Walks with Lorenzetti: Venice, Memory, Tourism

Just as A Partial India was a re-working of my travel notebook for India, so Walks with Lorenzetti re-visits a 1988 trip I made to Venice.  A Partial India and the notes it is based on try to capture the unrepeatable impact of seeing India for the first time.  Walks with Lorenzetti is quite different.  Although it was a particularly intense few days in Venice, it was far from my first trip there.  I brought with me other memories of the city and elsewhere, as well as various kinds of relevant knowledge built up over the years before.

Walks with Lorenzetti therefore goes beyond simply re-working one of my travel notebooks.  It weaves in other major strands, including three of the city's greatest creators and their art: the music of Vivaldi, the paintings of Canaletto, and the writing of Goldoni.  Above all, it follows in the footsteps of another book: Guido Lorenzetti's Venice and its Lagoon, a forgotten masterpiece that deserves to be better-known.  I hope the following pages will help to achieve that.

Foreword

Preamble

Introductory Chapters

The book
The itineraries
The man

The Twelve Itineraries

I - First act: eighth itinerary
II - First night movement: Allegro più ch’è possible
III - First portrait: Antonio Vivaldi
IV - Second act: ninth itinerary
V - Second night movement: intermezzo
VI - Second portrait: Carlo Goldoni
VII - Third act: third itinerary
VIII - Third night movement: capriccio
IX - Third portrait: Antonio Canaletto
X - Fourth act: fourth itinerary
XI - Fourth night movement: finale
XII - Fourth portrait: itinerant biographies

Recollections

The personal tempest

Venice and its Lagoon

Souvenir

Venezia Nuova - sonnet sequence

Pensione Calcina

Picture Postcard

L’Indipendente

San Giorgio Maggiore

La Dogana

Among The Celts

Premises

Canaletto’s House

Walks With L.

Speaking Of Venice

La Tempesta

Invisible Citizen

The Seasoning

Monteverdi’s Flowers

Souvenir

I will thus have helped to make my city more known, which is as much to say to love it more.

Not far from the west end of the Piazza San Marco, in Via 22 Marzo, there was an antiquarian bookshop.  In its window were displayed a number of engravings of churches and I in Venice.  On my last day in the city, driven by an old obsession with these survivors from the past, I went in to take a closer look.

It was like something out of a Dickens novel or a setting for a second-rate film: the archetypal old bookshop in which crucial discoveries are made, or terrible, long-buried secrets revealed.  Around the walls were glass-fronted bookcases.  Within and on top of them, piled up to the ceiling, there were heavy tomes covered in a characteristic orange-brown leather, many of them cracked with age.  There were also numerous prints showing aspects of Venice, mostly of the more popular tourist sights.  The tables and chairs in the room were from a previous age, dark and heavy, with generous proportions and swelling forms.

The scene was presided over by one of those grand old Italian ladies, probably in her early sixties, who looked as if she were a contessa reduced by a tiresome quirk of history to selling off family heirlooms.  Her proud bearing informed you that whatever price you paid for a book or print, it could never be enough to recompense her ineffable condescension in selling it to you.  Her Italian was of such a cut-glass clarity that it seemed you saw rather than heard the words, as if they were chiselled in some fabulously rare marble or basalt which hung in the air before you.  Her name was Signora Liliana Forreto Cassini, presumably the widow of the original proprietor, Giocondo Cassini, whose name the shop still bore.

I asked whether she had any engravings of the Campo Santa Maria Formosa.  Her patrician features softened into a friendly smile; she seemed genuinely pleased that I wanted something off the beaten track, something which would allow her to show her stock’s depth which was otherwise lost on the tourists who, like their forebears, were often rich but indiscriminate.

She dug among tightly-packed drawers and neatly-tied folders until finally she came up with a small collection of engravings of the more obscure corners of Venice.  Among them were two copies of precisely the scene I sought: the church of Santa Maria Formosa and its square.  According to the Signora Cassini, one of the prints was an original from the eighteenth century, the other a later pull from the same plates.  I opted for the latter, which was indistinguishable from the other except for its price.

The artist’s name was not identified on the print.  I assumed it was some anonymous eighteenth century figure.  I asked the woman whether she knew anything about the draughtsman and engraver.  To my surprise she said it was after an original painting by Canaletto, engraved by Antonio Visentini.

Back in England, I began to discover more about the work.  The print of the Campo Santa Maria Formosa formed number eight in the third series of engravings first published in 1742.  There are several paintings which show very similar scenes.  One is in the collection of the Duke of Bedford, at Woburn Abbey; another is owned by the Earl of Cadogan; and a third is in a private collection in Italy.  The exact viewpoint and lighting is different in all of them, and it is the last of the three which seems to be the original of the etching.

The scene is taken from the northern end of the campo, looking straight across at the church and its campanile.  The viewpoint is about twenty feet off the ground, possibly from one of the windows of the building opposite. However, Canaletto habitually painted his scenes from positions which would have been completely inaccessible to him, for example twenty or thirty feet above the Grand Canal, so it would be an unwarranted assumption to suppose that Canaletto drew this exact scene from life.  Canaletto frequently made sketches from the ground and reconstructed the particular viewpoint he needed.  Indeed, a sketchbook in the Accademia contains five views of the campo, sketched right to left, taken from the level of the square.  There are also two drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor which show a very similar scene, but from a higher vantage point.

In the engraving it is a very spacious view, with the campo pushing the buildings to the back and sides of the picture.  The parallels with the last scene in the third series, which shows the Piazza San Marco from the west, are striking.  There is the same head-on view of the church, the same flanking buildings with exaggerated perspective which seem to channel the viewer’s eye towards the facade.  The sense of openness which the broad view of the campo produces is reinforced by the empty expanse of sky overhead: apart from a few patches of light haze, Visentini has drawn his characteristic thin straight lines across most of the sky.

To the left are the Dona and Vitturi palaces.  At the back, next to the church, is the Palazzo Malipiero-Trevisan.  Many of the palaces’ balconies bear pots of flowers.  From behind a shutter in the top corner of the building furthest to the left, a stray curtain blows in the wind.

The church roof is under repair.  There are piles of wood leaning against its eastern apse and on the well-head nearby.  Shops on the left display some of their wares outside.  From Canaletto’s annotations to his sketches, we know that the shops were those of a mattress-maker - a sample is clearly visible in the shop opening - a grocer, a fruitier, a mirror-maker (again with some oval examples evident) finishing up with a rag and bone shop the other side of a small alleyway.  In addition, under the campanile on the right, though barely visible because of its size in the engraving, is the stall of a greengrocer.  Most of these are reproduced with surprising distinctness, a testimony to Visentini’s skill as an engraver.  With its concentration on the everyday rather than the conventionally grand, the view of the Campo Santa Maria Formosa is one of Canaletto’s most intimate works.

