Anyone for Venice?
The city on the sea is dramatic all right, and you too can be part of what is an epic story
VENICE just has to wake up each morning to be admired and cherished all over again. Especially by those who are escaping – from modern life, or enemies, or broken hearts – and who feel an instant kinship with Venice’s canals, streams, rivers, alleyways and bridges. In no other place is topography so personal. Empathy pulses from arches, flagstones, quays, gondolas, barges, punts and water buses.
The air is full of bells. Tintoretto and Titian might well have worked here last week, or year, from a ladder, or up on scaffolds, painting frescoes on to the walls above church altars.
Venice is much better in rain, mist, piercing cold, hailstones, high tides and sloshing walkways. Nothing brings people together like inclement elements. A fellowship of dripping sou’westers, bent umbrellas, glistening boots and saturated mittens. A feeling of collective survival as survivors step off duckboards to sip thick sweet chocolate and peer out of steamed up café windows. Netherland, wonder-world, underworld, whose Styx-like barges glide by like ghosts. The world’s most exclusive city with only 50,000 permanent residents, unique, mysterious and life-changing. Getting lost in Venice is more a privilege than an inconvenience.
The Hotel Luna Baglioni was once a palace of the Knights Templar. In Venice, this is not remarkable – the wealth brought back here by Marco Polo and his descendants made palaces as common as semi-detached houses. They lacquered their walls with gold, outside as well as in.
THE Baglioni, one minute from St Mark’s Square and with its own jetty on the Canale di San Marco, is run by people for whom no task is impossible. Friendly Venetians falling over themselves to help – with concerts, recitals, jazz club bookings, restaurants off the beaten track, water taxis, hot whiskeys, and directions. It’s a seven minutes’ walk from the Baglioni to the opera.
The Barber of Seville, Rossini’s enduring masterpiece, is playing at Teatro La Fenice. Buttoned up, head down, the approach is by way of narrow, pea-soup canals oozing mist, across tiny, mystical bridges, along empty alleyways with names like Assassins Lane. La Fenice, the opera house of Venice, fronts on to a small square, Campo San Fantin, closer in size to a pizza than a piazza. The façade is that of the courthouse in a small, provincial town. The imagination fights to grasp that a famed opera house can be located within this microscopic grid of lanes, channels, spillways and watercourses.
Once inside, any reservations are swept aside. Opulence on a Sistine Chapel scale abounds. Five semicircular rows of gilded boxes are piled one on the other, with little pink-shaded lights that turn the auditorium into a dolls house for all ages.
La Fenice – the Phoenix – was rebuilt in 1996 after a fire, its third in two centuries. Reopened in 2004, the acoustics are Dolby-plus. This performance of the muchloved Barber is tremendous with an outrageously camp Figaro (Vincenzo Taormina) and excellent performances from the Count d’Almaviva (Giorgio Misseri) and Rosina (Chiara Amaru) with a mainly Italian supporting cast, chorus and orchestra.
Conductor Stefano Montanari, who dresses like a Roman centurion, directs ‘con brio’ his orchestra through Rossini’s vibrant score which supports the vocalists and at the same time mirrors and enhances the dramatic narrative.
Venice throws other cities into relief. Every morning postmen with their little wheelie-carts full of mail board the water-buses at Tronchetto and make their way into the city’s islands. At dawn, the squat green rubbish collection barges nose their way down the Canale Della Giudecca. Ca’ Pesaro, an art museum on the Canale Grande, is reached by adventure – by wet alleyways so narrow that umbrellas cannot be raised, by way of Calle dei Morti, Deadman’s Lane.
Google maps and GPS struggle here. A former Baroque palace, naturally, Ca’ Pesaro is built entirely of marble and has a cloakroom that does not take cloaks – only umbrellas. But who cares? Andy Warhol, whose work is being shown here, would applaud.
You bring away combinations of sounds heard nowhere else: the groan of hemp on a jetty cleat as it takes the weight of a mooring vaporetto; the cries of gulls; bells; footsteps in puddles; waves. There’s nothing calm about the water in these broad canals – it roils and rolls, it churns and chops.
St Mark’s Square is best seen in winter, without people or queues; as is the famous Basilica, a series of gilded Moorish domes floated back from Constantinople, or so it seems. So many places to visit: the Doges Palace; the snail-shell-like
Scala Contarini del Bovolo; the sentry-like Campo Salute with its church of Santa Maria; the cemetery on Isola di San Michele where Erza Pound, Stravinsky and Joseph Brodsky are laid to rest among untold others.
It’s easy to forget you’re in Italy, but the food is a reminder. Cichetti (Venetian tapas) is everywhere. Risotto, veal, polenta, pizza, fish and more fish. Ice-cream and chocolate. Excellent restaurants with one foot in the water. The drink of Venetians is the Aperol spritz and the man in the Baglioni makes a good one. A list of restaurants where only the locals eat is attached and will make you feel like a Venetian.
A break of a couple of days is needed for perspective. The Frecciarossa fast train takes one hour to get from the Grand Canal to the medieval heart of Verona. Into another world. Of Valpolicella and Soave, cobbled streets, Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, the Roman Empire and hidden churches.
A 3-D Van Gogh Alive exhibition is being staged in the Verona Pal- azzo, just across the road from the Arena, Verona’s famed, first century A.D., Roman amphitheatre. All the big stars, from Pavarotti to Bob Dylan have played or are about to play in the Arena. And when they do they stay in the Palazzo Victoria, an immensely comfortable and friendly hotel, beside Porta dei Borsari, a Roman gate, and five minutes from everything. The hotel’s gourmet restaurant, Borsari 36, has glass inspection windows in the floor so that whilst eating delicious red mullet, served with artichokes and sea urchins, you can simultaneously inspect excavated Roman foundations at your feet.
On the way from the Palazzo Victoria to the shops – Verona is a great shoppers’ town – take a moment to drop into the medieval church of San Lorenzo on Corso Cavour. The unique alternating bands of red and white brickwork make the walls of this exquisite church, and its apse, rising into a dome, look like medieval nougat.