The magical city of Venice

Venice, a most unique and beautiful city. If one were to personify her charms into an image of a beautiful woman, you would not find any parallel with a beauty pageant winner. Rather, Venice would be an aged contessa, not exactly beautiful in a visual sense. One must spend years dallying with her to overlook the lines of age and savor her experience, her air of nobility. She is the soul of culture with just a dash of frivolity.

Sadly, the only thing Venetian in my life were the blinds hanging from my apartment window. It was in the mid-Seventies when I got the chance to visit Italy for several months. On the night before my departure, I could not sleep from excitement for this was the first of what was to be eventually many visits to Europe. My only daughter (now a faculty member of the Painting Department of UST College of Fine Arts and Design) was barely one-year-old when I set foot in this land of dreams.

It was the series of paintings about Venice by celebrated English painter William Turner (1775-1851) that initially gave me a strong desire to explore Contessa Venice. The artist had visited Italy in 1819, a trip that resulted in a vast number of watercolors and drawings that captured the bright realities of the country. Of all the Italian cities that he visited, it was Venice that captivated Turner most.

Venice is an extraordinary city in the northern part of Italy, founded in 421 A.D. It is situated in an Adriatic lagoon like a giant lily pad on a pond. A blend of land, water and stone, the island is laced by myriad canals and visited alternately by veils of soft mist and crowns of golden sunlight. The place is a magnificent exception to every architectural precept. Here, clock towers lean, pavements undulate, façades shimmer and statues have soul.

The secret to seeing and discovering the romance and beauty of Venice is to walk and savor each part slowly and sensually. Part of Dorsoduro and Castello are empty of tourists even in high season (from July to September). You can paint or sketch there with nary a disturbance. You could lose yourself easily in the narrow winding streets between the Academia and the station where the signs pointing to San Marco and the Rialto never seem to make any sense, but what a way to pass the time. There are no cars in the city and all public transport is via canal, on vaporetto (motorboat), traghetto (small ferry) or gondola.

"A gondola is a sweet interval of pleasure," wrote an 18th century French traveler. A gondola is made of 280 pieces of walnut, hazel, oak, beech, mahogany, linden, larch and cherry wood. It remains Venice’s finest invention. Gondoliers are part of the symbolism and mythology of Venice. Local legend has it that they are born with webbed feet to help them walk on water. Their intimate knowledge of the city’s waterways is passed down from father to son.

Venice is an urban maze, a fortress for the joy of living. There is nothing suggestive of artificially regarding Venice. Its architecture is old world and the buildings are not museum pieces. There are live and breathing human beings in those crumbling structures. Yet antique building or not, the cost of living in Venice is astronomical. Inside those monuments, one can find palaces. Poor rich people indeed! When you walk in Venice, you enter an extraordinary labyrinth where you quickly lose your bearing but gain in return a glimpse of venerable wealth and sacred wisdom.

Every time I visited a village, a town or a city here and abroad, my first step was to find the church or basilica to pray and to thank God for all the blessings that I received. The feeling inside the awesome Basilica of San Marco is so strange compared to my incursions at other religious shrines. Here lies the body of one of the Four Evangelists of the Gospels.

The Basilica, built in the Byzantine style in the 11th century and richly decorated, was constructed to house the body of St. Mark, which had been stolen from its burial place in Egypt by two Venetian merchants. The merchants were said to have hidden the body in a basket of pork (anathema to Muslims) and, thus, were immune from searches and inquiries as they escaped back to their beloved Venice. The saint has been reburied several times in the basilica and his body now lies under the high altar. Replicas have replaced the famous bronze horses which stood above the entrance. The horses were part of Venice’s booty from the famous Sack of Constantinople in 1204. The originals are now in the Basilica Museum.

One of the most enjoyable places in the old city is the famous Piazza San Marco. Napoleon once said that Saint Mark’s square was Europe’s most elegant décor. Never has so much opulence and art been crammed in any one place on earth. On one side, one can see the Byzantine Basilica, on the other, the Gothic Doge’s Palace, a sumptuous and elegant residence flanked by elegant arches, and still more, the Romanesque Campanile, an eighth century 325-foot guard tower plus the Turco-Gothic-Renaissance, new and old Procurators’ palaces and the Roman Empire—style logetta.

I did a number of drawings and paintings of the surroundings in different moods from my stay at St. Mark’s. I found the square so relaxing, feeling a perpetual festive spirit in the air. The thousands of pigeons roosting and feeding from the hands of residents and tourists alike contributed to a constant spirit of motion, as did the many side shops selling Venetian papier-maché masks and gimmicky hats.

Art exhibitions, theater and musical events continue all year round in Venice. The major event of the year is the famous Carnevale, held 10 days before Ash Wednesday, when Venetians do spectacular masks and costumes for what is literally a 10-day street party. The Venice Biennale, a major exhibition of international visual arts, is held every even-numbered year and the Venice International Film Festival is held every September at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido.

Venice means discovery and mystery. Much has been written about Venice of the north, south, east and west, but for me, there’s only one Venice, the magical one with gondolas and palaces. As I open the real Venetian blinds of my hotel window to say Arrivederci Venezia, I recalled my sleepless night with the half-opened blinds in my apartment back home.