The personal tempest

It is either an incident from Stazio’s ‘Tebaide’ or a myth regarding the birth of Paris or again an interpretation of philosophical naturalistic concepts in a composition in synthesis of the eternal force of rebirth of creation in the world by nature or of human beings, or lastly the ‘dream of Polyphilus’ (hypnoerotomachia).

Anyone who sees Venice for the first time is fortunate; but in the circumstances of my first visit, I was particularly so.  A friend had given me the address of a foresteria - a kind of hostel - near Santa Maria Formosa.  My initial steps in Venice were therefore purposive; as I followed the signs to the Piazza San Marco, crossed that great open space, and then dived into the warren of streets, it was not as someone who wandered helplessly from beauty to beauty, but more as one who could assign each new sight some provisional, personal meaning by virtue of my journey past them.  The monuments of Venice became my milestones.

The foresteria was hidden away in one of the less frequented parts of Venice, between Santa Maria Formosa and Santi Giovanni e Paolo.  Tourists seldom strayed there, and I was able to begin to colonise this corner for myself, uncorrupted by any previous knowledge, and to get to know Venice from the inside rather than through one of its more formal set pieces.

The foresteria lay at the bottom of one of those long, narrow alleys which abound in Venice, with high shuttered houses on each side.  At the end of the alley, you crossed a small humped bridge at an angle.  The path turned off to the right past a high and forbidding wall, and then snaked left.  In the wall were a pair of massive doors, and next to them an entryphone.  The wall formed a small courtyard, completing the empty corner of a high L-shaped building.  This was the foresteria.

It was run by a religious organisation, and used as a permanent hostel for university students in Venice.  Spare beds were rented out to travellers.  I rang the buzzer, explained that I was looking for a room, and was admitted to the courtyard.  Weeds grew among the broken flags, and flower pots and bicycles lay against the wall.

The front door was opened from above, and I went up to the first floor where the warden lived.  The small flat was furnished in a typically heavy Italian style of many years ago.  The man was in his fifties, short, balding and uncommunicative.  A woman, presumably his wife, stood behind the door of an adjacent room talking quietly to someone, perhaps their child.  The warden took my passport and then showed me to my room upstairs on the next floor.

As might be expected in a hostel run by a religious institution, there were separate dormitories for men and women.  My room had three double bunk beds, only one of which was already taken.  On the ceiling there were crude frescoes of pink, chubby putti; ancient cracks cut through them.  Otherwise the room was bare.  To reach the bedrooms you went through a low doorway from the main hall, past a tiny bathroom.

The hall Itself was magnificent.  It was about twenty feet high, with dark rafters overhead.  A long trapezium in shape, it looked out onto water on two of its sides: the small canal, over which the diagonal bridge from the alleyway passed, curved round to the left, girdling the building for much of its perimeter.  The foresteria had clearly once been the palazzo of a comfortably wealthy Venetian family, probably built in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.  Despite the characterless, institutional furniture - a few metal and canvas chairs and trestle tables - it was easy to imagine the hall’s former days of glory.  Perhaps as the last vestige of that time, a huge and incongruous black grand piano stood to one side of the room.

One end of the hall was filled by a high window of leaded lights reaching to the ceiling.  When the sun shone upon the canal outside, its hundred fractured images were cast upon a nearby wall.  At the other end there was a small kitchen, and in the middle of the wall opposite the door to the bedrooms was another door leading to the separate rooms of the Venetian students.

There were currently two of them, both female.  One was slightly built, with the fair hair and slightly aquiline nose which suggested a Roman heritage; the other was formed on an ample scale, a shapely young woman with long black hair, a rounded face and piercingly dark eyes.  Her name was Manuela, short for Emmanuela, and she spoke with a slight Venetian lisp.

My first visit to Venice was short and intense, just three days.  I devoted each day to wandering around a different area of the city.  At this stage I had not yet discovered Lorenzetti, so though my itineraries were often directed at a particular landmark - Santa Maria della Salute, the Arsenale - the paths were random and unformed, and along the way I missed the subsidiary details and the significance of the whole.  To begin with, Venice was beautiful but undifferentiated.

In many ways, this was probably fortunate.  Just as the great masters of literature presuppose basic reading skills, so Lorenzetti is best understood after a grounding in the grammar and vocabulary of the city.  His is an advanced course: he teaches you how to weave together the weft of art and the warp of history into a tapestry that is Venice.  But without those first self-taught lessons, the visitor is simply overwhelmed with information.  The first visit is a kind of cultural vaccination, a prophylactic against the Lorenzetti disease - aesthetic exhaustion - in its most virulent form.   It also allows the tourist a chance to form a few personal opinions before being confronted with the almost inarguable weight of Lorenzetti’s lifelong scholarship.

