XII - Fourth portrait: itinerant biographies

I make no claims whatsoever that my work is free from errors, deficiencies or inexactitudes.

Lorenzetti’s last itinerary is rather different.  All are collections of noteworthy sights, arranged into convenient paths.  One obvious grouping is the great sequence of constantly varied masterpieces along the banks of the Grand Canal.  Clearly these works had to be included in any conspectus of Venice; and yet access by land would be immensely long and tedious.  Lorenzetti’s solution, a metaphorical walk down the Grand Canal, is an apt compromise and fitting conclusion to the whole series.

But even by such initiatives Lorenzetti was not able to encompass everything he wanted to include, still less everything the city has to offer.  He therefore adds at the back of the book chapters on the major art galleries, the lagoon and its islands, even information on the nearby mainland.  His knowledge continually spills out beyond the confines of his self-imposed structures.

Knowledge and experience are ever thus, refusing to fit neatly into the predetermined shapes of science and art.  Much of the artifice of art lies in accommodating this inchoate experience in as compact and coherent a form as possible.  Lorenzetti’s book exemplifies both the power and the problems of that accommodation.

Lorenzetti’s itineraries do not purport to be exact records of his own experiences as he created and travelled round them.  They are composites, built up from years of research, years of painstaking investigation on the ground.  By contrast, my own itineraries as I followed in his footsteps are essentially literal reports of what I found and felt as I walked with Lorenzetti on successive days.

But not quite literal.  Just as Lorenzetti himself was forced to relegate some of his experiences and knowledge to a twelfth chapter, and still more to later, unnumbered sections, so I too have incidents and experiences which, for various reasons, are not contained in my descriptions above.

First of all there are the large-scale re-arrangements.  Life makes no allowances for the Lorenzetti walker.  Churches hold services, galleries are closed, and other quotidian details prevent you from following the master as literally as you might like.  For example, I went on my second tour - the Ninth of Lorenzetti’s itineraries - in the afternoon of the day I followed his Eighth.  The Accademia gallery was closed by the time I got there, so I went the next day.  Similarly the Gesuati church was not yet open.  By the time I had continued with my walk and returned to the Gesuati, the church of La Salute was closed, and had to wait to the following day too.

On that same first day another important deviation from the Lorenzetti path occurred.  When I arrived on the Zattere and found the Gesuati closed, I decided to go across to the Giudecca.  I had often stared across at this ghostly vision, this thin strip of land floating uneasily on the waters.  As I took the vaporetto, I was struck by just how wide the Giudecca canal is: it felt quite unnerving leaving behind the safety of Venice proper.  Moreover, I have had this lingering distrust of vaporetti, as if they were possessed of mischievous minds of their own, ever since one took me far away into the lagoon only hours before I was due to leave Venice.  It had all felt so symbolic.

Now, however, I found myself on the fondamenta of the Giudecca, looking back across at the Zattere.  It was a very strange experience, seeing those familiar sights - the Dogana, the Doge’s palace and the rest - so far away.  It was as if I were in some doppelgänger world, parallel to yet separated from the other.  Moreover, by some trick of light or perspective, that distance seemed to increase the longer you stared at it, as if the two side were drifting apart.  I was surprised to learn from Lorenzetti that Michelangelo lived here for a while during his exile from Florence. Somehow it is hard to imagine the ultimate exponent of the hard outline surrounding flat tints in this city of soft edges and peacock colours.

I went into a tiny café there, its minimalist decor offering odd juxtapositions: a garish photo of San Giorgio Maggiore, a faded print of Italy’s football squad, a pennant for Florence, and a still-life oil painting.  The clientele were similarly dour: old men with thick glasses and stern-faced women, one with mad eyes clutching huge blue boxes.  They stared suspiciously and silently at this invasive tourist.

Afterwards I went east further along the fondamenta to the church of Il Redentore - another church in commemoration, this time of deliverance from the 1576 plague.  The facade is very like that of the nearby San Giorgio Maggiore, unsurprisingly since they are both by Palladio.  But this is a cooler version, not so aggressively thrusting as the other.  From its steps the facade is particularly impressive as the edges of the pediments throw deep shadows.