Between these shops and across the square, people mill everywhere in what is a surprisingly busy scene - far busier than it is today.  There are 69 people in the picture, more than any of the other engravings in the series except those views of the Campo di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and of the Piazza San Marco.  There are numerous children, and three dogs - one of Canaletto’s trademarks. People cross the campo carrying vegetables; some carry pails to draw water from the central well-head.  A man enters his house on the right, while a young woman on the left looks out from one of the palace windows, perhaps waiting for a handsome young gentleman to bow to her.

Judging by the consecutive pages in his sketchbook, it is reasonable to suppose that Canaletto planned this scene in a single day.  From details in the picture we can guess more exactly the time of year and the hour.  There is a chill in the air: people wear thick cloaks which they hold close around themselves.  Early spring perhaps.  It is mid-morning, judging by the sun, and the shops’ activity indicates a weekday.  We know that the scene was painted before 1742.  It could well have been sketched around 1735, when the first series of etchings came out; as they started to sell Canaletto may have turned his mind to a second series and begun making a few sketches.

In the foreground, in front of all the others, two figures seem to be engaged in a heated conversation.  The man behind, older and in a wig, is talking to the younger man in front who wears a tricorn hat and is wrapped in a cloak.  The latter seems a little disdainful.  The older man is Vivaldi, the younger, Goldoni.  Canaletto has caught them as they cross the square discussing the details of their collaborative opera ‘Griselda’ shortly to produced at the theatre of San Samuele during the Ascensiontide fair.

Canaletto certainly knew Vivaldi; he painted scenery for some of his earlier operas.  He probably knew Goldoni, if only by sight and reputation, since the young dramatist was the talk of Venice as Vivaldi’s comments reveal in Goldoni’s report of their first meeting.  All three knew the Campo Santa Maria Formosa: Goldoni visited the nearby Grimani palace, and Vivaldi was born and lived in the vicinity.  Canaletto clearly knew it.  All three men were in Venice in the spring of 1735.  The conjunction could have happened.

But I am alike indifferent to the scholar’s quibbles and the statistician’s probabilities.  For me, that brief moment one cold spring morning has its own reality.  The abiding facts are that Visentini’s engraving of Santa Maria Formosa hangs on my wall, that I have understood, however imperfectly, the congruent wisdoms of Vivaldi, Goldoni and Canaletto, that I have been to Venice.

When I remember the scene, I do not see the second edition of a competent representation of a little-known corner of Venice, with some conventional and anonymous figures thrown in to populate the composition.  Instead, I see a tiny shaft of light issuing on the left from a narrow alleyway between the mirror-maker’s and the rag and bone shop; the long, narrow street leads to the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, passing on the way over a small bridge set at an angle over a canal which girdles a nondescript palazzo.  I see that light leading from the alley into the campo, in which for one instant, Vivaldi, Goldoni, Canaletto and everything that lies at the end of that alley are caught up together in a unity; and that instant and unity will endure as long as the image of that scene, and these words which are a counterpoint to it, also endure.  Together, they are my memento of Venice.

Walks with Lorenzetti

V - Second night movement: intermezzo

They love to deck out their boat with green branches, and coloured Chinese lanterns, and go singing in the Canalozzo. 

The second night of my stay in Venice, I went to the theatre.  Not ‘La Fenice’, which is used for opera and was in any case sold out; but the Teatro Goldoni.  It lies in a narrow street in the heart of Venice, near both the Piazza San Marco and the Rialto bridge.  Externally, the building is something of a shock.  It is built in the true sixties style, all concrete and steel, and is possibly one of the ugliest pieces of architecture in Venice.  It is hard to imagine what was going through the minds of the Venetians when they constructed this monument to their local dramatist, especially since it is clear from Lorenzetti that they tore down Goldoni’s own theatre of San Salvatore to do so.

There are two ticket offices in the entrance hall.  When I went along there earlier in the day to buy my ticket, everything was in chaos.  Nobody seemed to know which grille was selling which tickets; the queues, such as they were, looked terribly unstable, as if they might collapse into a seething mob at any moment.  All in all, it was a typically Italian scene.

Remarkably enough, that scene was repeated when the doors of the theatre were opened in the evening.  Despite all the queuing, none of the seats was numbered.  As a result, when I entered the auditorium, I was greeted with the extraordinary sight of elegantly attired couples, her in a swelling fur coat, him in an immaculate double-breasted suit, wading into the melee as everyone fought for the best seats.  The hall was soon filled by these means, with some time to go before the performance started.

The interior design of the hall was a strange mish-mash of styles and decorative elements.  Modern in concept, it had boxes at the sides which looked jarringly old-fashioned.  The seats were rust-coloured, the walls and the boxes a horrible green.  Above floated a diminutive chandelier.  At the front was a small proscenium stage with a set which may have been minimalist, but was probably just exiguous.

The play I was to see was Goldoni’s Le Donne Gelose - ‘The jealous women.’  I knew nothing about the plot, and there were no programmes on sale.  As the work started, my worst fears were confirmed: the play was totally in Venetian dialect.  There are few sounds more pleasing to the ear than the gently explosive jumble of Venice’s Italian; unfortunately, for the foreigner, that jumble also means that the individual words are almost completely lost.  As a result, I was forced to watch the play as if it were some mime where meaningless noises were added for sonorous effect rather than for propulsion of the plot.

Needless to say, when I later read the work it bore no resemblance to my own interpretation based on what I saw.  But the situation was not without its charm; I was no longer a passive spectator: I was forced to work on the material before me, to create my own play, to become another Goldoni.  Besides, many of the images were attractive, probably more so for being freed from meaning.  One in particular remains in my mind.  It was night, and most of the cast were masked.  Brightly coloured paper lanterns were hung about the stage.  Everything was quiet and rather magical.  The mingling of commedia dell’arte characters with ordinary Venetians only added to this other-worldly effect.  But one thing I did notice: barely anyone - even among the natives of the city - laughed during the whole length of the play.  A serious business, Venetian comedy.

Walks with Lorenzetti

III - First portrait: Antonio Vivaldi

The famous composer and violinist Antonio Vivaldi

The Ospedale della Pietà was founded in 1346 as a charitable institution for orphaned, abandoned or illegitimate girls.  In 1663 it had over 400 children; by 1738 this had risen to 1,000.  The Pietà was supported by the state and run by a board of governors appointed by the Venetian Senate.  As time went on, it augmented this income by giving increasingly popular concerts in its chapel, until the stage was reached when it had in effect become a musical conservatory.

Naturally there were performances of sacred choral works: among the duties of the music director was the composition each year of a minimum of two new masses and vespers settings, at least two motets each month and other occasional works.  But it was chiefly for its orchestra that the Pietà became famous.  Perhaps as a result of the competition from the other ospedali in Venice which also offered concerts, by the early eighteenth century the Pietà seems to have begun specialising in unusual instruments.  In addition to the normal orchestral complement there were lutes, theorboes, mandolins, chalumeaux, viole d’inglese, psalteries, clarinets and transverse flutes; the last two, though common enough today, were novelties in the early 1700s.

