The Best of Venice

I'm trying to think of how many discrete times I've been to Venice. The first was that ill-fated Carnevale trip during study abroad, when I was so disgusted with our fellow students' drunken misbehavior; Carla likes reminding me about the rant about the "swine" that I delivered when we finally got back to our hotel room.  Overall I didn't have a great impression of the city.  It was February, and freezing; I remember standing in the piazzetta, waiting for the "flight of the angel" to kick off the carnival season, hemmed in by the biggest crowd I'd ever seen, freezing my ass off despite the thermals I was wearing under my jeans.  I remember being unimpressed by the general air of dilapidation, too, the peeling plaster and exposed brick--why couldn't they keep things in better repair?

The second time I went to Venice was again with Carla, when I visited her the fall after we graduated college.  I was working for Paul at the time, and making decent money for the first time (ah, those long-ago days of an entry-level salary!).  I don't remember too much of that trip either, besides our gondola ride, a ridiculous 80 euro split with another woman and her young daughter, and that I threw out my wine-color Converse sneakers, bought during our study abroad period, because I thought they'd done something to my feet that left me hobbling from Venice back to Florence. In fact, as I would learn in Rome in 2009 when I took that monthlong class, it wasn't the shoes so much as my feet; I don't have enough padding in my heels to handle the 8-odd hours of walking a trip to Europe typically requires while wearing only Converse.  If I put heel pads in, though, I'm fine (and in fact I have heels pads right now in the wine-colored Converse I'm wearing).

The next time after that was March of 2010, when Sean and I went to Bergamo and then to Venice for my masters thesis research.  By this point I'd decided that I was going to work on Venetian art for my dissertation, which means that a lot of that interest in Venice was fostered more from books and seminars than from direct experience of the city itself!  We traveled during spring break, and while it was cold in Bergamo, that was nothing to the sudden blizzard we encountered as soon as we got into Venice. Even the locals were surprised, because it should have already been spring.  Whichever Converse I was wearing that day soaked through with floodwater immediately upon leaving the station, which is why I purchased the rubber boots, which I still own, at a shop nearby.  Splashing around in the flooded San Marco piazza was fun, taking a picture on Rialto as snow fell around us was great, but overall it was a pretty physically miserable visit.

After that came the summer research trip of 2012, when I spent two sweaty, lonely months living on the Lido with Elsa, the ancient Venetian woman who spoke no English, and fruitlessly trying to come up with a dissertation proposal as I bounced among the various libraries and archives in the city.  Sean told me recently that he's never seen me as unhappy as I was during that period. The lack of a concerted purpose, coupled with not having many people to talk to, aside from various encounters with my adviser and the few people I knew or to whom she introduced me, was pretty hard to deal with.  The hot weather was a bitch too, honestly, especially since Elsa, despite having AC, almost never used it because of the expense.

Most recently, before this, I went up to Venice in January for David Rosand's memorial at the Accademia.  I had forgotten that it was acqua alta season, and the boots I bought in 2010 did me absolutely no good sitting in my room in Rome while I trudged through four or five inches of icy water!  Luckily my ankle boots were waterproof, but it was still distinctly unpleasant. The skies were grey, and the chill damp in Venice in the winter really manages to get into your bones somehow, in a way it doesn't seem to in other places.  I remember shivering in the Salute and asking myself, "what am I even doing here?"  To be fair, the sunset that night on the Grand Canal nearly made up for the awful day-- an exquisite, hot pink all across the horizon. I considered it an honor paid by nature to Dr. Rosand.

Finally we come to this visit, just four days, to attend a conference on the young Tintoretto at the Cini Fondazione.  The weather has been perfect, even if it rained briefly on my first evening, as I was helping Margaret haul her mom's giant suitcase over the bridges from the station to her apartment.  Low 70s, sunshine, zero humidity.  Warm enough to make you sweat a little crossing the big campi or on the open stretches by the bacino, but chilly enough in the shaded streets to require pants and a scarf--even my leather coat at night.  I have discovered the face of Venice I like the most--and it's the one that doesn't make me shiver or drip with sweat!

It really has been an awesome few days, and has helped remind me why I love this city, its history, and the art it produced.  It helped that I had avenues for socialization: a drink with Margaret on Thursday, dinner with her and Dave at Il Refolo on Friday (recommended by Stefania as a 'cheap' osteria option, it was one of the most expensive meals I've had all year, but really, really good), lunch with Sophia, the same girl I had a scholarly blind-date with in January, at the conference yesterday.  I ran into Francesca Alberti, a Villa Medici scholar who was giving a paper (and who reminds me of Delphine from Orphan Black), and met her mom, who lives in Trastevere and is an artist who works with beetles.  Even this morning, as I was enjoying three leisurely hours in the Accademia, I approached a woman to tell her how much I liked her skirt (long and dark blue with distinctive gold edging in an irregular pattern) and it turned out that she is an Assyriologist at Yale, haha.

Making those human connections, small or large, really does make a huge difference for me, which is kind of ironic given how I am often known for being antisocial (the difference, of course, is that I want to be antisocial on my terms, vs feeling isolated).  The weather is less surprising to find as a defining element, given how much time you have to spend being exposed to the elements to get around Venice.  I'm hoping the next time I visit, at the end of June, I'll be able to maintain my enthusiasm for what is sure to be a hotter and more crowded place!

The Scent of Jasmine

It was an absolutely exquisite night tonight.  The day was beautiful too, clear enough to see the Alban Hills and the peaks of the Apennines, but the sun has already gotten too strong for staying out of the shade for long.  Once the sun starts to go down, though, you really are reminded of everything that makes Italy magical and timeless.

Particularly helping that magical feeling is the scent of jasmine rolling in through the windows.  I had thought that the green plants wrapped around the piers of the courtyard were merely ivy, but when I got back from the States and walked into a warm patch of heady fragrance, I realized that they had chosen the week of my absence to burst into flower.  Jasmine is a luxurious scent, that occasionally flirts with the edge of being cloying without ever really passing over the line.  It's not a scent I had ever encountered before Italy, it being a flower more suited to warm climates than New England (the same goes for the riotous bougainvillea, which I look forward to seeing spilling over the walls around the city this month).

At any rate, it smells like summer, and feels like very early summer--it's now too hot to sleep with the blanket, but it's not so warm that you need the fan.  The 'end of the year' feeling is in the air, too.  After the Romans vs Barbarians game a couple of weeks ago, a dozen of us were sitting around in a big circle on the grass, eating pizza and gelato, and someone commented that it felt like camp, like the last night of camp.  Now it's started to remind me of the end of the spring semester, that mix of excitement for summer freedom and wistfulness for the friends and the environment that had begun to feel like home.

Wistfulness is especially true in my case, since Sean and I will be staying here another year, with a different group of people.  I've been told that it's a commonplace among former two-year fellows that you always prefer the group you came in with to the group you leave with, and I have no doubt that that will prove to be the case for me as well.  When I think about being here next year without Stefania's acid, profanity-laced commentary on everyone else's behavior, without Denise's cheerful practicality, without John's terrible jokes and Vince's gruff-but-sneaky ones...it's kind of sad.  Sean registered this too, saying it would be hard to come back for two months, just enough time to really get used to everyone (even though they all love him already!) and then to say goodbye.

It will be nice that the staff is the same, at least.  Without Gabry's smirk or Tiziana's warmth or even Alessandro's aloofness, the place would really be unrecognizable.  In the meantime, it's time to treasure what I have, and to enjoy a night like this one.  The fountain is off, the birds have gone to sleep, and so for a rare moment, in the cortile, there is silence.