The interior is completely different from the austerely classical S. Giorgio.  Il Redentore looks homely and comforting.  The fact that it was Christmas, and there was an ornate crib with candles and lamps everywhere, and saccharine Italian hymns playing softly in the background, added to this effect.  It was also dark now, so Palladio’s design slipped into the shadows leaving only a general feeling of warmth and a safe space.

I went outside again into the dusk.  I passed along to the church of Zitelle, which was closed.  The facade looked like derivative Palladio, flat and without energy.  The view from here was stunning: San Marco lit up but half obscured; the Dogana glaring with its golden ball; La Salute rising proud at the end of the Grand Canal; L’Ospedale della Pietà illumined too.  San Giorgio Maggiore had been lit with an eerie glacial glow, and now floated on the black waters; tiny pink lights appeared along the Zattere and Riva degli Schiavoni.  The bells of the city were ringing: not peals but four distinct notes, played according to some impossibly complex rhythm.

On that same eventful first day I also visited the Peggy Guggenheim gallery.  On previous trips to Venice I had sought in vain for this collection which is hidden away around the back of La Salute.  It was a pleasure to find it now, and not just for the sense of satisfaction its final discovery gave.  It was warm, and after a morning and afternoon spent wandering a bitterly cold Venice, such warmth was welcome.

It also offered a much-needed cultural respite.  My eyes had surfeited on ancient images cargoed with history and meaning, so the sight of Jackson Pollocks with all their abstract energy and disregard for representation came as a relief.  At the same time, their intricate web of lines seemed at one with the city’s own fine mesh of alleys and waterways.  It refreshed my exhausted senses - so much so, that I returned here the next day too, for much the same reason.

The Guggenheim collection was situated on the Grand Canal.  From its galleries you could walk out onto a small balustraded area and watch the boats pass by.  But this grandstanding of Venice and of material and artistic wealth also had its melancholy side.  As well as the permanent collection there was a temporary exhibition of photographs showing Guggenheim herself with famous twentieth-century artists.  She looked desperately unhappy.  Even with all this art, all this visual namedropping, even with this collection to preserve her name, the photos said she was living a sham, that her collecting like that of so many other great collectors was obsessive and defensive, and that her great public munificence was born of a terrible personal loneliness.

On my last day, after following Lorenzetti’s fourth itinerary, I went to another collection, that in the Correr Museum.  This is one of my favourites.  First, its location along the south side of the Piazza San Marco means that the view from its windows alone is worth the price of admission. But more importantly, this is a museum of Venice’s past: it is Venice’s memory of itself.

As if to emphasise the continuing relevance of that past to the present, at the start of the museum there was a painting of the city made around 1650; barely a building has changed.  A little further on, I was greeted by another image which seemed strategically placed, a striking ‘Portrait of Amedeo Svajer’ by Antonio Canova.  The subject weighed around 30 stone, and had what looked like a skinned rat on his shoulder.  In its monstrous secularism it offered to my eyes a pointed contrast to the thousands of pinched and worthy images of saints which fill the churches of the city. This was, after all, the civic museum.

There seemed little overall organisation to the place, which only added to its charm, to the sense that it was a kind of artistic lumber room for the city.  Each room seemed to have a theme, but any links between successive rooms and themes were recondite, relating perhaps to ancient and arcane mysteries.

One room was full of superannuated lions of St Mark, another had nothing but portraits of apprehensive looking Doges - with their wigs and hats they looked like sheep in fancy dress.  Yet another displayed row upon row of commemorative coins, a sight made the more melancholy by the sense that each of these thousands of coins had been cast specifically to preserve the memory of a notable person or event; now, people and events had been reduced to fading words on dusty and yellowing labels.  A room was hung with ranks of third-rate madonnas, redundant in this city filled with masterpieces on the same theme, but touching because of their redundancy, their third-rateness, their exile here like cloistered gentlewomen.  One of the final rooms was filled with cases of Urbino maiolica, the unforgettable blues and yellows and greens falling peacefully like a balm upon the eyes.

My other major divergence from Lorenzetti occurred in the morning of my last day.  I had been wandering around the back of the Accademia Gallery, in a part of Venice which is picturesque, but which attracts few tourists.  I was walking without any real goal, and without Lorenzetti, when I found myself by San Pantalon.  Passing along the salizzada of the same name, I came to the church of the Tolentini.  It had been around just here that I had stayed during my second trip to Venice.  I looked along the doorways, and there, just as I had remembered it, was the entrance to the Locanda Stefania.