As has been true for audiences throughout the ages, one of the surest ways of pleasing was the showcase concerto.  Regular concerts meant that many such works were needed, including some for the unusual combinations of instruments which the Pietà could offer.  They were provided by the maestro de’ concerti, who was the leader of the orchestra, conductor and house composer.  For some twenty years at the beginning of the eighteenth century, that post was filled if only unofficially by Antonio Vivaldi.

The music of the early Baroque which preceded Vivaldi was based on the solo voice.  Indeed, the creation of the early Baroque style was largely the result of the evolution of opera, itself a rediscovery of the power of the voice declaiming a clearly audible text, with music that follows closely the rise and fall of speech, accompanied by spare and simple textures.  This was in stark contrast to the late Renaissance style which was polyphonic, with thick unbroken textures obscuring multiple and overlapping texts; the emphasis was on smooth part-writing, and there was little rapport between words and music.

In this respect, the traditional labels of Baroque and Renaissance are misleading.  During the three or four centuries these periods encompass, just as for the two which followed, the large-scale stylistic shifts in music tended to occur one or two cultural cycles later than for the other arts.  Nor is this surprising, any more than the fact that literature tended to be in the vanguard.  The composition of music presupposes an elaborate apparatus for its performance.  The cost and complexity of its implementation necessarily make it the most conservative of the arts in terms of uptake of new ideas.  Words, on the other hand, require minimal mediation - a copyist or printing press suffices.  Almost as soon as a new way of looking at the world has been conceived, put into words in the mind, it can be written down and put into words on the page   But converting that idea into music can take centuries.

Thus so-called Renaissance music is in fact the perfect expression of an earlier medieval society: each part is strictly circumscribed both in range and material, compositions tend to be homogeneous throughout their duration, and the overriding concern is with a harmonious whole.  The concept of soloist does not exist except as the topmost level of the hierarchy.

Similarly, early Baroque music represents the first genuine stirrings of the Renaissance spirit in the medium: it is centred on the individual not the group, it prizes passion over passivity, and contrast over continuity - all dangerously subversive ideas in a rigidly feudal world.  Matching its implicit humanism is a new-found and explicit enthusiasm for the pre-Christian era’s myths and history in all their rawness and vigour, marking a distinct break with the previous medieval obsessions with generalised pieties and anaemic hand-me-down notions of chivalrous love.  All this occurred fully two hundred years after the other arts had started to turn their thoughts in a similar direction.

Words provided the natural scaffolding for this anthropocentric style. Without them, it proved hard to write extended compositions, and purely instrumental music lagged behind the achievements in opera, whose peaks included such classically-inspired works as Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo’ and ‘L’incoronazione di Poppea.’  One of Vivaldi’s central achievements was the part he played in the development of extended compositional strategies, and of a viable instrumental idiom in which to implement them.

When he started composing his concertos, it was natural that Vivaldi should draw on the well-established and highly effective tradition of vocal writing.  His earliest works in the form are almost choral in their melodies and textures.  The solo instruments take the place of the singers, while the orchestra supports their line as it would voices.  At the same time, as a virtuoso violinist himself, Vivaldi was able to introduce many strictly instrumental figurations into his music, and so to move away from the purely vocal shape of melodies while retaining their soloistic nature.  In fact it is clear that he tended to think almost exclusively in violinistic terms: even his concertos for wind instruments show the same continuous line, with little thought given for the soloists’ breathing.

Once Vivaldi had established a workable model for this new kind of concerto writing, his duties at the Pietà provided him with daily opportunities for refining it and exploring its potential.  He stripped away all the superfluities of the early Baroque style which tended to clutter the music of his contemporaries, and arrived at the characteristic Vivaldian sound and structure we know today.  It is a style based on the simplest elements of music, on arpeggios, scales, sequences and repeated notes.  In effect, Vivaldi was establishing the basic vocabulary of Classical music, a vocabulary we take for granted today, but one which needed to be extracted from the developments of the seventeenth century, and which was as radical and fundamental for its time as Wagner’s innovations were for his.

Although we tend to think of Vivaldi as a quaint byway in the history of music, his importance is pivotal.  On Bach, his influence is well attested: as a young man Bach transcribed for harpsichord ten of Vivaldi’s concertos, and it is clear how the later composer first built on, then surpassed the Venetian’s achievements.  But Vivaldi’s influence goes much further than that.  His first published set of concertos was probably one of the most important collections of instrumental works of the eighteenth century. Vivaldi largely defined the Baroque concerto as we know it.

More importantly, he had a tremendous impact on those shadowy composers whose works form the transition between the late Baroque and early Classical, the composers who were to create the environment which made the central achievements of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven possible.  In a very real sense, Vivaldi is the grandfather of that Classicism, and it was the unique circumstances of the Pietà which acted as the catalyst in its evolution.

And yet this Vivaldi of the musicologists is not the Vivaldi the world knows.  That Vivaldi is the Red Priest - so named for his flaming mane of hair; it the Vivaldi of the ‘Four Seasons’, the Vivaldi whose music is the soundtrack of Venice.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born on 4 March 1678, not far from the Pietà which was be the centre of his life.  His father was a musician who played in San Marco as a violinist; him it was, presumably, who gave young Antonio his first music lessons.  The future composer took the tonsure at the age of fifteen, and became a priest just after his twenty-fifth birthday in 1703.  For someone of his humble background, this was a sound career move. His association with the Pietà can be dated back to around the same time, when he was taken on as violin teacher.

His first publication, a set of trio sonatas, appeared in 1705, followed by a set of violin sonatas.  His earliest concertos were published in 1711 as Op 3, and bore the inscription ‘L’Estro Armonico’, a phrase referring to the flights of harmonic and poetic invention to be found in the series. The originality is indeed striking.  Where the earlier violin and trio sonatas sound like journeyman works, somewhat conventional and tentative, the concertos of ‘L’Estro Armonico’ offer us the first view of Vivaldi’s emerging style.

Inevitably the set looks both forward to the works of Vivaldi’s maturity, and back to the models it grew out of.  Thus over half of the concertos are written in the form of the old four-movement concerto grosso which alternates slow and fast sections, and pits the full string orchestra - the ripieno - against the lighter grouping of players known as the concertino. The latter are not true soloists: their material is often very similar to that of the ripieno and rarely virtuosic; instead, they act as a dramatic counterpoise to the larger body, and offer the possibility of typically baroque effects such as dynamic terracing, rhythmic intensification and melodic juxtaposition.

The actual thematic material reflects this conservatism.  The figurations are rather conventional, the overall structure episodic and the total effect less than the sum of its parts.  Even the middle slow movements - soon to be a hallmark and highpoint of the mature Vivaldi style - function less as freestanding melody than as rhetorical questions and answers between the two contrasting groups, a kind of musical stichomythia.

