The flight attendants on Austrian Airlines dress entirely in red – a true Chanel red, leaning a little more toward blue than orange. This is a great color on lips. When I lived in New York, long ago, I would try on different reds at Lord & Taylor at lunch-time. Red pants, shirt, vest, shoes, and if a skirt, tights. All red. The young woman who just passed me also has red hair. I wonder if that helped her get the job. Anyway, I am on my way back to Iasi from Venice. Venice is like a dream. My friend and former student Jess P. reminded me in a comment on my Instagram about Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I assigned as reading when she was in graduate school. Invisible Cities is always on my list, as is Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, Adam Zagajewski’s Mysticism for Beginners, and Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris. Calvino writes from the point of view of Marco Polo speaking to Kublai Khan about the fantastic cities in Khan’s realm – late do we discover that in each tale, he is describing some aspect of Venice.
While there, I was visiting my friend from graduate school, poet Penelope Pelizzon. I saw Penelope read at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last spring. She did a beautiful reading, coherent and inspiring, and we ended up at dinner with another former MFA from our program, poet Karen Holmberg. (I think I invited myself to dinner, but they did not make it feel that way.) Our MFA program at University of California, Irvine, was now decades ago and in a way, it feels like an otherworldly time, when we were embarking on not “careers” as writers, but the idea of writing as something you could grow with, something that could be one of the larger parts of your life. Four of six of us (my dear friend poet Connie Voisine is the other) ended up publishing extensively and working in academia. That’s a crazy ratio and it’s safe to say that our commitment to writing was fed in certain ways by each other.
In any case, when I heard that Penelope was teaching in Venice this semester, I reached out to her and (again!) invited myself to visit. She graciously agreed and on Friday, walked me around the entirety of the island, or of the many islands (118 islands and 438 bridges) that compose Venice. She also possesses vast knowledge about Italian art and architecture and history (this will be read by others before she can modestly deny this), so our conversation contained all of that plus our lives as poets, our personal lives, and numerous subjects from food to plants to children to how-did-we-end-up-here? We drank prosecco or white wine during the day; I ate grilled whole branzino and beautiful grilled zucchini, eggplant and peppers at every dinner, and at night, we lingered in the small but lovely hotel bar where she would have a Fernet and I would have a Lagavullin, each with a small ice cube.
I was staying at a hotel in a quieter part of Venice, away from the tourists. The first time a bellhop took me to my room, I followed dutifully and paid no attention, to the point that I had to ask the front desk manager to show me the way the second time. He said: you are not the first. Venice is a maze and so is our hotel. My journey to room 321 (from floor zero) involved a right turn, a left turn, a sliding door that led outside, a right turn, a sliding door that led inside and an elevator. The first time I came downstairs from the room, I exited on floor zero found no public entrances or exits, took the elevator to floor one, found no public entrances or exits and again went to the floor zero, where I discovered a possible exit that conveyed me to the front of the hotel. At which point, I pretended that was exactly where I had intended to be. I had thought, for a brief moment, that I might be trapped in an Escher painting.
On the first day, when I had Penelope to myself, we went to see a truly glorious painting (really, a series of paintings) by Vittore Carpaccio, “St. George and the Dragon.” It is one of nine restored (or in the process of being restored), housed at Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. Penelope pointed out museums I could visit the next day, including St. Mark’s Basilica and the Accademie Gallery, without her as she had work to do, and I was “on holiday.” We walked about 20,000 steps (said my watch), drank two coffees plus one espresso, drank one glass of white wine and one prosecco (she had a spritz) as well as two bottles of fizzy water. That was before dinner. Our three dinners together were at intimate and warm restaurants that seemed to house more locals than tourists; though we walked by and through the famous and crowded Piazza San Marco, we did not dwell there. Many of the streets of Venice, if you have not been, seem more like alleys than streets – they are narrow and mostly in shadow, but this is the way you get anywhere, this and the bridges, the steps up and down. My navigation apps were surprisingly accurate, guiding me through narrow passages and then you end up in a boisterous crowd 30 feet later; somehow you do not hear them until you are almost among them.
Fortunately, Venice is no stranger to tourists, so my phone/camera incessantly clicking on canals and bridges, multi-colored building facades, store displays of pastries and glassware from Murano, did not seem to bother anyone. Did I shop? A little. I bought myself and Syd a pair of Gondolier slippers in a saturated purple and a dusky blue, and some handmade paper, and a beaded necklace. Nothing too crazy. Penelope and I also took a group-tour of the Jewish ghetto. We saw two of the five synagogues, interior spaces that hold meaning but are nowhere as beautiful as the external visuals of Venice, or, to be honest, the churches. The scale cannot be compared, so as a Jew, I just have to endow these modest and lovely buildings with the meaning that we were here, we contributed, we made a life for ourselves in the New Ghetto and the Old Ghetto, even locked in and guarded at night. Penelope showed me some “stumbling stones” that mark where Jews who were taken to concentration camps had lived. Has Venice dealt with its history? Somewhat. Hard to say. The tour was full, which was heartening, and I did not get the sense that most of those who came along were Jewish. So, at the very least, there is curiosity, and that is a form of accountability.