I recall many years ago ascending the long narrow staircase to the top floor, and entering through double doors to the reception area.  There was a heavy, late middle-aged man with thick grey hair who showed me his one remaining room, a tiny single costing 10,000L.  The use of opaque green glass everywhere made the locandia very light and rather cold, and lent it a sub-aqueous air, as if submerged in a canal.

Finding the locanda was hardly of great moment to me, unlike revisiting the foresteria near Santa Maria Formosa, where I stayed during my first visit to Venice, which unleashed powerful emotions. But it did offer a further link with my past, strengthening the feeling of continuity in this city, the sense that nothing is ever lost here, that every memory is held and endures.  Finding the locanda was like discovering and opening up a casket which had been buried years before, and retrieving small, personal objects of no great value in themselves, but interesting because of their unlooked-for survival.

These, then, were the places I visited outside Lorenzetti’s itineraries. They were part of my biography, but were not assimilable in his larger scheme.  Just as important to me were the places which I did not visit this time, but which figured strongly in my personal mythology of the place, and whose absences I regretted.

Chief among then was the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.  For anyone passing along the Riva degli Schiavoni, it hovers as a constant presence across the waters.  The first time I went to Venice, I was soon drawn out to it, taking the No.5 vaporetto from one of the cluster of floating stops a little way along from the Ducal palace.

It is a strange feeling being marooned on that small paved space in front of the church.  There is always the momentary fear that the boat will not come back.  The sight of the church’s interior is enough to dispel such minor considerations.  It must be one of the most perfect buildings ever created in terms of the balance of its constituent parts.  The lack of ornament contributes enormously: everything is smooth surfaces, clearly articulated spaces and cool colours.  In this context its physical isolation outside becomes an inevitable correlate and extension of a spiritual one inside.

It comes therefore as something of a relief to ascend in the lift to the top of the campanile, away from all this control and rigour.  The view from here is one of the best in Venice.  You look across to the set pieces of the Ducal Palace, San Marco, the Piazza; you see the whole of the city laid out before you like a map.  The varied hues of the roofs, the oranges, the browns, the reds, the yellows, create a rich quilt of colours which is spread over the city.  Dark grooves seem to be cut in this cloth, tell-tale signs of the criss-crossing canals below.  From up here, Venice looks like neither a city of streets, nor of canals; it is of a third kind, which is related to both, but distinct.

Where the Isola S. Giorgio to the south of Venice seems to be watchful, with its vigilant bell-tower keeping guard over the city, the Isola San Michele to the north - which I also did not visit - seems to be quite apart, ignoring all that happens there.  San Michele is the island cemetery of Venice, a kind of deathly version of the city: where everything there of ordinary life happens amid the unreal world built on water, so here death too operates as usual, but in its own watery world.

The isolation is reinforced by the high wall which surrounds the cemetery.  As you approach on the vaporetto which stops on its way to the outer islands of the lagoon, you can see only the church of San Michele, and the walls, and above the latter, a few dark cypresses.

Even more than with the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, stepping off here feels like leaving this world for the next.  Perhaps, you think, dying is like this.  Inside, the cemetery is both peaceful and beautiful.  The eye is struck by the regular rows of graves and monuments, a regularity all the more impressive for being so alien to Venice with its perpetual corners and curves.  Also notable are the flowers everywhere which make the solemn scene a mass of colour.  But even the blooms speak of death: they are all cut flowers, withering daily.

At one end of the cemetery there is a gate opening out on to the lagoon.  It faces the city, and through the gate’s bars you can gaze as if at another land, just as the dead gaze across at our island of the living perhaps.  It feels like an immense privilege that, unlike the dead, you are permitted to leave this cemetery island and return to Venice.

The final destination I failed to reach on this occasion lies beyond San Michele.  Beyond even the nearby island of Murano, the so-called island of glass, which in form is a miniature version of Venice itself, in its bridges and churches and narrow streets, and even down to the serpentine main canal which cuts it in two.

It requires a journey on the vaporetto deep into the lagoon, out past all the nearby islands, out through the guiding rows of splintering wooden staves placed to mark the channels through the mud.  Venice soon disappears into the haze and the mists, and you are alone on the waters.