At the same time, the Op 3 set does offer four works which are clearly of quite a different cut.  Numbers 5,6 8 and 12 - two double concertos and two for solo violin - are three-movement works, cast in what soon became the norm for concertos of fast-slow-fast.  Structurally they are better organised, melodically they are more economical, and there is an unobtrusive but effective integration between different sections and different voices.  The solo line is more truly soloistic, with the first appearance of Vivaldi’s characteristic wide leaps and across-the-strings arpeggios.  Equally striking are the intense slow movements which have blossomed into arresting cantilenas for the solo violin over varied accompaniments.  The Vivaldi concerto was born.

That breakthrough was consolidated and extended in the composer’s next published work, another set of 12 concertos - 12 would be the canonical number for musical publishing for many decades more.  The most successful and forward-looking of Op 3 moved away from using the cumbrous full concertino group towards the more supple resources of one or two violins; the concertos of Op 4 take that development a stage further by concentrating exclusively on the solo violin.  Once more, there is a sobriquet: ‘La Stravaganza’, a love of the unusual and exciting which could be equally well applied to the composer as to the works themselves.

In Op 4, that extravagance is limited to the violin part itself, now more demanding than ever, and beginning to explore the then limits of the instrument’s technique.  For the rest, the concertos represent a simplification and rarefaction of earlier ideas.

All the Vivaldi fingerprints are there: the powerfully motoric arpeggios, often based around sequences; themes formed from scales or chords; the long pedal notes; the use of the most basic harmonic progressions as musical punctuation, sometimes played in unison by the whole orchestra; the fascination with simple repeated chords played slowly and without ornament, either on their own, or acting as the barest of accompaniments to long, flowing melodies on the solo instrument; the steadily chugging walking basses; a childlike delight in the strength of the dominant seventh chord; the relentless chromatic sinking of the bass-line from tonic to dominant in minor key works; and the consistent use of a style which is essentially homophonic rather than contrapuntal.

Between publishing his Op 3 and Op 4, Vivaldi produced his first opera, ‘Ottone in Villa’.  Together with the concerto, opera forms one of the two poles of his creative life.  The origins of his mature style as a fusion of vocal and instrumental approaches to melody meant that he could move easily between the two.  Of the 50 or so operas we know about, 18 were written for the Sant’Angelo theatre in Venice; the others appeared in Venice at the San Moisè and San Samuele theatres, as well as at Rome, Verona, Vicenza, Florence, Milan, Mantua and elsewhere.

In Vivaldi’s day, it was opera, rather than instrumental music, that offered a route to fame and fortune. Instrumental music was usually printed at the composer’s expense, and unless patronage had been secured in advance therefore represented a highly speculative approach to composing.  Opera, on the other hand, provided guaranteed fees which could be substantial for an established composer.

The operas of Vivaldi which have come down to us are unremarkable as far as their subject matter is concerned.  Titles include many classical subjects, works based on Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’, plus exotica like ‘Montezuma’, and ‘Guinevere, Princess of Scotland’.  Librettists included the omnipresent Metastasio, the popular Zeno and the Venetian dramatist Goldoni.   Although the latter only worked with Vivaldi on two works, the second occasion is of more than passing interest because both librettist and composer wrote under anagrammatical pseudonyms, respectively Grolo Candido and Lotario Vandini.  The fact that the name of a musician called Vandini occurs in the accounts of the Pietà in 1720 has led some scholars to read more into this than coincidence.

Opera was particularly important to Vivaldi, and not just for the financial rewards or popular acclaim it brought him.  Vivaldi seems to have had an extramusical interest in the genre on account of a certain Anna Maddelena Giro.  She became his pupil, and the leading interpreter of the contralto roles in his operas.  Vivaldi once declared that it was impossible to put on a performance of one of his operas without her, since there was no comparable singer to be found.  Evidence other than Vivaldi’s partisanship suggests that she was, indeed, a very fine singer.  Just how partisan he was is an intriguing question, one that takes us to the limits of our knowledge of the composer.

We know, for example, that he travelled for some 14 years around Europe with both Anna Giro and her sister.  We also know that in 1737 the Cardinal of Ferrara refused to let him enter that city, partly on account of his friendship with Giro.  It is hard in these cynical times not to suspect that there may have been some justification for the rumours which were obviously circulating.  But it is frustrating that on such a key issue one which would necessarily change the entire mythology of the Red Priest there can be no certainties.  Against the odd letter or report and lingering tittle-tattle from the time, we have the vast and impressive body of his works which speak directly to us, and act as a powerful advocate of Vivaldi as the sublime and poetic genius dedicated to his art rather than as a fornicating priest who wrote concertos for a living and operas for profit.  The fact that the latter is probably nearer the truth is an indication of how little the music tells us about the man.

It would be interesting to know which of the two categories - instrumental and operatic - Vivaldi prized the most, or would have wanted to be remembered by.  The question probably never even crossed his mind.  Both genres had their attractions: the operas brought him immediate and rather ephemeral fame throughout the main operatic centres in Italy, but it was his published concertos which established his European reputation.

It is ironic that of all Vivaldi’s works, the most famous today should be in many ways the least characteristic.  ‘The Four Seasons’ form the first concertos of a set of 12 published as his Op 8.  As with the earlier Op 3, and Op 4, but unlike the rather nondescript Op 6 and Op 7 sets of violin concertos which followed, the Op 8 set was given a subtitle: ‘Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Invenzione’ - that is, the contest between compositional order and poetic inspiration.  This could easily stand as an epigraph to most of Vivaldi’s works, which combine an enormous fluency and variety of ideas with a rigorous application of Vivaldi’s own brand of the Baroque concerto form.

The collection’s subtitle is a particularly apt description of what Vivaldi attempted and achieved in the first four concertos of the set, now known by the names of the seasons.  These are not the only works with such nicknames: as well as ‘La tempesta del mare’ and ‘Il piacere’, both from the Op 8 set, there are concertos known as ‘Il sospetto’, ‘L’inquietudine’, ‘Grosso mogul’, ‘Il favorito’ and ‘L’amoroso’. But none of these attempts to follow an explicit programme in the way that the first four of Op 8 do.

Those programmes take the form of rather slight descriptive sonnets by an unknown poet, probably Vivaldi himself, printed at the head of each concerto.  Moreover, the appropriate phrase appears over the music which represents it.  Vivaldi’s skill lies in the way he adheres to the simple programme while working within the conventions of the concerto form - a true contest between ‘armonia’ and ‘invenzione’.

The concertos progress from spring through to winter.  Along the way we hear birds singing, dogs barking, fountains murmuring, summer and winter tempests, and the chattering of teeth.  It is fascinating to observe how Vivaldi marshals his favourite compositional and instrumental tricks.  Thus his rapid scales and repeated notes become storms; his languid slow movements depict the calm which comes before them, and the peaceful days spent beside the hearth while the rain - represented by pizzicato arpeggios - falls steadily outside; violin pyrotechnics act out the awkwardnesses of the drunken harvesters, the scurrying of the winter winds, the sudden falls on the ice; and even the athematic, chordal slow movement based purely on subtly shifting harmonies puts in a turn as the deep, porcine sleep of the drunkards.

