The last few days of the Academy were a grind: not only was the weather awful and sticky with no chance of respite, even at night, there was the stress of moving all of our stuff into our new spaces, and the sadness of saying goodbye to all of our friends. A lot of people will be back through for one reason or another; Stefania has a couple of conferences, Danny and Kim will be in town all of September, Sarah is hoping to come back in the spring, Lakshmi said she'll try to visit. It was especially sad to say goodbye to her, of course, as my closest friend at the Academy. Le sigh.
Anyway, we got to Venice and discovered they were enjoying a rare cool snap, so we were able to savor a few days of cool temperatures before the heat and humidity picked up again, especially since we were celebrating Sean's 30th birthday! We had a lovely meal at Refolo (they have a fantastic Refosco there which I'm sure I'll never be able to find again) and strolled under the "blue moon." Our hotel for the night, before we could move into the apartment, was best described as 'bordello chic', haha.
So Venice is Disneyland: I never really realized before exactly to what extent that's true. It's not a 'real' living city anymore, and Sean noted it's as though people can sense that and accordingly abandon all pretense of the norms of city life, like keeping to the right in crowded, tiny alleyways, or *not* stopping in a massed group on a tiny bridge, or *not* zig-zagging carelessly all over the place like a line of drunken ducklings. It's amazingly frustrating, and I don't know how anyone who actually lives here long-term manages! Granted, we're living near Santa Maria Formosa, a fairly high-traffic zone near San Marco, so if we were living somewhere quiet out in Dorsoduro I'm sure it'd be a little less noticeable, but...it's a lot.
Still, Venice is really awesome, and it's great to finally be able to be here for a decent period. The Rosand library is awesome, too, except for the fact that my m%&#%ing Chromebook can't connect to the wifi there! It already sucked not having Zotero access, and now I'm reduced to just poking at my tablet if I need to look something up online. Not ideal. It's also a little intimidating that there are pictures of Rosand *everywhere*, a never-ending slideshow on the catalog computer screensaver, his signature in the ex-libris in all the books, and even his annotations in a lot of places! Talk about the anxiety of influence!
In terms of travel outside Venice, so far we've been to Castelfranco Veneto and up to Urbino. This week we're renting a car for four days, and the plan is to hit Asolo (Queen Caterina Cornaro!) and Bassano del Grappa on the way to Trent where we're staying one night. From there we'll go a little further north to another hotel, which will be our base for the exploring Italian alps and Innsbruck, just 2 hours north; then we'll be driving to Belluno and staying the night there, with a stop in Titian's hometown; and finally we might be able to stop in Treviso and see his Annunciation in the Duomo before we return the car to Venice.
No comments:
Post a Comment