Venice: I am not making this up

always looking

October 4, 2024 16 Comments

As you know by now, just looking around can be hugely entertaining in Venice. If you don’t come often, everything is worth looking at. For lifers, though, looking really closely as you plod along the same old streets really relieves the monotony. If you keep your eyes and brain coordinated, all sorts of diverting little details jump out. Fun fact: Even Venetians are surprised to suddenly notice something new, even after a lifetime here.

This isn’t what anybody would call a LITTLE detail — you could see this with one eye closed and the other squinting. It’s one of my favorite lions, including his little starter kit of wings. I have no idea what this structure is. I could ask somebody sometime…. Meanwhile, whatever materials the artist “Manu Invisible#” used have held up amazingly well. Still looks as fresh as it did when I first saw it at least 20 years ago.

Speaking of felines, one almost imagine this one is sipping through a straw. Impressive eyes. Is he winking?

I detect the hand of a different artist here (or at least a different species of cat).

To remain in the feline, not to say leonine, mode for another moment, here is a very brave exemplar on the church of the Salute. He’s got the hang of appearing fierce yet dignified, but the teeth perplex me slightly — they must have called in the doge’s dentist to give the sculptor some advice. Evidently the first advice was to extract the fangs.

Over the adjacent doorway was this wreck. Either this is the same lion many years later, or after one brief but violent visit to the aforementioned dentist. And who among us has not left the dentist’s office looking, or at least feeling, like this? “Your dentures will be in by next week…..”

A national election was held some time ago and the local polling place was bedecked with the requisite signage for the “sections” assigned to this school for voting. They did their best.

There are so many reasons to feel sorry for tourists here (I know, we hate them, but we can also feel sorry for them at the same time). They discover all too quickly that what passes for normal here is usually something tiring, confusing, or just generally hard. The fact that you have to walk, sometimes kilometers (and over bridges), means that your feet are the ones who who decide what you can and can’t do. It was 5:00 AM that morning on the vaporetto trundling toward the train station, and this woman’s feet were already so unhappy.

I really felt for her. First, these are boudoir shoes, not for the granite pavements of the most beautiful city etc. Equally first, even if she were in her boudoir, these shoes are too small. Every woman recognizes that your brain can try every trick to make you ignore the fact that the shoes you couldn’t live without are too small, but that struggle comes at a price charged to your feet and the rest of your body. As you see here, she’s trying to maintain a truce with her feet. I imagine that these shoes were acquired because her boyfriend said he liked them. (Refrain from commenting on latent sexism in that theory. Maybe she got them because she knew he’d like them. Maybe he tried to discourage her and now she regretfully realizes he had her best interest at heart. I’ll never know.) Anyway, he’s the one you can’t see, wearing the comfortable white flat walking shoes. Just looking at this picture hurts me as much as it did to look at the pair of them (the two people, but also I mean feet) all the way up the Grand Canal.

There are shutters on thousands of Venetian windows, and while opening them is universal, there’s a choice of gizmos made to keep them open. A friend revealed one type that is as fabulous as it is common. I’d give anything to know who thought it up, but I love the fact that so many people decided that’s how they wanted to control their shutters.

A very common sight at street level. I’d never given them a thought till their secret was revealed to me.

She’s down. She’s resting. Waiting for the day to start and the shutters to need holding. Look closely at her arms. As soon as she is lifted upward on her hidden linchpin they will turn out to be…

…this guy’s turban. He is up and she is facing the wall upside down.

Okay fine, so the person who opened the shutters couldn’t be bothered to put this couple to work. And yet, he is up, in holding-shutter position. So many questions.

And yet, we know that if something can go wrong, it will. One day the gizmo had to be installed but the installer was — let’s say disoriented. Perhaps it was a Monday morning. Yep, I installed it, boss. Yes, the male figure is supposed to be in the up position. BUT LOOKING OUTWARD, ya nugget!

Venetian Problems

tourist strikes back

September 25, 2024 16 Comments

The nose on this very old-fashioned doorbell has encountered thousands of hands in its life, as we see. But they usually came in friendship.

This just hot off the press.

Yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon the Piazza San Marco was bubbling with tourists. The sun was out, the air was warm, the most beautiful city in the world (so-called) was just lounging around being beautiful, etc. There were thousands (probably) of tourists, and an inexact number of thieves and pickpockets in the mix. So far, so normal.