Eventually two towers emerge; one belongs to the island of Burano, the other to Torcello.  Isolated, and little known to the tourist, Torcello is an extraordinary place.  Today, all that remains of its former glory is the Romanesque cathedral, probably built in the tenth century.  It is most famous for the well-preserved mosaics which date from 800 years ago.  Once, though, Torcello was Venice itself: it was here that those fleeing from the invasions on the mainland first built their homes and their churches, their palaces and cathedrals.  Most of the island today is mud covered with grass and reeds; but it is the mud from which Venice arose, and on which it still stands.  To visit Torcello is to step back to the origins of Venice.

These, then, were the places I visited but did not record, or those that I did not visit but remembered.  But even incorporating these events, my itineraries are still the barest bones of my time in Venice, just as Lorenzetti’s work, for all its ungraspable detail, is only a fraction of what he saw and learnt in a lifetime.

Above all, whole areas of experience are missing in both.  For example in Lorenzetti’s itineraries, and in mine, no mention is made of food: it is assumed that the tourist is sustained by spiritual and cultural nourishment alone.  Nor is there any reference to the need for pauses, rest or sleep. Instead, Lorenzetti’s Venice is a place of pure and unremitting aesthetic experience, one in which the city’s spatial concentration of artistic riches is mirrored in a temporal compression which omits all of life’s more mundane moments.

Rest and sustenance are not the only aspects of common humanity apparently glossed over in the book.  Throughout, Lorenzetti remains almost as impassive as the stones of the city he describes.  He seems to proceed everywhere with equanimity, walking through a landscape undifferentiated by emotion.  His eulogies are temperate, his condemnations measured.  If he makes a judgement, you can be sure it is the fruit of decades of experience and rumination, and is not the unconsidered reaction of a moment.

In the end his willed objectivity, his abstention from emotionalism, become almost frightening in their success, so at variance are they to our own feelings when confronted by the same masterpieces.  It could be argued that our whole response to Venice is in some sense emotional since the overpowering richness of its experience passes beyond the bounds of logic and categories.  Throughout its history, Venice has been a city for sensualists, hedonists and aesthetes, never for rationalists.

However, it would be a mistake to characterise Lorenzetti as unfeeling. The whole of Venice and its lagoons bespeaks a profound love for every aspect of the city, its art, its history, and its people.  Its intensity is manifest not overtly in glib exclamations, but in the dedication it took to produce over 1000 densely-packed pages; in the major part of a life it consumed - as only a passion can consume; in the self-sacrifice of its quiet tone and its perpetual self-effacement.

When, as a shorthand, we refer to this book as ‘Lorenzetti’, we are more correct than we know, in that the man gave so much of himself to produce it that in effect he became his book.  But the final result of those labours is something quite different, something quite antithetical to the self-glorification that implies, something far more precious.  Lorenzetti’s ‘Venice’ is a true distillation of Venice itself.

Walks with Lorenzetti

X - Fourth act: fourth itinerary

This itinerary passes through the characteristic lower class Sestiere of Castello.  It includes the Church of Sta. Maria Formosa.

Santa Maria Formosa - San Lorenzo - Santa Maria Formosa 

The fourth itinerary is quite unlike the rest of Lorenzetti’s walks in character.  It strikes out into the relatively unknown eastern reaches of Venice.  This is no longer a guided tour of a city you wish to know better; this is another city altogether, though clearly a sibling.  The itinerary culminates in the intimate surroundings of Santa Maria Formosa.  For most tourists this is likely to be as strange and unfamiliar as the rest, even though it lies only a little way off from the Piazza San Marco.  For me, though, reaching it is like coming home.

For once, the initial stages of the itinerary repeat those of another.  I leave the Piazza San Marco under the clock tower, and pass along the bustling Mercerie to the Campo San Zulian.  The previous itinerary had also reached this point, but there Lorenzetti had hurried on with other goals in mind, leaving full contemplation to another time.

Now he stops and points out the curious facade, a window in the pediment, its stones covered with grime and soot, easily missed by those rushing past.  It is as much a monument as a religious building.  There are inscriptions in Greek and Hebrew extolling the virtues of the church’s benefactor, and there is a small relief by Sansovino depicting him.