The first day I visited the Accademia Gallery, the next I went out to the Isola San Giorgio Maggiore, and my final day was spent travelling out to the island of Torcello.  I walked along countless alleys, crossed innumerable bridges and courtyards, visited churches, palaces and galleries, but without the thread of Lorenzetti’s itineraries on which to hang these experiences, I can no longer recall when I went where.  As Venice itself appeared to me then, my first impressions formed a huge, insoluble labyrinth.

But my Venetian trip as a whole, with its great unstructured cargo of memories, remained with me vividly.  I had visited the city as just part of an extensive Europe-wide tour which took in France, other parts of Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and Holland; but it was the multi-faceted image of Venice which burnt fiercest in recollection.

So much so that I knew I would eventually try to preserve these memories in writing.  It did not happen immediately; I went to Venice for the first time in 1979 and returned there in 1981.  But it was not until 1984 that I felt ready to attempt the translation of some of those images and experiences on to paper.  Ideas had been growing within me all this time, often deeply hidden and rising only occasionally to the surface in the form of a sudden memory; but it took certain crucial events of that year to cause everything to come together into a coherent whole.

At this time in my life I wrote with pencil and paper.  Corrections, especially of a major nature, were difficult.  As a result, I tended to plan out in my head my writing in a comprehensive fashion, and then tried to capture it on paper in one sitting.  This extreme approach meant that I was forced to wait until I felt the pressure of concentration - if not inspiration - sufficiently strong to carry me through what was necessarily a long and intense process.

I remember that it was a Sunday in April, almost exactly six years after the events, that I started to plan out a short story based on this first visit to Venice.  For two hours I paced around the room, advancing the story with my advancing steps.  In trying to hold all the facts and feelings in my head at once, I felt like one of those circus performers spinning more and more plates on sticks: there was the same sense of elation, and growing panic, as more plates - more words - were added; the same knowledge that the greater the success the nearer the failure.

Then, at 11 am, I started writing.  Nearly twelve hours and seven thousand words later, I finished, mentally exhausted but feeling as if delivered of a great burden.  There was a sense of achievement in that I had written the story I had set out to capture; but joined with this was the omnipresent sense of failure, the sense that once again the work had slipped away in the act of creation.  For this reason I found it impossible to read the story once finished, and it was years before I was able to approach it with sufficient objectivity to lessen my natural distaste.

It is always a curious experience to read writing from deep in your past, especially if that writing embodies strong experiences.  The words and images have a strange resonance: they are clearly of you - the lineage is manifest; and yet they are also equally clearly distinct from you, since the you which exists now has moved so far from its earlier incarnations. This explains the ambivalent feelings such re-discoveries tend to excite: you squirm over the gaucheries, and yet are touched by the simple charm, surprised and moved by the innocence and ingenuousness - long since unattainable.

The short story is derived almost entirely from my first trip to Venice; its form is based now loosely, now more closely, on my itineraries, and likewise its plot on my experiences.  There is the journey across Venice to the foresteria, the visits to the Accademia, the excursions to the islands.  More importantly, it is about an emotional path, a journey to knowledge.

The main character is a student of art history whose approach to his discipline is essentially academic, and therefore necessarily limited.  He himself is similarly callow.  One of the intersecting themes of the story concerns his search for a painting, the ‘Assunta’ of Titian, one he knows well from illustrations, and one that has always impressed and moved him.  Eventually, and unexpectedly, he discovers the picture in the course of his wanderings through the city.  But he finds it curiously unsatisfying.  In the meantime he has come across another painting, one which proves initially more mysterious than the other, but ultimately far more potent: Giorgione’s ‘La tempesta’, which gives the short story its title.

Through his slight acquaintance with Manuela, a young Venetian studying at the university and living at the foresteria, and with another young Briton staying there who loves her - eventually to self-destruction - he comes to understand what qualities and meanings that picture may hold.  As a result, he gains a far deeper - because intuitive as well - understanding of both Venice and himself.  The identification of Venice with the emotional, so-called feminine aspect of life is simplistic and unoriginal, but it provided me with the central equation necessary for making sense of the disparate elements of my own experiences in Venice and back in England.

Re-reading ‘La tempesta’ now, I am struck by how much effort I wasted trying to describe Venice.  It is foolish to attempt what so many others have done well, though never well enough.  To endeavour to capture that overpowering but elusive city with words - or indeed in images or music - is clearly folly.  If it were possible to reduce the essence of Venice to anything which can be caught in this way, the city itself would not exert the unique fascination it has.  After more than 500 years as a byword for harmony and beauty of form, the mountain of words, images and sounds Venice has generated still stand only as pale shadows of our own experiences amidst the city’s reality.