One of the tourists was a man identified only as being South American. One of the pickpockets was originally from Tunisia, and around 4:00 PM they were destined to meet. The Tunisian was already known for his propensity to steal from shops, but yesterday he tried his hand at stealing from people. The aforementioned hand had already extracted the tourist’s wallet, as I understand it, but the victim felt it, ran after and caught him, and launched his fist at the thief’s nose. Broke it, in fact.

Wallet recovered, pickpocket carried away in an ambulance to await surgery.

The daily newspapers were in full cry. (Left to right): “San Marco tourist breaks thief’s nose.” “Pickpockets a tourist followed and beaten at San Marco.” “Robbed he retaliates and sends the thief to the hospital.”

Lessons learned? Don’t try to steal wallets if you’re only used to ransacking rooms. Rooms don’t hit back.

Somebody stepped on this tomato long before I walked past. I took the photo only because I liked how it looked. Little did I suspect that it would ever be useful.

Nature

windowboxes gone wild

September 1, 2024 18 Comments

The rebellious hedge was one thing, but here the plants are taking over. I’ve been watching this installation grow over the past few years, and while I applaud the owner’s commitment to the natural look (English- v. French-garden style), I think having what may turn out to be an actual tree growing in your windowbox is pretty audacious.

I’m just glad to see that they all can manage to get along together.

The creeping shadow may be the only brake (along with water) that has any effect on this extraordinary assortment.

Windowboxes, I feel I ought to note, are a late bloomer in Venetian life. They certainly weren’t common in Lino’s childhood. “People didn’t even have food,” he states. “Who had flowers?” Little vegetable allotments were not unheard-of, but flowers? Only in their natural state, out in the fields and in the wild, on the barene and lagoon shoreline.

But now that windowboxes are flourishing — or running hogwild, as above — let me share a bit of their color and cheer as we stagger toward the end of a hideously hot summer.

The flowers are best of all. Second-best is the ingenuity of putting them in a bucket, seeing that there is no other place for them. But special mention goes to what the bucket is hanging from: The handle and its support of the long-ago doorbell. The small hole at the top of the metal strip was where the metal wire was attached (the wire that stretched upward to the relevant dwelling, where the other end was attached to the bell itself. Yes, you just pulled it and it rang like crazy up in your friend’s apartment.)

I love so many things about this arrangement, but it wouldn’t be so wonderful without the sticker still stuck to the pot.

Somewhere on Sant’ Erasmo, somebody wanted to do this. I’m guessing it’s a pet’s grave, but I’ll never know. The place needed flowers, and flowers there are.

Burano, obviously. I admire anyone who can think of putting flowers out to coexist with walls whose color is measured in decibels.

Leaves that looks like petals, or vice versa. Nice.

Enjoy your flowerbox before it dries up.

Venetian Curiosities, Venetian-ness

hedge gone wild

August 27, 2024 9 Comments

Well, I waited six months to get a haircut, so I suppose I’m not one to criticize a hedge. But I’m confused. Wouldn’t you think that the so-called most beautiful city in the world would do a little more to keep itself presentable? I know my mother would.

Granted, we all know how you just go along thinking everything is fine… you’ll fix your hair/mop the floor/write that thank-you note just any day now…and then suddenly something snaps and you realize that your hair is a freaking mess, etc. etc. The jig is up.

In the case of this hedge, nobody seems to be responding to the jig. Maybe wild-haired hedges are just the latest trend, or something related to the Biennale which is just through the park ahead. But company’s coming to town (and some is already here — I’ve seen the yachts). Tomorrow is the first day of the Venice Film Festival, and if there were ever a time to trim that hedge, I’d think the time would be now. Actually, yesterday. ACTUALLY, a week ago.

But what, as I often ask myself, do I know? I never trimmed my bangs to suit my mother, so it’s clearly just as well I was never responsible for a hedge.

Oh, did you want to see that statue? Sorry, come back later. No, I don’t know when. Later.

It’s clear at the end of this row that somebody with a hedge-clipper, or machete, had made a good start. But they got a day off, or had to take their kid to the dentist, or something broke the momentum (or the tool), and here we are.

Or it might have been around the time when the hedge finally realized it was never going to play Hampton Court Palace, or the Redberry Maze, or the Laberinto Katira, and just let everything go.

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