

As I stepped out of the Santa Lucia station and saw Venice for the first time, it was like recalling a memory I had never had.  In the early morning sunlight, under the clear cold sky, the green dome of San Simeone Piccolo stood out amidst all the browns, reds and yellows of the tiled roofs, and the Grand Canal’s broad band of water bent glassily away into the distance. The more I looked, the more I seemed to recognise - so deeply have the images and elements of Venice been woven into the fabric of our civilisation.  A world without Venice, like a world without Shakespeare, is unthinkable.

As a result, it is hard to see the city for itself rather than as an assemblage of set pieces.  Initially, Venice deconstructs into your previous knowledge of it.  Fuller understanding and appreciation come only as your experience of the city re-enacts its complex history of accretion and connection.

This is not easy.  At every turn, the mesmerising allure of the city’s beauty compels you to stop and stare.  But to stare is to remain a captive of the arresting image, and of your preconceptions which conditioned it. To gain a deeper knowledge you must move on: you must walk.  Walking builds the two dimensional views into the three-dimensional city.

Providentially, Venice is a city built for walkers: within its compact confines, people set the scale for everything.  Confirming this, you find that there are no broad highways in Venice; whatever the name - whether called ramo, ruga or salizzada - they are all narrow streets and dark alleys. Though straight, they are short and doglegged, so where you are going, or where you have come from, always remain hidden.  In Venice, even the shortest journey is an adventure; perhaps it is no coincidence that the greatest explorer of all, Marco Polo, was a son of this city.

Without motorised vehicles on its streets, an eighteenth century air prevails, almost as if the Venetians had tried to stop the clock of history during the endless carnival of their last giddy heyday.  Then, as now, the city existed for its tourism.  Today, without that age’s carts or wagons, Venice is a place of eerie near-silence,  The loudest noises are human: the porters’ occasional warning cries, the crowd’s muffled hubbub, the constant dull ringing of heels on the paving stones.

This is one Venice, a labyrinth of backstreets.  But there is another, the Venice of the waterways. 

Water is the defining element of the city: imagine Venice with its canals filled in.  Throughout its history, the city has been wedded to the seas by more than just the symbolic marriage ceremony which was carried out annually by the Doge.  A millennium and a half ago, the water which washed around the mud flats in the lagoon was a defence against the hordes of invaders on the mainland, and the initial impetus for the birth of the city.  Surrounded by the element, Venice bred sailors and navigators, who soon formed the backbone of a formidable navy.  With that in time came power, then empire, then wealth.  The glory which we gaze on in Venice rose from the city’s watery origins.

Its form was shaped by water too.  Pressure of space on the hundred or so islands which make up Venice dictated that buildings were high and contiguous, and reached to the water’s edge; gardens were soon an unconscionable luxury.  Today, excluding the public parks to the east, the number of trees in Venice is so small they could easily be counted.  The numerous campi, once true fields surrounded by houses, are all now paved over.  With time water has added further marks of its dominion.  Over centuries, the action of air and moisture has smoothed sculpture and stained stone, until the entire fabric of the city has become an enormous canvas on which water has laid down its masterpiece.

The intricate grid of canals provide Venice with its other streets, broader and better suited for transport than the earthbound ones.  Motor launches excepted, they are even more silent.  Ranging from the rii, the narrowest streams hidden away between high palaces, through the workaday channels along which the barges filled with fruit or refuse or furniture pass, up to the greatest of them all, the Grand Canal, which slices the city in two like a twisting dragon, the canals form one great network, over which is superimposed another - that of the streets and alleys - with hump-backed bridges marking like knots where the two threads cross for a moment before passing on their different ways.  Combined, they spread an intricate cat’s cradle of paths across the city, binding it together so successfully that in the place of an archipelago you see only an island.

In this city without direction or differentiation, there are two landmarks which are signposted everywhere: the Rialto bridge, and Piazza San Marco. They are the twin poles of the city.  The one represents commerce, the other the state - San Marco was originally simply the chapel to the adjoining Palazzo Ducale.  Wherever you walk, you will come across the characteristic yellow signs indicating the way to them.  Often it requires an act of faith to follow.  They are widely spaced; the alleyways down which they lead you are small and lonely; there are no shops, just high walls with closed doors and shuttered windows; there are no fellow travellers.  Persist, though, and eventually you reach a larger street. Follow it, and the growing crowd, and suddenly, you have reached the Rialto.