Just why Vivaldi produced these concertos is a complete mystery.  There are no other works quite like them in his output, and although programmatic music had been produced by many earlier composers, this does not address the central question of why Vivaldi chose to write these concertos in precisely this way at this point.  The whole issue is bound up with a larger question about the creative process itself: what causes work x rather than work y to be written, and what determines the particular artistic path it chooses to follow?

This is a problem which is particularly acute for music, of all the arts. For literature, subject matter provides a ready starting point and structure, as does pictorial reality in representational painting; but music seems to exist outside of any such easy correlations.  Walter Pater recognised this in his famous essay on ‘The School of Giorgione’ when he wrote that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”  That is,  the other arts strive to free themselves from their literalistic roots, to blur the distinction between form and content - a distinction which does not exist in most music.

It is relatively straightforward to understand where a painter such as Canaletto would have found his inspiration for the scenes of the Grand Canal - presumably on such and such a day a particular scene struck him by its compositional possibilities - and what the occasion of such a painting might be - a commission, say, for a ‘typical’ Venetian scene.  Most poets, novelists and dramatists ultimately draw on their own personal experiences, their memories and the knowledge they have accumulated, to provide them with the basis and initial impetus of their works.  But we have no such clear points of departure for Vivaldi’s music.

The operas are easier to explain.  Vivaldi sought commissions, the libretto was often given, as were the requirements of the singers.  He then set about finding music which in some sense matched the words and the scenes and the voices.  Of course the central mystery of where he found that music remains; but at least a framework for its creation can be guessed at.  It is true that works in concerto form were required on a regular basis for his pupils at La Pietà; once more the individual needs of the players would have helped limit the range of compositional possibilities.  But not much.  Each time he set to work Vivaldi would be confronted by the blank music paper with only his past compositions as a guide to where he had been, and as a hint of where he might go.  Each work was potentially the exploration of a new region of his compositional world, a filling in of an empty part of the map.

The greater part of that map - and certainly the most important historically and the most familiar to present-day audiences - is occupied by the concertos.  In all there are around 480 works which can be so described.  The majority of them - 329 - are for solo instruments; 45 are for double instruments, and the remainder are a mixture of string orchestra concertos and those for other combinations of soloists.

Some of those combinations can be quite extraordinary.  The concerto ‘per la solennita di San Lorenzo’ - one of two written for that saint’s feast day - uses two oboes, two clarinets, two recorders, two violins, a bassoon - and a lute in the slow movement.  The solo and double concertos embrace most instruments of the baroque orchestra - violin, viola d’amore, cello, recorder, flute, oboe, bassoon, horn and trumpet.  But the vast majority of the solo concertos - and indeed a significant part of Vivaldi’s entire output - are for the violin: around 220 have come down to us.

Of these, about a third were published in Vivaldi’s lifetime.  After the Op 8 set, came three more collections,  Those of Op 11 and Op 12, like those of Op 6 and Op 7, were probably put together by the publisher rather than the composer.  They are not works of the first order.  Most of them feel like pieces born of contractual obligations, not inner necessity, Vivaldi’s weekly concerto for the Pietà.

Happily the same could not be said about the Op 9 set.  It too bears a subtitle, perhaps indicating that the composer took the same trouble in collecting these works as he did with the other named sets.  Op 9 is called ‘La cetra’ - the lyre - and, aptly enough, a kind of Apollonian ease and mastery pervades the set.  The twelve works represent perhaps the furthest point of Vivaldi’s development in this form.

Not all are of the highest quality; but the last three concertos are as good as anything he wrote.  They are also interesting for the way in which they seem to reach out towards the future.  For example, the final movement of number 10 has a distinctly Rococo feel about it.  Even more striking are the levels of virtuosity demanded.  Rapid execution and extremely high notes are called for routinely - skills Vivaldi himself is known to have displayed to the admiration of his listeners.  Extended passages of arpeggiation across all the strings are also deployed to brilliant effect throughout.

Of the three, the last is the best.  The thematic material manages to be both distinctively melodic and yet highly integrated within the larger design of each movement.  The textures are unusually rich - thanks, in part, to the soloist’s scordatura, the retuning of the violin to allow important harmonies and figurations to be played on the resonant open strings.

But amidst all this wealth, there is one passage in the work which stands out, one which etches itself into the memory.  Towards the end of the first movement, the solo violin starts up one of those figures which are born of Vivaldi’s deep knowledge of the instrument.  It is a wide-ranging arpeggio with a tiny rhythmic kick at the end of each beat.  Its effect is quite hypnotic as the ear locks into its particular pattern which slowly shifts across the harmonies, supported by the steady quaver throb of unison violins and violas in the orchestra.

There is nothing remarkable in this: Vivaldi has used the same device with great success many times, and will use it again in the last movement of this same work.  But on this occasion something extraordinary happens: a melody emerges, a very still and wistful melody played by the first violins.  Supported by the soloist, this tiny line grows and grows, moving with the harmony as the arpeggios slowly shift.  It is one of the longest melodies Vivaldi ever wrote, and one of the most beautiful.  The moment is exquisite in its sense of total equipoise.

It is almost inescapable to regard passages such as these as personal statements.  Indeed, as Vivaldi developed the violin concerto, he seems to have stamped it with more and more of his personality.  Vivaldi was a considerable virtuoso of the violin, and these works delight in brilliant and idiomatic writing for the instrument such as only an accomplished player could produce, and such as the same player would relish to the full.  It is equally hard not to see the frequent adoption of a minor key in the slow movements of these concertos, together with the characteristic solo cantabile line supported by a very simple pattern of  orchestral chords, as further expression of Vivaldi’s deeper feelings.  They indicate a man of powerful emotions, mostly of a melancholy cast.  That they could only really find expression in this coded and covert manner probably goes some way to explaining their existence.

Yet today, listening to his music, it is not so much the man we tend to hear as his milieu.  For Vivaldi’s works seem to speak to us directly of Venice.  But trying to pin down in exactly what this Venetian quality resides leaves us floundering; it is hard enough defining the spirit of a place, still harder trying to translate it into another medium.

At the very least, the hints of an underlying sadness to Vivaldi’s music, especially in his slow movements, chime with many people’s experience of Venice.  There is something abidingly wistful about this city built on water, a city which was once the greatest maritime power in the West, and which now is struggling just to stay above the seas it once dominated.  The glories of its architecture serve only to remind us of what Venice has lost - both in terms of its empire, and the thousands of works of art which fill foreign museums.  And out of season, when the tourists have gone and the bitterly cold wind blows along the narrow lanes and canals, Venice can be one of the loneliest places on earth.  As you walk down those empty streets it is almost inevitable that it is one of Vivaldi’s bleak and forlorn slow movements that comes to mind.

