III.xi. Death and Glory

"Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;
And was the safeguard of the west: the worth
Of Venice did not fall below her birth,
Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.
She was a maiden City, bright and free;
No guile seduced, no force could violate;
And, when she took unto herself a Mate,
She must espouse the everlasting Sea.
And what if she had seen those glories fade,
Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
When her long life hath reached its final day:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is passed away."
- William Wordsworth

The only thing more daunting about Venice than the city itself is its legion of famous visitors that has already written about it in an eloquent eternity's worth of reading. Everything that can be said about the city has been surmised a thousand times before in infinitely more elegant ways. A visitor, then, as familiar as he can be with Venice by the book, will always feel a certain inadequacy as he walks down the steps from Santa Lucia station onto the banks of the Grand Canal. It is an inadequacy due not just to the material fact that Venice is too glorious to ever begin to encompass or understand, but also to the knowledge that any attempt at this will already have been superceded by countless long dead heroes; Byron, Wordsworth, Proust, Goethe, Ruskin, Wagner. Dead, like the city itself.
    Inadequacy and Lament, Wordsworth's sonnet, are hard to overcome then in this place. It's the same all over Italy, except that the shards of the past in Venice are hardly shards at all, and the city's stones, its marble brick and mortar, are the same as those of the Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic, the Queen of the Adriatic, dead some two hundred years ago at Bonaparte's behest. A completely preserved body, with no soul, and the lagoon waters are a cruel formaldehyde that doesn't let die what should die.
    Venice is on life support. In Saint Marc's square work crews are rebuilding the canal bank. A few hundred million Euros later and the whole square will be resting on a plastic membrane, totally impermeable to the acque alte that have plagued it for the past century. The engineers go about their business under the watchful eyes of Saint Marc's lion, symbol of Venice, perched atop an ancient column, and the four golden horses that were stolen from the stadium at Constantinople, brought back as trophy from an eastern raid. But the lion looks a little too fierce- he was removed in 1993 for restoration at the British Museum, then dutifully shipped back. And the bronze horses, the real ones, are preserved in the basilica's museum for safekeeping; their sixteen hooves have traveled more than their fair share; stolen, they were stolen again by Napoleon, brought to Paris and then restituted to their less than rightful place some years later. Thievery is not the open, symbolic thing that it once was.
    But, somewhere between Santa Lucia station and Saint Marc's square, I realized that I would never be sad for Venice again. Venice is not dead, it is as real as anything that has ever been; it is as vivid and as valid as the present. For such is history, a collection of everything that has ever occurred, and the Doges that looked out to crowds from balconies, all the painters, the fishermen, the prostitutes, the moors, they are all as real as you or I, and in the eternal scale of things they are just the same.
    So I won't be sad for Venice, nor anything else that we today foolishly consign to the Past that we will all soon be part of. Today I visited the Academia and spoke with Titian about his brushwork. I bought silk scarves from a Levantine merchant in the Rialto. I even listened to the strum of a classical guitar in the loft of a waterborne palace. I will be returning, soon and often, to the Queen of the Adriatic, the bride of a sea that still, after Napoleon, Garibaldi, Floods, Tourists, Trains, Buses, and even the British Museum, still laps at the shores of its eternal mate.



No one ever forgets the light of Venice…


… nor the River of clichés that is the Grand Canal…


… the Lions that rear their heads throughout…


… or the pinnacles and pigeons of Saint Marc's