I am also struck by how the narrative shifts between fact and fiction, between the true details of my first visit to Venice, and the added elements which somehow help make sense of those details.  Indeed, at this distance I can no longer securely distinguish between some of the facts and some of the fictions.  I kept no notebooks on that trip; in many respects, ‘La tempesta’ is the only record I have, together with my memories.  Reading it again, some of it is immediately familiar, while some strikes only faint chords; but are these memories of reality, or memories of the creation of an alternative reality?

In the end, it does not matter.  Reality only exists in our flawed perceptions and even more untrustworthy memories.  What matters is the value of what I retain and create from those experiences.  Art, or least my writing, allows me to sift and select, modify and add, until I have recreated a version which in its contemplation today and, I hope, tomorrow, allows me to feel that something remains of my past, that out of my life something exists which will be able, however imperfectly, to transcend me and all the irrelevant details I have lived through.  It means that some of my travels - in the broadest sense - were not random wanderings, because here at least I have imposed a sense of form on them.

Walks with Lorenzetti

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

The Man

The work has been fatiguing and complex, but I do not believe it has been completely in vain.

When I started writing this book, I began researching into the life of Giulio Lorenzetti.  I had intended to sketch the details of his birth, his marriage, his work and his death, to give a framework for the writing of his book which was itself a kind of biography, describing the Venetian Republic’s birth, its marriage to the sea, its artistic achievements, and its eventual decline and dissolution.  I soon drew a blank.  Lorenzetti does not figure in any of the standard art history reference books; even the Italian dictionaries of art I consulted ignore him.  In the catalogue of the British Library, there are just two books of his listed, one of them ‘Venice and its Lagoons’.  I thought of writing to Edizioni Lint, his publishers, or to the Italian embassy: surely somebody would have information on the man?

In the end, the more I read his book, the more it seemed that it contained all I needed to know about him.  Just as it had become his life, occupying more and more of his thoughts and his time, so his life had become the book, which mapped out his paths through Venice, and detailed his interests, his observations, his loves and obsessions. This process of fusion is so nearly complete and neatly dovetailed, that there are few blatant vestiges of the man in his words: the overt ‘I’ became redundant in a book which was all an expression of him.  Occasionally, though, Lorenzetti steps out from behind the scenery of the great theatre he had constructed and directed, and shows himself.

The work is at its most personal at the beginning, but soon fades away into apparently anonymous objectivity.  Lorenzetti’s introduction, a mere page or so, is written uniquely in the first person singular.  Even here he forgoes this opportunity to greet the world face to face.  Like a master of ceremonies, he soon moves out of the spotlight, preferring to introduce the book itself, as he gives a short summary of its shape, its itineraries, and the introductory chapters outlining the historical and cultural background.

In the first of these introductory chapters, there are one or two final glimpses of Lorenzetti peeping through the backstage curtain.  For example, in describing the unique character and romance of the Piazza San Marco, he cannot resist berating “the insupportable café orchestras that never give one a moment’s respite.”  A little later on, he inveighs against the decline in the quality of traditional Venetian workmanship, which he sees “mixed unfortunately with a great deal of rubbish in bad taste that is sold under the name of local curios, or ‘souvenirs of Venice’.”  But such outbursts are rare.

Lorenzetti also shows remarkable restraint in the face of this city of masterpieces; he knows too well that there is nothing more boring than an enthusiast’s endless rapture.  But even he is moved to poetry sometimes, as in his hymn to the wonder of San Marco:  “From this uninterrupted work of centuries a miracle of incomparable harmony and beauty has blossomed, with a beauty of line, colour and wonderful ever changing effects of light, especially at sunset when it assumes the appearance of something seen in a dream.”

This paean occurs in the first itinerary; thereafter, Lorenzetti adopts a far more measured tone.  It is almost as if he had allowed himself a final moment of unbuttoned response before reverting to his self-imposed sobriety.  A tiny crack in this otherwise unbroken surface is occasioned by an apparent triviality.  In a note on an unexceptional series of eight panels in the church of Sant’Alvise, he gives them as works of “a follower of Lazzaro Bastiani”.  But clearly his bile has risen on this issue: he adds a gratuitous and dismissive side-swipe that “Ruskin attributed them, absurdly, to Vittore Carpaccio, then a child of eight or ten.”  Lorenzetti does not suffer fools in his Venice gladly.