In the end, as with all music, our response to Vivaldi remains a mystery.  But unlike many other composers, including lesser ones, the man, his life and his feelings remain mysteries too.  Insufficiently appreciated in his own lifetime, and soon forgotten after it - though the influence of his music continued - little was thought worth preserving in the way of letters or memoirs of the man.  His figure emerges only sporadically from the darkness which crowds in around the small, weak lamps of history.  When he does step forward, it is only into the half-light.

For example, of the few anecdotes which have come down to us, one stands out for its oddness, its surreal disjunction from the image of Vivaldi we construct from his ordered and often serene music.  Johann Georg Pisendel was a virtuoso violinist from Dresden who was a pupil and friend of Vivaldi.  Once they were walking in tile Piazza San Marco, when Vivaldi broke off their conversation and dragged the bemused Pisendel home.  There Vivaldi explained that he had seen city constables following them, and he questioned the younger man about anything he might have said or done to warrant these attentions.  Pisendel could think of nothing, so Vivaldi went to the authorities for an explanation, and discovered that they had mistaken Pisendel for someone resembling him.  The incident is so strange and pointless that the story is surely true.  It says much about the atmosphere of Vivaldi’s Venice, and gives us a disconcerting glimpse of the man behind the music.

Even our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Vivaldi’s death is frustratingly incomplete.  Often on the move following promises of lucrative commissions, Vivaldi left Venice for the last time in the first few months of 1740.  He then disappears from view until the summer of 1741, when he was in Vienna.  And it was there, in Mozart’s final resting place, that he died.  We still have the cathedral records which list the nugatory expenses of Vivaldi’s funeral.  It is easy to imagine some clerk entering the foreign-looking name of Vivaldi in his accounts book.  As these details show, like Mozart, Vivaldi was buried in a pauper’s grave.

This unexpected link between the two composers is more apt than it might appear.  Goldoni claimed that it was through his collaboration with Vivaldi that he first gained experience in writing comedies and intermezzi which were the forerunners of the Italian opera buffa, which in turn reached its culmination in Mozart’s great trilogy of works.  The case for Vivaldi’s direct influence on Mozart is perhaps less obvious.  It is based on two factors: on the leading role Vivaldi’s concertos, known throughout Europe, took in preparing the way for the Rococo and early Classical forms which led to the creation of the symphony and the symphonic style, and on his achievements in crystallising what we now regard as the key components of the Classical vocabulary.  Without both, Mozart’s music would have been very different.  A world without Vivaldi is a world without ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’, ‘Don Giovanni’ and ‘Cosí Fan Tutte’.

But Vivaldi is important not just as a forerunner, as one who prepares the way for even greater things.  As we now recognise, his body of music is one of the most consistently impressive of the middle Baroque period.  And as anyone who has been to the city will attest, by some mysterious alchemy it also provides us with one of the most enduring though intangible records of his - and our - Venice.

Walks with Lorenzetti

I - First act: eighth itinerary

In this itinerary we cross such characteristic places such as Campo di S. Stefano and Campo Sant’Angelo, and we also see buildings of remarkable interest such as ‘La Fenice’ theatre.

The Museo Fortuny y Madrazo - Ramo and Campiello di Sant’Angelo - ‘La Fenice’ Theatre

Lorenzetti’s eighth itinerary winds through the core of Venice.  It is bounded by the Piazza San Marco to the east, and to the north, south and west by the great loop of the Grand Canal as it turns back on itself before opening out into the Pool of San Marco.  Because of its circumscribed nature, the area seems even more densely packed with incident than the rest of Venice.  The itinerary is notable for the number of theatres it takes in; it is perhaps appropriate that the city which democratised opera and passed its last years in the greatest and most spectacular performance of all - ignoring its imminent downfall - should have at its centre these memorials.

As with all the itineraries, I start in the Piazza San Marco, and strike off down one of the side alleys.  It is as if the Piazza is a smooth, deceptive surface, and the buildings and world which lie around it a vast and complex subterranean city.  The eighth itinerary begins by diving under a narrow archway, the Sottoportico dei Dai.  The past immediately crowds around me: barely visible in the darkness, there is a tablet recording the ‘fraternal help given by the Neapolitan people to Venice during the struggle against Austria.’  The name of the passage, and of the bridge it leads on to, may, according to Lorenzetti, commemorate the game of dice or dadi authorised here in the fourteenth century, or else refer to a Daniele dai Dai who lived here.  It is unlikely that we will ever know; the only certainty is the name which lives on, teasing us with possibilities.

Passing over the Ponte Tron - the Venetian tongue can produce the most un-Italian sounding combinations - I reach in turn the Fondamente, Ponte and Calle Goldoni.  Venice does the eighteenth century dramatist proud: in addition to these streets named after him, the city has erected a statue in his memory.  And yet his contemporaries in other fields such as Vivaldi and Canaletto - both arguably greater artists - barely feature in the cityscape.  Perhaps Goldoni’s vivid depictions of his fellow citizens, the articulation of their daily concerns, and the crystallisation of their language into art has earned him this public gratitude.  From the Ponte Goldoni there is a typical Venetian sight, with canals and bridges criss-crossing into the distance like something out of an Escher drawing.  The light early mist adds its obvious but affecting romance as the successive scenes fade as they recede.

Suddenly the Grand Canal appears before me.  It is easy to forget how much it winds and curves; and in a city without main streets you soon lose any sense of direction.  As a result, Venice can sometimes seem like a nightmare city: whichever way you turn there is no end or exit, only the omnipresent water.  On the Riva del Carbon, named after the coal-carrying boats which once moored here, I arrive at the Palazzo Loredan.  One of the virtues of Lorenzetti is that he helps individualise the myriad palaces along the Grand Canal.  Travelling past them on the vaporetto, you are aware abstractly that each is unique, and yet your experience of them blurs into a glorious but undifferentiated panorama.  Lorenzetti divides this backdrop, rations the richness, and goes on to expose the historical currents which have brought together the elements of art and architecture, the names and the nobility associated with each.

Although a delight to read, Lorenzetti is not always easy to follow with the feet.  Despite walking with the book in hand, it takes me some time to track down the Calle Loredan.  From there I move on to the Ponte del Teatro Rossini.  Built by the Grimani family, who owned several theatres, it was originally the Teatro di San Benedetto, and the largest in the city before ‘La Fenice’ was built.  Demolished this century, it has been replaced by a cinema housed in a rather tasteless modern building.  Nearby, on the other side of the bridge, is the Palazzo Grimani di San Luca, now the Court of Appeal.  It is the occasion of a characteristic touch from Lorenzetti, who cannot resist recommending even the ‘fine bronze door knocker’ as worthy of inspection.

I pass under another sottoportico, not named by Lorenzetti, which smells strongly of rotting vegetables, through several backstreets - but all of Venice is backstreets - to the Campo San Benedetto.  This is a small but surprisingly powerful space, irregular in shape, and crowded in by the high buildings which loom over it,  The church has a plain facade, half hidden by an adjoining decrepit structure.  Next to it is the Palazzo Martinengo; rather eerily, a pediment of the church eats into the front of the palace. Opposite both is the huge and imposing facade of the Palazzo Pesaro, also known as the Palazzo degli Orfei, once the seat of the Philharmonic Society l’Apollinea.  Externally it looks rather forlorn; some of its great gothic windows are bricked up, and an air of desolation and decay hangs over it all.

