Thursday, January 6, 2011

The Grand Canal

The act of walking out of Santa Lucia station and beholding the Grand Canal feels a bit like stepping onto a stage and bowing to thundering applause. I always feel momentarily cleansed of all absurdity when I arrive in Venice, found innocent of all criminal charges, proud of myself and my life, as if Venezia is something I had a hand in creating, as if it couldn’t exist without me and my rush of radiant emotion. For a while I always sit by the water and watch the waterbuses arrive and leave, the gondoliers ease their boats up towards the Rialto Bridge. The blue of the sky invariably has a pristine ethereal quality which only Italian skies seem to have. I’m not at all fat, just the opposite, but if I were fat I imagine looking up at an Italian sky would make me feel like I had miraculously lost two stone overnight. 

5 comments:

  1. Oh, I love Venice too... quite, quite beautiful and I've secretly always fancied attending one of those seductive masked balls.

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  2. Have you read "Baroque Concerto" by Alejo Carpentier?

    It details a meeting in Venice, during carnival, between Vivaldi, Scarlatti and Handel in 1709, watched by a South American Don, with percussion from his young black servant. It's a riot. A beautiful, dense, musical book.

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  3. Someday I will visit Venice. When I do, I will remember this.

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  4. Stunning first two sentences. You've captured the moment perfectly, and now I remember that fist time outside the station, though my own experience was altogether less noble: my companion threw his jacket over a bunch of pigeons, slipped his hand inside and strangled a couple for supper.

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  5. Thanks, Simon. I'll check out Baroque Concerto. The Aspern Papers and Death in Venice are probably the best two evocations of Venice I've read. Both depict it as a place of decay and slumbering menace.
    You should start a new novel off with the pigeon scene, Pete. Of all the things to do the moment you arrive in Venice you could hardly beat that for originality and black humour.

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