Venice

On our second day in Venice I remembered that Ezra Pound had lived in Dosorodoro and wondered if there was any evidence of his many years in Venice. A little web-research revealed that he lived in Calle Querini, the very next alley down and that Camila’s hotel window actually overlooked Olga Rudge’s house, where he had lived – on and off – since the twenties. On our way to breakfast at our café we stopped to see the house. It is in a short narrow dead-end alley but actually has a plaque. It reads:

In un mai spento amore per Venezia EZRA POUND

titano della poesia questa casa abito per mezzo secolo.

Commune di Venezia

[In his undying love for Venice/Ezra Pound/Titan of Poetry/lived in this house for half a century/The Venice City Council.]

As Pound was also known to have frequented Caffe Florian on the Piazza San Marco, along with Casanova, Lord Byron, Dickens, Proust, The Queen, Charlie Chaplin et al, we decided that despite it being unbelievably touristic, we should add it to the sights and at least have a cup of coffee there. It still has some of that old elegance: a small orchestra cranking out the classics, waiters in white coats and so on.It is clearly more expensive now than when Yashim visits it in Jason Goodwin’s The Bellini Card, one of the best of the Yashim series.

More research initially suggested that our hotel, the Messner, was very likely the one that Allen. Ginsberg had stayed in when he visited Pound in Venice in 1967 and 1968 when it had a different name. He stayed at the Hotel all Salute ‘Da Cici’, a pension and restaurant with a garden at 222

Fondamenta Ca’ Bala, a pension with a garden that Pound used all the time as it was very close. The Messner, which also has a garden, is only 20 meters away, consisting of two buildings at 216 and 237, with the Cici between them. There seem to be many addresses for the Messner and it is very

confusing, so it may be all the same place. One day I’ll research it and sort it out. Here are Al and Ez standing in more or less the same spot, outside the hotel, taken from different directions, the Giudecca is behind Pound.

That evening we dined at the Antica Locanda Montin, Pound’s favourite restaurant. Sadly his favourite dish, coda di rospo – Angler fish – was not on the menu. (The Venetians call it ‘cerda di rospo’). This is my kind of restaurant, with the walls filled with paintings and a garden in the back. They tend to have an older clientele, but then, I am an older client.

This was Accademia day. Here are all the usual suspects: Bellini, Tintoretto, Veronese, even one of the few Canalettos not in England. It was lovely to see Giorgione’s La Tempesta [1505] again. Described by Dali as the strangest picture ever painted, I see what he means. The male figure, apparently unmoved by the naked mother suckling her child while a full scale storm seems to be ranging in the background. It is, among other things, thought to be the first landscape in Western history if you exclude watercolours and drawings. I remember being incredibly moved by it when I first visited the museum in 1968, and it still moves me today. There’s another one of his works, The Old Woman, there too. Superb.

I have to record that Camila was particularly struck by Titian’s St John the Baptist who, unusually, is depicted as rather a hunk, not as the usual emaciated figure of classical art.

It was a good day, so we walked a lot as usual everywhere is wonderful, everywhere is magical, but none so iconic as the views of the Grand Canal. Every day was a delight. I could have stayed a month.

Friday 18th we went to the Guggenheim Museum. The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was only a few minutes away from our hotel, on the Canal Grande. For some reason I’d been a bit loath to visit this as Peggy’s taste seemed to be largely determined by who she was sleeping with, or who she wanted to sleep with, but in fact it is a superb collection and I regret my doubts about her. Of course I had to take a picture of Camila with the Marino Marini and its detachable penis.

The temporary exhibition was of very enjoyable op-art work by Marina Apollonio, many of which could be spun or moved in some way to produce optical effects. 

There were excellent examples of virtually all the twentieth century artists that interest me, from Klee and Kandinsky to Picasso and Pollock, with good examples of all the principal artists of the period lacking only in women. There is a notable absence of female artists. The collection is brought up to date with more recent material in the Schulhof collection, housed in a separate pavilion. It was interesting to see the Pollocks from different periods though only three of the eleven she owned were on view. All seven Picassos were on show, but the majority of the pictures I’d hoped to see were not displayed. They clearly need more space. At least the website tells you what is presently on show.