Despite these appearances, the Palazzo is open to the public, and is in fact a museum, though not in the neat Anglo-Saxon sense.  The Palazzo was bought by a Spaniard, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, who made Venice his home.  He restored the building, and after his death his widow presented the palazzo and its contents to the city in 1956 as a memorial to him.

The entrance is hard to find: hidden away round the corner in a tiny dead-end alley.  It leads to a small, dark courtyard, with high walls on three sides.  The museum lies on the first floor, up a splendid wooden staircase. Huge dark oak beams are visible in the roof; I wonder how old they are: the palazzo was built in the fifteenth century by unknown architects.

The museum itself is locked, so I descend to hunt among the warren of rooms on the ground floor, the original servants’ quarters, perhaps.  Finally I manage to knock up the custodian of the place, a typically sleepy Italian attendant who seems surprised but not unduly annoyed that a visitor has turned up for a museum which is, after all, off the beaten track, and has little to offer in the way of famous masterpieces.  Even Lorenzetti is stumped for much to say about it.  

We ascend the steep and winding stairway again.  The tall door with its old round leaded windows is unlocked, and I am admitted.  Having paid some nominal entrance fee, I am left to my own devices.  As I move through the first rooms, all quite silent, and encounter the crazy collection of objects, it is like entering an old attic stuffed with dusty and forgotten mementos, or like stepping back into the past.  There are Moorish helmets, monumental casts, a huge set of wooden steps, lights with great white umbrella-like reflectors.  Curious lamps hang from the ceiling in the form of damascened shields, but made of cloth.

In glass cabinets, unmarked, are more casts: a miniature version of the Belvedere torso, two copies of Wagner’s deathmask.  Confronted by them, side-by-side, I want to ask “why two?”; but a more sensible question is “why one?”  Venice played an important part in Wagner’s life - as well as writing his seminal work ‘Tristan and Isolde’ here, he also died in the city; but why should anyone want an image of death, not the Wagner who lives on in his music, but the inert form of the flesh he inhabited?

A smaller room off to the side offers a total contrast to the others. Where they were dark and full of heavy hangings, this is light and airy.  It has been painted as a pavilion, with grottoes and views of distant country scenes.  The dominant colour is green, a hue which is almost absent from Venice.  Once you are in the city, you accept its norms; trees and grass are alien here, and you soon forget them.  Which makes this room all the more surprising and disconcerting.  In the corner there is a simple Duchamp-like basin, with a crude tap above it.  All around there are gaudy daubs of old paint; it could almost be a piece by de Kooning.  Above it, as a final touch, is a dried ram’s head, made of clay.  I cannot tell if this corner is a composition, a work of art, or just a chance collocation of an artist’s tools of the trade.

Returning to the main hall, I encounter what I presume is the principal unchanging exhibition, perhaps a hundred brightly-coloured pictures, the majority of them depicting young, naked women.  Amidst the emptiness of the echoing rooms, the quaint artist’s equipment, the pale plaster casts, these images of youth and beauty are almost shocking in their vigour and affirmation.  In an act of great humility, or perhaps great arrogance, none of them is signed, though clearly they are by the same hand, presumably that of the owner of the palazzo.  In confirmation of this, there is a picture in the same style of these very rooms.  It shows an artist’s studio, with heavy drapes everywhere - just as in this exhibition.  Light streams in through an open window.  In the corner of the painting is a grey-bearded man at an easel.

It is curious to behold the scene now as it was then, and yet for there to be such a gulf in time.  Are any of those young models still alive?  They could be.  What memories do they have of this Spanish gentleman who painted them half a century ago?  What was he trying to express in these constant representations of them?  Plastic form?  Evanescent beauty?  Eroticism? What did his wife think of his works - was she jealous, proud, indifferent?  And in leaving the palazzo to the city, did she stipulate, through piety or masochism that these paintings should always be displayed?  Together with the faint odour of the canals, these questions, and hundreds more, hang in the air.

At the far end of the hall, through a door marked ‘Emergency Exit’, there is a bare and dusty room, full of strange objects.  There is a cutaway model of a domed theatre.  In the middle of the room are two indescribable devices which look like a cross between dynamos, phonographs and who knows what.  Lorenzetti refers to a “theatre lighting system” invented by Fortuny y Madrazo and “bearing his name”; presumably these are examples.  Whether they are still used and his name lives on seems unlikely.  Instead, it is only through the occasional visitor to his palace that the effects of his time on earth continue to linger.  For one who was clearly rich, and probably relatively gifted, this is a poor end.  But still better than that accorded to most of us.

On the way out, I notice one painting which is signed; why?  What caused this momentary weakness?  It seems an apt note to leave on.  The custodian locks up after me, shutting this world away.  While I have been inside, he has sat patiently at his wooden table with its exiguous supply of tickets and petty cash tin.

Back with Lorenzetti, I cross the Ponte Michiel and Ponte dell’Albero, under which pass small canals heading towards the nearby Grand Canal. Standing on them I catch tantalising glimpses.  Between the tall walls of the enclosing palazzi, a great vertical shaft of light enters.  It is like a slit cut in a curtain; through it I can see part of the palaces on the opposite bank of the Grand Canal, as well as fleeting images of vaporetti and gondolas.

From there I move on to the Ramo and Campiello del Teatro where once the Teatro Sant’Angelo stood.  It was here that most of Vivaldi’s operas and many of Goldoni’s earlier comedies were first performed.  Today it is just a space.  It is hard to relate its silence with the excited and chattering crowds which once must have filled it.

Passing along the Fondamente Narisi, I see another unexpected vista: a view of two bridges and, more mistily, Santa Maria Salute in the distance.  Then I reach the Campiello Novo o dei Monti, raised up some two on three feet above the surrounding streets, perhaps because it is built over a churchyard.  In the Piscina San Samuele, is the Palazzo Querini, decrepit and easily missed.  A tablet commemorating the young Francesco Querini who died during an expedition to the Pole ends rather gloomily with the thought that his death “reminds us that no human enterprise is glorious unless born of sacrifice and suffering.”  Nearby, another disturbing sign, though for a different reason: it says ‘Europa Driving School.’

In the Salizzada San Samuele I find Veronese’s house, which looks for all the world as if it had been built a few decades ago.  Reaching even further back into the past, I search out a tenth century well-head in the Calle Conner, only to find that I am trespassing on someone’s private land.  Since all of Venice is a museum, it is easy to forget people still live there.

Lorenzetti points out a fourteenth century relief of the Shoemakers’ Guild which bears their emblem - a shoe.  It sits quietly above a doorway in the Salizzada, making no fuss about its six hundred years, telling nothing about what it has seen.  Were it not for Lorenzetti, it would probably have been chiselled off by now.  His words, which began as a memorial to the details of his city, now act as their preservative.  Just as it did two hundred years ago, tourism today sustains Venice; and the visitors demand that Venice be constant, a repeatable experience.  Lorenzetti is the bible of that unchanging Venice, the touchstone of its durability.