But Lorenzetti has dived down a tiny alley by the side of the church, and passed over a couple of bridges.  Following him, to my surprise I find myself already in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa; for a moment I feel lost, disoriented: Santa Maria Formosa was supposed to be the conclusion of our walk, and to form the climax of my stay in Venice.  Its sudden, unexpected presence here is like a small but frightening betrayal of all that Lorenzetti’s ordered itineraries stand for.

But I am over-reacting: in fact we are just skirting the campo.  To be more precise I am in the Campiello Querini-Stampalia, near the gallery of the same name.  As is often the case, Lorenzetti makes this gallery a small itinerary of its own, which he places at the back of his book.  Today the gallery is closed, so I have no choice but to follow the main itinerary rather than make a diversion.

I pass over the Fonte Ruga Giuffa, then down the Ruga Giuffa itself.  To the left there is the Palazzo Grimani.  A left turn takes me down the beautifully named Salizzada Zorzi, a transformation of the name Giorgio.  After a bridge and a long, straight road, I emerge in front of the Lorenzetti’s own church of San Lorenzo or St. Lawrence -  Lorenzetti  means ‘the family of the little Lawrences’.  The saint’s death was particularly horrible: he was martyred by being slowly roasted alive on a griddle.

His church is situated at the bottom of a deep courtyard, surrounded on two sides by high buildings, which reaches down to the Ponte Lorenzo where I now stand, a spot little changed from its appearance in Gentile Bellini’s ‘Miracle of the Cross which fell into the Canal at S  Lorenzo’ in the Accademia Gallery.  The church facade is very simple, built of dark bricks, but very strong.  It is also rather melancholy.   As Lorenzetti writes, the church was damaged in the First World War; he also wrote - in 1926 presumably - that it was in the process of restoration.  It still is, a sad state for what is an impressive building.

Once more Lorenzetti takes a small turning which no tourist would ever find except by chance, and having found it would certainly never take.  After passing the Scuola of San Giorgio Schiavoni with its fine collection of Carpaccio paintings - also closed today -  I move on and enter a real warren of backstreets.

There is the Campo Ugo Foscolo, commemorating where that brooding poet lived.  Once it was called dei Gatti - of the cats - apparently a wonderful mangling of the phrase ‘i legati’ - the legates - since the latter used to live here too.  The names generally have a certain charm round here: there is the Ponte della Scoazzera - the bridge of rubbish - and the Campo a Fianco della Chiesa - the square alongside the church.

Lorenzetti’s maps are hard enough to follow when he gives detailed instructions on how to find the well-known streets.  There is no indication of distance either in the text or from the maps, and exactly when you turn left or cross a bridge is unclear.  Around here things are even worse.  I reach the Calle del Cimitero - Cemetery Avenue - but search in vain for Lorenzetti’s next marker, the Calle dietro il Campo della Confraternità - itself named for its relative position.  Uncharacteristically for Venice, there seems to be a large open space, or several smaller ones connected together, with blocks of houses dotted around like islands of an archipelago, making it hard to sense overall direction.  For a period I am lost.

At last I find the exit, which takes me to the Church of San Francesco della Vigna, so named after the vineyard which was left to the original friars in 1253.  The facade is familiar, not because I have seen it before - which I may have done in my previous wanderings in Venice - but because it is a typical Palladian design, with his favourite twin pediments, one piercing the other.  It is built on a massive scale, and unlike San Giorgio Maggiore, or his church of Il Redentore, you can move back from it and take in its proportions in a way that you cannot with those other churches, built as they are on the edge of the sea.  But even with this building, Palladio has been unlucky: the right-hand side is obscured by a block of flats built too near.

The interior is rather four-square, and done out in the same grey and white as Santa Maria della Salute.  It is light and airy, and according to Lorenzetti’s description, packed with works of minor artists.

From there, I pass along more backstreets, and then to Barbaria delle Tole, an interesting street which emerges alongside the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.  It is a busy and bustling thoroughfare, clearly one of the shopping centres for the district.  The sounds carry strangely; as I walk along I can hear a woman’s voice from one of the upper stories of a house beside the road.  She shouts and screams unremittingly.  No one else takes any notice.

Before reaching the end of this street, the path turns left down a small side alley, over a couple of small bridges, and then suddenly I find myself in the Calle Lunga, a narrow alley I walked down many times every day during my first visit to Venice.  As past maps on to present, my feet remember the paving stones.  True to its name, the alley is long, and at the end it opens out into the attractive Campo Santa Maria Formosa - the Square of Shapely Mary.