As the palazzo was never finished, I see nothing wrong in adding a new floor to it so we can actually see her De Koonings and her Duchamp. If anything, a higher structure would enhance the building wall of the canal. I was a bit disappointed to not see any reference to Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881-1957), one of my favourite muses, who lived at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni between 1910 and 1924. She was a far more interesting person than Peggy Guggenheim, though one wouldn’t have wanted to get too near when she was wearing live snakes as jewellery.

This was also our day to see the Frari with its Titians, its Bellini, Donatello, and tombs of Canova, Monteverdi and Titian (or Tiziano, as we got used to calling him – his retable here, La Asuncion de la Virgen [1518] is one of his greatest works). So, quite a day for the eyes.

We crossed the Canale Grand by traghetto, almost the same as hiring a gondola only much much cheaper at 2 euros. I assume you get used to the wobbly nature of the experience as everyone scrambles on and off as if it was a number 55 bus. We saw the wonderful 15th century Scala Contarini del Bovolo, spiral staircase, and ate cicchetti for lunch – small plates like tapas, mostly seafood, like small versions of a full-course meal on bread or polenta. Here’s Camila showing her sea-legs and the spiral staircase.

We finished the day with an enormous baked turbot – Rombo chiodato al forno – at the hotel, carved by an inexperienced, but enthusiastic, waitress watched over by her supervisor. It was delicious. Lightning springs from Camila’s glass and the giant fish hides beneath the potatoes as her minder keeps watch from behind.

It was a rainy day on the Saturday but we managed to see the Ca’ d’Oro (1428) and, though the man on reception said half of it was closed because of the high tide, we managed to see everything: the Van Dyck, the Titian Venus, the Tintoretto, the Mantegna and the wonderful view out over the Grand Canal from the piano nobile. The ground floor colonnaded loggia was still partially flooded by the canal, but most was open and we could inspect the Cosmati tile pavement, which reminded me of the one in Westminster Abbey (1245) that they used to only uncover every 20 years. King Charles walked all over it at his Coronation.

We did see the Libreria Acqua Alta, where many of the books are displayed in boats and gondolas, but there is a queue outside, like Shakespeare & Co in Paris, and it has become a tourist attraction, so packed with people that you can hardly move or get from one section to another, let alone actually inspect their stock. A must to avoid if you were hoping to perhaps buy a particular book or see what they had on a certain subject. I couldn’t get out fast enough, but even that took time.

In addition to Ezra Pound, Venice was also famously the home of Lord Byron for three years (1816-19). He swam in the Lagoon, named the Bridge of Sighs, and studied Armenian, while at the same time writing the end of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the beginning of Don Juan. 

Bored, despite his claim to have had sex with over 200 women during his stay, he decided to learn Armenian, as you do, and rowed each day to the island monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni near the Lido. The monks are still there, 200 years later, and their website suggests that their small museum contains some interesting mementoes of Byron’s visits. On the Sunday, we took a ferry that stopped there but the place was all locked up and no-one responded to the doorbell or knocks. We took photographs of the plaque commemorating Byron’s association with the place, spoke in a desultory way with the two other people who, like us, had misguidedly got off the ferry expecting to be able to tour the building, then settled down to wait the return boat. A wedding party arrived and milled around for a while, providing a distraction, and we admired the view out over the Lagoon which was gorgeous. 

We decided to return that afternoon at the time of the guided tour and this time there were loads of people. The stern monk in his beard and black frock glared and warned us that the guided tours were in Italian and Armenian only but we’d come this far so we decided to carry on. However, though the website suggested otherwise, we were not allowed to wander freely. 

We chose the Italian tour guide and quickly became very bored as she settled us in the uninteresting chapel and droned on and on about the history of the monastery and, presumably, the fate of the Armenian people and how this is one of the remaining centres of Armenian culture. She had an irritating, hectoring delivery and it looked as if the Italians were just as bored as us. There was nothing to see in the chapel. Then we trooped off to the museum which had hardly anything about Byron. A reproduction of a well-known painting, an example of his signature on a document, a painting of him in a woodland setting. The museum had a few nice things: a painted sarcophagus, and, in a second room a collection of about two dozen shabti figures which were unfortunately displayed so high up that they were hard to properly examine. 