On the second day, I hit a stumbling block of my own devising, which is to say I started to worry about all the work I have to do in Iasi and my upcoming travels to give poetry readings, seminars, and workshops. These travels and events are, as they say, a good problem, but do take work, and I started to think about the week ahead. I devoted an hour or two and then veritably shoved myself out of my pretty hotel room. I started to walk with no plan and no conviction, but the beauty of Venice intervened and soon I was crossing over small bridges, meandering through green spaces, buying a double espresso and a croissant, and then I decided to find the Accademie.
For anyone craving an art history lesson, I must warn you: it won’t happen here. I’ll tell what a little of what I saw and mostly what I loved. The Accademie houses masterpieces of Venetian painting; some painters familiar to me – Tintoretto, Titian, Vasari, Veronese, Tiepolo and others a little less familiar. One of the featured exhibits was of Vasari’s nine-panel ceiling called “Triumph of Virtues,” which had been disassembled, the panels gone to the four winds after the family owning the house/ceiling/art had died out. After a rigorous search for these panels, they are now reunited. I wanted to see them, in part, because Vasari exists at the center of John Ashbery’s most famous poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” – perhaps the only Ashbery poem (gasp) I truly love. (It’s long and unwieldy but makes some sense, and I am a maker of sense and lover of sense, and I read for some degree of sense-making.) This renovated ceiling did not disappoint. (I will provide a picture.)
This museum is for me, the perfect size. The idea of seeing everything is perhaps just out of reach but not completely so. It’s sort of the “just right” of the three bears of museums. The scale of many of the paintings is insane. You have no idea how vast a painting can be until it covers a giant wall of giant room. What I love about these works is how populated they are – so many individual faces and bodies to create, to distinguish from one another. On the other hand, the paintings I probably like best are the less populated, like Lorenzo Lotto’s “Gentleman in his Study,” (he looks like a slightly surly millennial) and “The Chess Players” by Pittore Caravaggesco, which contain three people, and you can study them, their faces and hands and feet, the folds in their gowns and robes (fewer pants and shirts, then). I may be drawn to them, as well, because I do tire of an abundance of Christian religious art – what can I say? – so at about the 16th annunciation of Mary I get a little weary. And much as I like a cherub, it was clearly a checklist item for these painters and even I, who am consistently amused by them, tire of the chubby lads.
So I am more likely to sit and stare (and there are benches for just that) at some of the quieter, less inhabited works that may not address a religious epiphany. Clearly, this is my art weakness. I do stand in awe of the abundance and elaboration of the events. And there are a few figures from the Hebrew bible depicted – “Samson” by Giovanni Battista Langetti and “Judith and Holofernes” by Giulia Lama. It was nice to see my “landsmen,” (of sorts), even in scenes of peril and distress. I also enjoyed the sculptures of Greek and Roman mythological figures; poets write about them so much, we feel like we own them. They’re so ridiculously flawed and arrogant – I think they remind us of ourselves, and we’re always sad for Odysseus having to surrender poor Eurydice to the underworld. It’s as if we’re always surprised that he turns around: will he figure it out next time?
Since I cannot provide a more intellectual evaluation, I’ll move on. Suffice it to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the Academmie and would highly recommend it, as well as getting slightly lost on the return to my hotel, where I encountered some lovely shops, one selling high-end Murano glass. As we tell children: I kept my body to myself (I am a tripper), stepped carefully, admired, inquired of a few prices, sighed, and left. My children are almost through college, but those purchases would have required the sacrifice of any vestiges of the much-touted “college fund.”
And so to dinner with more branzino and wine and great conversation. And the next day, I walked to the water taxi at Madonna del Orto, no more than five minutes away, and validated the ticket we had purchased the night before, as planned. At the Marco Polo Airport, I waited for my plane to Vienna, then Iasi, and returned “home” to my apartment in the mid-afternoon, following a Bolt ride that did not take me through the prettiest part of town, but that’s alright. It was strange coming home to Iasi, which in ways, does feel like home and in others, does not. This morning, the crows were extra loud and prolonged in their call-and-response conversation, as if to say: where were you, Patty? How dare you leave!
I love the feeling of a perfectly sized museum, and I truly agree that curation is what makes or breaks. I've been to some very cozy museos that I've loved beyond all else and whose pieces live on in my mind rent free, as they say :)