The name of the church derives from the legend of the visions of the seventh century San Magno, Bishop of Oderzo, to whom the Madonna appeared in the form of a shapely matron.  According to the tradition relayed by Lorenzetti, Santa Maria Formosa was one of eight churches built by the saint.  Whatever its origins, we know that it was rebuilt at the end of the fifteenth century to a design of one Mauro Coducci, a prolific architect who was responsible for many of Venice’s famous landmarks, including one side of the Piazza San Marco.  Aptly enough, then, Santa Maria Formosa was designed partly in imitation of the central part of San Marco.

The connection goes deeper, as if the architect had been haunted by the image of San Marco and its campanile in the great piazza.  Viewed from the north end of the Campo Sta. Maria Formosa, the church and its campanile bear a striking resemblance to San Marco seen from the west end of its piazza.  It is more a similarity of spirit than details; the styles are quite different.  Santa Maria Formosa is transitional between late Renaissance and early Baroque in its two main facades, facing west and north.  The latter is the more ornate.

It has an elaborate doorway - not used at present - with two columns supporting a broken circular pediment.  Above it, there is a lunette window, and above that, a further small pediment.  The broad roof passes via two volutes to four simple arches which flank the doorway, each of which is separated by ionic pilasters.  There are three portrait busts of the Cappello family, one above the doorway, and two either side above the nearest arches, and five statues along the top of the pediment.  The high dome has been rebuilt several times, once after an earthquake in 1688 and again after an incendiary device damaged the church and its contents in 1916.

The campanile is more boisterously Baroque, and was built in 1611.  The belfry and pinnacle are wildly ornate, and over the entrance there is a grotesque mask which moved Ruskin to write in his ‘Stones of Venice’ one of his eloquent splutterings which seem so disproportionate to their occasion. Indeed, he characterises Santa Maria Formosa as one of the first examples of what he calls ‘grotesque renaissance’, given over to the glory of Man not God, and cites San Moisè and Santa Maria Zobenigo as other offenders.

It all seems a bit much for this quiet little church.  Though as Lorenzetti and Ruskin note, Santa Maria Formosa was once an important place of pilgrimage for no less a person than the Doge himself.  On the occasion of his annual visit to commemorate the rescue of Venetian brides from the hands of Slav pirates by the local makers of marriage chests, the Doge would receive a straw hat.  This ceremony took place for centuries - possibly seven of them if the legends are true - until the fall of the Republic itself in 1797.  As a sad reminder of this lost continuity, the last hat ever given is kept in the Correr Museum.

I enter the church, and am greeted by what looks like a typically unpretentious seventeenth or eighteenth century interior, and moreover a living parish church.  With his customary meticulousness, Lorenzetti details each work of art to be found there, including the altarpiece of Santa Barbara which won Palma il Vecchio great renown in his day. Appropriately enough for this church, the female saint is what Lorenzetti calls “a splendid type of buxom female beauty”.

Every time that Lorenzetti launches into one of his extraordinarily detailed descriptions of a church’s interior, its architects, sculptors and artists, I am amazed at the effort expended, the doggedness with which he seeks out every work, consults every authority on its attribution, its quality.  I feel embarrassed that I cannot do justice to this dedication, this diligence, even on a site which is of such great personal significance to me.  I can only wander around, looking at as much as I can, flicking through his book, then stumble out into the cold open air again, saturated with facts and images, my head buzzing.

Outside, Lorenzetti is still eagerly dragging me forward, imparting information.  He tells me about the beautiful private houses in Campo Santa Maria Formosa: the Palazzo Malipiero-Trevisi, Palazzo Vitturi, Palazzo Doria, Palazzo Priuli.  Lorenzetti could doubtless tell me even more: the names suggest rich and complex histories; constraints of space alone preclude it.

Some other things he does not tell me.  He omits any mention of the palazzo wall opposite the church, beloved of the Venetian children who pound a plastic football against it again and again, causing arrhythmic, hollow thuds to echo around the square.  He says nothing of the well-head in the middle of the campo; he never mentions my favourite café on the corner of the Calle Lunga, with its dog-eared copy of the pink Il Gazzettino dello Sport on the counter and screwed-up paper napkins on the floor like gross confetti; nor refers to the pizzeria where, as an early customer in a hurry, I ate my last meal before leaving Venice for the first time, and which has since turned into a popular restaurant called ‘Il burchiello’.  He even remains silent about what lies at the end of the Calle Lunga.  But I expect too much: such a book would be a personal Lorenzetti; the one he left us is universal.