The library itself was a delight with breakfront cases with float glass containing slight imperfections, guarding thousands of leather and velum bound volumes including the ten-volume set of Napoléon’s Description de l’Egypte [1809-1829] that I would have loved to take out and examine. It was easy to imagine Byron working there with the monks.

Meanwhile there was nothing to do but sit it out while the guide continued her description of everything in the room. There was an ugly Canova, a Tiepolo ceiling, but that was about all. In the end we decided to just leave and retraced our steps, then waited in the gardens for the next ferry to stop. It was boring but I did not regret going to San Lazzaro. It was somehow quite worthwhile to slow down, assess, and process all that we’d seen so-far in La Serenissima, and to have seen where Byron worked in tranquillity which had obviously changed little over two centuries. We reinvigorated ourselves up with cuttlefish in black ink over buttery polenta with a bottle of rather good Cantina La Salute. (We both very much liked the local Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso grape which I’d not consciously had before. Sadly I see it’s rather pricy in London).

On Monday we took a vaporetto across the Basin to the Public Gardens. The Venice Biennale was still on, but even though it had a Brazilian curator, Adriano Pedrosa, we decided not to spend too much time on it, just to look in on any of the International Pavilions we happened to pass. One of the best shows we encountered in our walks was Portraits in Life and Death, an exhibition of the work of Peter Hujar: pictures of Susan Sontag, Ann Waldman, John Waters, William Burroughs, et al, all reclining like Matisse odalisques in a historical snapshot of a certain period of the New York Downtown scene taken by a master photographer. Susan on the left, Bill on the right.

We walked slowly over to the Arsenal, where we found that parts of the area are still under military control and that despite Camila’s charm, we still could not achieve access. It didn’t matter, the whole area is of great interest. The Arsenal was where the great Republic of Venice built its ships and controlled the Eastern Med. There are some fine buildings still to be seen. As usual, they are guarded by the Lion of St. Mark.

It is a largely working class area, away from the tourists, where café prices are half that of the centre, people are friendly and colour-coded washing hangs across the streets as it has always done. This would be a great place to live.

The 21st was the first day that I had been able to buy jump-the-queue tickets for Saint Mark’s Basilica when planning the trip months ahead (you have to pay again to see the Pala d’Oro and again to see the museum and the Roman horses). 

Here we truly have ‘the golden gloom of Byzantium’. The walls are covered with four thousand square meters of gold mosaics of the saints and Biblical scenes and a 12th century Cosmati mosaic pavement covers the floor with animals and geometric arabesques, gently undulating as the floor sinks into the wooden stakes and mud upon which it is built. 

The unmissable treasure, the world’s only intact example of large size Gothic goldsmiths’ art, is the Pala d’Oro (the altar retable). It consists of about 250 cloisonné enamels of different sizes and epochs on sheet gold, studded with pearls and precious stones set in the enamels, commissioned by the Doge Vitale Falier in 1105 and added to in 1209 and 1345. Precious treasure from so far in the past has rarely survived and only appears in storybooks and ancient histories. It is extraordinary to see something so valuable from so far back in our past still in its original position. The High Altar canopy is even older, being from the sixth century. This is a very old building. 

On the terrace stood the four enormous horses made from golden copper, 835 kilos of it, that once pulled a Roman emperor’s chariot atop a triumphal arch. They are from the 4th century AD, seized during the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the fourth crusade. The originals are now inside the basilica, in the museum a few meters from them, and those on the terrace are pretty good copies. 

Of course the view of the Piazza San Marco is spectacular, as is the view south to the Bacino di San Marco, so no shame in including some ‘what we did on our holidays’ snaps. The trouble is, Venice is filled with such views, so one’s entire record consists of picture postcard shots. 

That evening we walked to the tip of Dorsoduro past the Salute and looked across to San Marco. The twinkling lights reflected in the black waters of the Bacino danced in the wake of a vaporetto. A row of moored gondolas bobbed up and down. A young man sat propped against the wall of the ancient church, quietly playing a guitar. It was enough to make you want to climb a lamppost.