The Campo San Samuele is a small space opening onto the Grand Canal, with a fine view of the Palazzo Rezzonico.  These small spaces are disorienting because they stop at the water’s edge: you cannot proceed as you would elsewhere in Venice; they are a reminder that the city is bounded.  San Samuele itself is striking: a fine Romanesque church out of place surrounded by all the Venetian Gothic.  Its facade reminds me of that of Saint-Germain-des-Prés opposite Les Deux Magots in Paris.

Turning back into the small alleyways, I search in vain for the Calle del Teatro where the Teatro di San Samuele once stood.  Another theatre owned by the Grimani family, it was here that Vivaldi and Goldoni briefly collaborated in one of those intersections of great artists’ lives which seem so remarkable to us, but which were probably of little importance to them.  The theatre was destroyed at the end of the nineteenth century, and now its location has become for me one of Lorenzetti’s missing places, present in his world, preserved in the aspic of his words, but for the moment absent from mine.  Passing on over a couple of bridges, I reach the Church of San Vitale.  Normally this is approached from the Campo San Stefano as you make for the Accademia bridge or vice versa; coming upon it in this way emphasises again how Venice is everywhere connected against expectations.

Today the church is in a rather sad state, its Palladian facade decayed and grimy, its doors locked.  It was a great shock to me when I realised that this was the site of the famous ‘Stonemason’s Yard’ by Canaletto in London’s National Gallery.  It is one of those images which has been with me since my earliest years.  I have memories of a reproduction of it on the wall of a teacher’s or headmaster’s study.  At that time I was more struck by the general scruffiness of the scene than by its greatness.  Later I was able to appreciate its poetical handling and sense of atmosphere.  But even then, I was still not reading the picture correctly.

For example, no matter now many times I saw the image, I did not register the presence of water.  Instead, I saw the stonemason’s sheds and the distant church joined by some indeterminate patch of land - at that time I did not know that there is no such thing as a patch of land in Venice: everything has been allocated, every use is deliberate.  Somehow my eyes overlooked the gondolas.  It was only much later still, after my first visit to Venice, that I realised that Canaletto’s picture showed what is today the Accademia gallery; the painted scene was hard to relate to reality - even though little else of substance has changed - because the most obvious element, the bridge, was missing.

Lorenzetti spends some time in the Campo San Stefano, which he clearly regards as the high point of this itinerary: he heads the whole chapter with an illustration taken from Visentini’s engraving of Canaletto’s view of the same.  But I pass through it quickly, stopping not even for the musical instruments formerly in the institution of the Pietà, where Vivaldi worked and was responsible for looking after the string collection.  I do try and see the church of San Stefano itself.  Unfortunately I get there just as it is closing - 11.30 a.m. - and so I am deflected from my itinerary by external forces.

I pass on to the Campo Sant’Angelo which offers a quietness normally only found in the smallest courtyards, and which belies its grandeur and expansiveness.  The Campo lies close to the geographical heart of the Eighth Itinerary, and hence to the centre of Venice.  As its emptiness demonstrates, most tourists are unaware of its existence; preferring to pass along the main thoroughfares from the Piazza San Marco to the Accademia bridge, they are in fact only a few steps away from a world that is quite different.

As you might expect, there is a fine labyrinth of streets and canals around here: the Ponte Storto, Calle Caotorta, Rio Menuo, and the Sottoportico San Cristoforo, giving on to the back of ‘La Fenice’ theatre.  Once more, I am thwarted by officialdom: the theatre is not open, so I am unable to view its “aristocratically luxurious” interior, or the monument to Goldoni by the splendidly named Luigi Zandomeneghi, who crops up a number of times in Lorenzetti’s meticulously researched book.

Zandomeneghi’s work occurs, for example, in the nearby Ateneo Veneto, commemorating even more obscure Venetians.  And in his lovingly complete description of the church of San Fantin, Lorenzetti himself preserves the name of another who might otherwise have slipped into oblivion.  On the left side of the church, beside the door, there is an annunciation by Cesare delle Ninfe, the “only known work by this artist” according to Lorenzetti.  Sad to think that a lifetime’s work, the long and hard apprenticeship, the constant struggle for commissions, the even greater struggle in the act of creation, should be reduced to these few words, together with the equally terse ‘second half of sixteenth century’ accorded to delle Ninfe in the Index of Artists at the back of Lorenzetti’s book.

Nearing the end of my first and Lorenzetti’s eighth itinerary, I move on through regions with increasingly extravagant names: along the Calle degli Assassini, over the Ponte della Cortesia, down the long, narrow Calle della Vida, as if I had entered into an allegory, to see the famous ‘snailshell’ staircase of the Palazzo dal Bovolo, which itself is like something out of a fairytale.  I look at it across a tiny, improbable garden - with grass - before boldly entering the public building, passing through a couple of barred but unlocked gates, and ascending the wedge-shaped turning steps for a way.  Close up, a staircase turns out to be a staircase; I return as I came, and content myself with a distant but more satisfactory viewpoint.

Then following Lorenzetti, I pass back along the Calle, Ponte and Fondamente Goldoni, to the Piazza San Marco.  In all, 64 points of interest are distinguished during the course of the eighth itinerary; but for Lonenzetti a point of interest may be anything from a twisting staircase to a masterpiece of a church steeped in history and filled with hundreds of works of art.  His simple enumeration cannot hope to encompass all the sights and shifting viewpoints along the way.  Nor does it try to; Lorenzetti’s work is notable for its matter-of-factness, its refusal to rhapsodise.  Perhaps this is the only possible course for a writer of a guide to the most seductive and vertiginously beautiful city in the world.

Walks with Lorenzetti

Foreword

This is not a guide book to Venice.  It is a guide book to a guide book, a translation of Lorenzetti’s Venice and its Lagoons into a cityscape which the reader is invited to explore, as Lorenzetti’s book invites the tourist to explore Venice.  It is also a partial record of my own encounters there.

In the same way that Lorenzetti’s book can be read and enjoyed without knowing Venice, so I hope that it will be possible to read this book without knowing Lorenzetti.  But the experience of Venice inevitably illuminates and vivifies Lorenzetti immeasurably more than the book, great as it is, does the city.  Similarly, direct acquaintance with Lorenzetti may help the reader to follow my paths through his work.

The epigraphs to each chapter and the quotations are taken from John Guthrie’s English version of Venice and its Lagoons published by Edizioni Lint Trieste.  I have translated the excerpts from Goldoni’s memoirs and plays.  The bare facts of this work are derived from countless books and, above all, from Lorenzetti.  The errors are my own.

I wish to thank here all my family and friends who directly or indirectly have made this work possible, and with whom I have spent such memorable times.

Glyn Moody

Walks with Lorenzetti