So, almost reluctant to leave this magic square, I follow in the footsteps of the master once more.  He is taking me round the back of the campo, over a bridge from which I can see the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, reminding me how near I am to that landmark.  He leads me down a calle and over a bridge or two, to the Ponte delle Bande, so-called as one of the first bridges to have parapets, and then to the Calle della Guerra, leading to the Campo della Guerra via the Ponte della Guerra - clearly a place of strife, this - where one of those daft Venetian street battles took place between rival factions in the city.  The losers of these melees on bridges still without parapets ended up in the canal, often as not with broken heads and bones to boot.

And all this a stone’s throw - and a few probably were thrown in these little wars - from the august and dignified San Marco.  Once more my guide has brought me safely home to the haven of the Piazza.  And yet however glad I am to have accomplished my itinerary, to have reached my goal, I am still a little sad to part from Lorenzetti, to have left behind all the hidden corners of the city.  Leaving them and striding across the open space in front of San Marco is a little like leaving the claustrophobic world of Venice for the ordinary world outside.  We will always hanker for those special, secret places - like the tiny backstreets way out east, like the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, like Venice itself.

Walks with Lorenzetti

II - First night movement: Allegro più ch'è possible

At night the face of Venice is transformed: she prepares and presents new enchanting beauties.

The first night of that visit to Venice, I went for a walk without Lorenzetti.  Although all of Venice lay before me - magically transformed as if for a carnival outing by the great black cape it wore - there was only one possible choice for my steps: towards the Piazzetta, to sit beneath the lion of St Mark atop his column.  I had spent the last hour of my very first night in Venice here, as well as many others on my subsequent trips.

More than any other spot in the city, it was here that I felt most directly in touch with all my past visits.  It was here that I sat on the cold and uncomfortable steps at the base of the column, looking out through the darkness to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, thinking about all the occasions I had sat and looked and thought in just this way.  There were few people about, so it was easy to map past onto present.  Nothing seemed to have changed as I contemplated Palladio’s bold, almost shocking design for the church’s facade of a low, squat pediment pierced through by a second, higher pediment.

But there were changes.  Even San Giorgio Maggiore was different, though not because of any visible alterations to its design.  Since last visiting Venice I had read several books on Palladio’s architecture.  As a result, I was aware now not only of the lonely splendour of San Giorgio Maggiore but also saw for the first time the echoing forms of San Zitelle and II Redentore on the nearby Giudecca, two other churches designed by Palladio.  Where before I saw only an isolated masterpiece, I was forced by my newly gained perspective to see the start of a series of works, themselves part of a larger body of Palladian-inspired architecture throughout Europe, particularly in Britain.  Cultural ramifications spread out in all directions.  My original vision had been corrupted by knowledge.

Another change: when I looked up, I saw to my astonishment an empty capital - the lion had gone, presumably to be re-gilded.  Once again, my memories had been dashed against reality.  I got up and wandered along the Molo; I gazed across at Santa Maria della Salute.  Floodlit like some huge, baroque spaceship about to lift off, aided by its magnificent setting across the canal which here attained its widest extent, it seemed the only possible conclusion to the complex architectural discourse of the Grand Canal, a full stop in stone.

I joined the few strollers taking their passeggiata along the Riva degli Schiavoni, a waterfront which always surprises by its unvenetian breadth.  I stopped briefly before the Church of the Pietà, undistinguished in appearance, but once the centre of Antonio Vivaldi’s music-making, and thus the home of perhaps the most Venetian music ever written.  Beyond it lay a funfair, eerie in its stillness and silence, and eerie in the grotesque silhouettes its attractions formed against the distant San Giorgio Maggiore.

I turned back towards my hotel, tired from my day’s walking, and from the new and old sights which had pressed in on me.  It is all too possible to suffer from an overdose of experience.  The Piazza San Marco was illuminated by a harsh, other-worldly glare; as I crossed it, somebody was letting off very loud firecrackers which echoed around the square’s impassive stone faces.

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