The final glimpse the book affords us of the man is, appropriately enough for someone who must have spent much of the time he was not walking around Venice surrounded by books, in the bibliography.  Among the six densely-packed pages there are ten works by Lorenzetti himself.  From the titles which he deemed worthy enough to be included with his sources we can form an estimation of what his principal concerns were, and with which of his other works he was most satisfied.

His interests were wide: as well as a work on the history and art of Torcello, he produced studies of Venetian masks and festivals, together with catalogues on maiolica and lacquerwork of the city.  But as the first of his works listed there, ‘Italian painting in the eighteenth century’ indicates, his main area of study was the final years of the Venetian republic.  This is corroborated by his comment in the introductory chapter of ‘Venice and its Lagoons’, where he says “the eighteenth century marks an awakening of new energies in art for Venice. For the second time she took the lead in all Italy.”  For all its earlier glories, Lorenzetti seems to have felt that the city and its art attained their most characteristic forms during these twilight years.

The book, then, can give us tantalising glimpses of the man; and yet so many fundamental questions remain unanswered - such as where the idea of the itineraries came from, how he ended up structuring the book in exactly the way he did, how his work affected his daily life, what his wife thought, and what hidden messages or secret memories lay buried within.  On all these, the book remains mute.

And yet after reading the book for a while, and walking with Lorenzetti along his paths through Venice, it is easy to feel that the growing acquaintance allows you to guess at some of these things, to extrapolate from the known to the unknown.  One of the defining characteristics of great art is that it grants you a sense not only of the magnitude of the artist’s achievement, but also of its cost.

So from reading the words, taking in the meaning and sharing the experiences, I feel that I know how Lorenzetti felt when he finished this monumental work - the sense of exaltation and exhaustion, of relief and sadness; I know the sense of pride he experienced when he held the first bound copy in his hands, the curious sensation that something he had created now had an existence independent of him; and I can detect too that shiver which must have passed over him as he realised that he had failed to capture fully his original vision, and that the task of revision he was compelled to attempt would end only with his death.

But the image born of my familiarity with his book which I prefer to keep, is different from all of these.  Just as Lorenzetti succeeded in capturing the essence of his city in its last years of glory, so I like to picture him at the close of his life.  He is bent with age and arthritis; he has bright grey eyes, and his hair is brilliantly white, combed back like a mane, receding slightly at the temples.  When he takes his customary walks around Venice, he leans on his metal-tipped cane held in his right hand, and goes tapping along the flagstones.

I imagine him standing in the middle of the Piazza San Marco, facing the cathedral’s facade, with the proud, gentlemanly form of the campanile to his right.  It is early spring, and there is a chill in the air, although the pale sun is out, casting long shadows on the Piazza. Lorenzetti is grateful that it is too early in the season for those terrible café orchestras.  The only sound is of footsteps on stone, and the low murmur of voices.

Lorenzetti is conscious that his task is nearly done; the second edition of his book is almost finished, and he is grateful that though he will soon die, his beloved wife Maria, who has shared so much of his life and his labours, will be able to see the work through to completion.  As he looks at the buildings around him, familiar now for fifty years, he thinks back over his life, of the times he has stood here in the Piazza, of the thousands of paths he has taken through his city, of the hundreds of thousands of words he has written trying to capture those paths and all that he has seen and felt on them.  And he thinks of all the men and women who created Venice, who came to these mud flats in the middle of the lagoon and built the most beautiful city in the world.  He thinks of their lives and the unimaginable details which formed them, and which went into the works they produced.

As he thinks of these artists, he imagines a huge crowd of them gathering in front of him in the Piazza San Marco, a grand and magnificent procession such as Gentile Bellini had recorded in his painting now in the Accademia Gallery just ten minutes’ walk from here.  He imagines them filing past him, smiling and saluting.  He smiles, and raises his cane slightly in recognition.

Now he imagines a different gathering.  These are not artists, but ordinary people, hundreds of them, thousands of them, of all ages and all nationalities.  So many now, that they are beginning to fill the piazza.  Lorenzetti gazes around, and sees all these people; he notices that they are holding copies of his book.  They seem to be waiting for something, waiting for him.  He nods as if in agreement, and begins to walk slowly across the Piazza, tapping his cane.  The crowd parts to let him through.  As he reaches the edge of the square, and is about to enter a narrow alleyway into the maze of backstreets he knows so well, he turns and gazes over the scene.  The crowd has formed itself into a huge procession. He turns back and begins to lead them on a walk through the heart of his kingdom.  We follow him to this day.

Walks with Lorenzetti

The Itineraries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walks with Lorenzetti