VI.vii. North of Venice

"I reached the Alps: the soul within me burned
Italia, my Italia, at thy name."
- Oscar Wilde

Italy becomes a small country quite easily. The Alps are just across the valley from Bologna, and Tuscany is just over the hills. This geographical closeness does nothing but add the compressed, crammed, and conflated nature of this place. Beyond the normal reactions of a North American, the arable, cultured space in Northern Italy is objectively quite limited. The mountains, Apennine and Alpine, force everything into close proximity or else great distance. This is not the case in France, where one only has to see Chartres cathedral rising from the limitless Beauce plain to realize it is an enormous place, or the German world, which divides all of Europe into West and East. Granted, Britain too is small, but the English never did anything even half memorable on their own land, and their empire, a weird and impudent reaction to claustrophobia, discounts them anyhow. Italy is not anywhere else; arguably, never has so much happened in so little space.
    As a case in point, only three hours north of Bologna by train are the approaches to the perennially snow covered peaks of the Venetian Alps. A little farther is Cortina, the preferred ski resort of the Bolognese who seek more than the unchallenging runs of the closer Apennine locales.
    A staging ground for centuries of Alpine excursions, the bustling city of Treviso was my first stop of the day. Greener and more gardened than Venice, Treviso has its own distinct character, though it has its share of Adriatic architecture and languid canals as well. The icy waters of the Sile branch out and breach the still intact Renaissance walls, mingling with the arcades and cantilevered houses of the city. Of strategic importance for centuries, Napoleon built a road from here to the Venetian lagoon that is still in use today, while the Brenta canal, which also leads out to more open waters, is only a few kilometers away. The waterways that course through the old town seem so strange, in our era of landlocked cities, but for the remainder of history they have been much more useful than their current role of providing a backdrop to a patio here or there. Water was the lifeblood of many cities that today seem dry as could be. Even Bologna, at first glance the most parched place imaginable, had and still has an extensive network of canals. These streams, which occasionally surface in areas where they haven't yet been built over, actually extend underneath the city for a great many more kilometers than do the famous arcades above ground. But in Treviso at least, the waterways have been left as they are and there is still a fish market that operates directly above one, so that the offal can easily be disposed of every Sunday afternoon, after the week's sales have been made.
    Treviso has its artistic treasures too. Despite the dampness of its setting, its climate is enough of an inland one to preserve frescoes, unlike that of Venice, where plaster doesn't last a short century. Tomasso da Modena, an itinerant man of obvious origins, came here to work for much of his career. His celebrated portraits of famous Dominicans painted in the thirteen fifties, who stare down from the walls of a chapter house as though they had interrupted in their reading, include the first known depictions of eyeglasses. Corrective lenses, imaginatively captured in Eco's The Name of the Rose, were a necessary invention of the bookish middle ages, and were of use even to the silent timeless doorman who let me in to see Tomaso's frescoes, housed nowadays in a silent and equally timeless seminary.
    Belluno, my second and principle destination, is a confusing place, jointly in the grips of the German and Mediterranean worlds. Here, Venetian palaces rub shoulders with Austrian belltowers, and the whole is surrounded by a magnificent backdrop of mountain peaks. As confusing as the city itself was my reason for venturing this far north in mid-February: an exhibition entitled "North Of Venice, Culture in the Dolomites between Gothic and Renaissance." Laughably obscure to most, this event was on the top of my agenda ever since I saw it advertised in a Venetian Vaporetto some weeks ago.
    The exhibition in Belluno was a coherent, beautifully put together attempt by the people of Belluno to get people to Belluno. It got me there, but I think that I am neither a typical nor ideal economic agent in these sorts of situations. In the tourist office, as I asked whether it was possible to get to Trento that evening (it wasn't), I enquired about staying the night, but declined, finding the twenty five Euro John XXIII residence either too expensive or too orthodox. Deciding art tourism in the mid-winter Alps to be somewhat inhospitable, I had a cup of tea in the Gran Café Leon, a Bellunese institution since Austrian times, before catching my train back to the lowlands.