Like the city, the Rialto bridge is hard to see for what it is.  The subject of countless paintings in the past, and co-opted endlessly today as a easy emblem - of romance, of Italy, and of Venice itself - the image is so overlaid with associations that the physical reality disconcerts.  For what was the only bridge across the Grand Canal for centuries, the grimy stone structure with its decaying lockup shops - looking like a row of suburban railway arches thrust up and bent in the air - is bathetic.

Shabby rather than splendid, it is, above all, functional, allowing three streams of traffic to pass, and was once able to cope with even the tallest ships’ masts at high tide.  This clash between expectation and experience is representative of all Venice: what for us are key and symbolic images imbued with dense historical references are for the Venetians just scenery.

If the encounter with the Rialto bridge is fraught with cultural baggage, how much more so is the first sight of the Piazza San Marco.  In part the impact is so powerful because in an anomalous city the Piazza is itself an anomaly.  Even its name is unique: every other open space in Venice except the nearby Piazzetta is called a campo.

As you enter the Piazza San Marco through one of the galleries which flank it on three sides, the sudden sense of space and of sky is a shock.  Elsewhere in Venice you are conscious of the omnipresent walls which shadow and rear up around you.  Their constant embrace adds to the sense of the city’s intimacy, which, like all unremitting intimacies, can border on the oppressive.  Here, in the Piazza, it is as if Venice had peeled itself back, as if the buildings had suddenly fled, leaving you alone in this huge, yawning space.

The architecture conspires in this effect.  Although on one level an act of typical imperialist barbarousness, the destruction of the church of San Geminiani at the west end of the Piazza - ordered by Napoleon to allow the design of the loggie to be continued all the way round - showed an acute sense of architectural dynamics.  The apparent uniformity of the converging loggie makes them into a kind of visual vice, squeezing you down to the eastern end to confront the ultimate goal of the tourist: San Marco and its majestic campanile.

The perspective of the loggie, abetted by the linear design of the paving, throws the eye onto the ornate richness of the cathedral’s facade.  The horizontality of the Piazza, itself breathtaking enough in this city of undulating pathways, is then negated by the huge vertical stump of the campanile.

To the south of the cathedral, part of the Palazzo Ducale can be seen, the gentle flush of its pink facade peering round the base of the campanile. The visitor’s gaze and footsteps are alike drawn to it.  As you approach, the Piazzetta appears, a miniature version of the Piazza, and with it the basin of San Marco.  Beyond, lies the unreal vision of San Giorgio Maggiore, a church on the waters.  As you walk past the two columns of San Todaro and the lion of St. Mark, up to the water’s edge where the rows of gondolas are tethered to a forest of bleached poles, the water slapping their black sides, once more you are assailed by doubts about the possibility of relating this unique and well-known scene to your ordinary steps which brought you there.

The Piazza San Marco, the Piazzetta and the Riva degli Schiavoni are the most famous images in this city of famous images; but the miracle of Venice is not just that such scenes exist, but that any random path will map out a trail rich in historical associations and architectural and artistic treasures.  No other city offers this protean ability to compose itself for each visitor.

To experience the city is to wander through it, taking in every house and alley.  When we remember other cities, we remember the highlights.  Venice is all highlights.  To recall Venice faithfully is to recall our paths through it.  For the perfect tourist, memories of Venice would become co-extensive with memory.

No wonder then that the city can itself seem like memory.  Its many wandering paths which connect every campo, calle and canal are like the hidden paths within our minds which link together all our knowledge and experiences, forging what we call our life.  Venice has its secret corners which we find, then lose however much we search, only to chance upon them again some day when they strike with a combination of familiarity and freshness, just as a long-submerged image will surface with a vividness which astounds us.  It has those perfectly composed vistas, tantalisingly visible across a maze of canals and bridges, but without any obvious path to them.  They hover like names on the tip of our tongue, or like anchorless memories, evoked by a smell or a taste, frustratingly present but ungraspable.

On my first trip to Venice, I was converting the famous images I had inherited into personal memories.  In the process, I discovered countless other sights that would be uniquely mine, because they were determined and created by my experience in walking round the city.  When I returned, it would necessarily be a different Venice I saw, one which now carried the overlay of my previous visits.  The unchanging views of the city would act as fixed points between which I could start to thread a complex web of knowledge and memory.

The pattern of that tapestry would be profoundly affected by one further element, a book about the city, which itself was the product of a dense interplay of knowledge and experience.  That book was Giulio Lorenzetti’s Venice and its Lagoons.  As I read it for the first time, it was like stepping out into another new but familiar Venice.

Walks with Lorenzetti