Even without letting oneself go in romantic dreams, a tour in a gondola on a moonlit summer night in the Pool of San Marco, or in the deep shadows of the internal canals, is always profoundly moving.
On the eve of my departure from Venice, I did not have time to take one final walk. Instead, I packed, left the hotel and boarded a motor launch which took me first into the depths of the city, into that other maze, then out above the Fondamente Nuove into the wider waters. As dusk fell, the air grew chill.
Night is a good time to leave Venice. By day, there is no way to extract yourself painlessly from the scenes around you: as you are forced to move away from the city, the eyes linger now on this detail, now on another, until each in turn is torn from sight. The descent of darkness casts a deadening pall over the buildings and canals and campi; like a half-anaesthetised patient, your gaze passes over the shadowy forms without feeling the full anguish of imminent loss. More importantly, as night falls, Venice itself disappears, to be replaced by another, more ghostly vision.
As proof of the disjunction between these two cities, even that passport to the Venice of light and colour, Lorenzetti, lies useless in your hands after twilight. The world he describes is a world of distinct images; the paths he maps out for you are signalled by visual clues. Venice by night does not recognise either the images or Lorenzetti’s definitive capture of them. By night you can walk down the most familiar of alleys, cross the best-loved of campi, linger on the most memorable of bridges, and they will all be strangers to you.
Venice by night is a deeply claustrophobic city. The lanes are dimly-lit, the campi are invisible without lights to show their extent, and canals are simply seamless rolls of the blackest cloth, pierced occasionally by the reflected moon. In the darkness and the silence, the coffin-shaped gondolas seem to come into their own. By day they look skulking and incongruous amidst the snub-nosed barges, the roaring motor launches and the brisk vaporetti; by night they are the undisputed aristocrats of the waters.
To be lost by day in Venice is richly rewarding: you discover unsuspected by-ways, secret corners. Ultimately you will find a busy street, or at least a signpost to the Piazza San Marco. After dark, no street is busy, and the signposts seem to be invisible. To be lost in Venice by night brings out all the irrational fears in you, makes you too aware that this is an impossible city, great palaces and cathedrals built on rotting wooden stakes driven into the mud of a rising lagoon.
If you must leave Venice - and you must or you will be poisoned by its richness - leave it by night. Then you are losing the dubious half-sister of the Venice you know; the other, daylight Venice remains intact, waiting for you. Its uniqueness makes it paradoxically easier to leave than cities of lesser attractions: the least acquaintance engenders the certain knowledge that you will always return.
So in leaving this Venice of the night, I was not sad. As the motor launch pulled away north, into the darkness, I gazed back. The lights of that crazy, magical world gradually disappeared; it was as if the money were running out in a thousand coin-operated lighting systems all over the city.
Walks with Lorenzetti
A long, closely packed, dark train of boats and gondolas with tiny trembling lights like fireflies, follow behind and as this luminous, magical train passes, the Grand Canal comes to life as if by enchantment, pulses briefly with life and then returns once more to its usual silence and shadow.
On my last night in Venice I decided for no reason to move outside my usual realm - and the heart of Lorenzetti’s - towards the railway station. As I passed the Campo dei Santi Apostoli I felt that I was crossing the frontier into another world, a different Venice. The shops became noticeably tawdrier, the streets less attractive, the canals more functional, the further I went. The essential unity of Venice masks its diverse districts.
The transformation of the city was an apt preparation for the sight of the Ferrovie dello Stato terminus. It sat on the side of the canal, a huge, unadorned, squat slab of light like a slot punched through the darkness. Shockingly in this cramped and confined city, a clear space stood squandered in front. Of all the Venetian scenes preserved by Canaletto, this area had changed the most in the intervening two centuries. In place of the church and dyeing works he recorded at this spot, the brashly modern station looked as though some alien spacecraft had landed. And it had: this was not just a railhead, but a beachhead for the mainland, for the outside world, for the mundane and quotidian.
As I stood with my back to the silent, eerily illuminated station, I gazed across at the church of San Simeone Piccolo, its green dome dimly visible against the sky. It had been my first sight of Venice. Tugged perhaps by those memories I crossed once more the bridge by the church of the Scalzi, and stepped again into the narrow back alleyways.
In many respects they were unrepresentative. The way was poorly signposted, as if trying to put off the fainthearted; the streets were narrow. There were no churches, no picturesque campi, not even any canals. You wondered if this were really Venice. Finally a square, Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio; this too deceived the newcomer: it had trees.
I drew closer to the Rialto bridge, the goal of this route. And yet even near this crossing point, there were no people evident. Venice had become a ghost city. I stood amidst the empty market place, surrounded by arcades and columns. I moved to the bridge, observed the graffiti there, the attempts at immortality, names, dates - some stretching back to the turn of the century. I stood and watched the quiet river traffic pass beneath me.
I decided to take the vaporetto back to the Molo. A No. 1 soon appeared and was moored with a swirl of ropes to the swaying Rialto pontoon station; I boarded it. This was how the Grand Canal should be seen. I had the boat practically to myself, the water too. Gazing out, I could watch the great palazzi float by, the two majestic panoramas unfolding each side of me.
By day, like the aristocrats they were, the facades were silent and impassive, an inscrutable wall of architecture. At night they were more human and vulnerable. In all I saw perhaps 20 lit windows, tiny spots of yellow light in the otherwise dark surface. Behind those windows were people. Who were they? And why was nothing happening behind the hundreds of other windows? What histories lay there? Unmoved by these scenes, the vaporetto chugged steadily on through the cold winter air, leaving behind the palaces, and the windows, and the lights.
Walks with Lorenzetti
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
