Venice landmarks
St Mark’s Basilica
Venice is replete with countless remarkable buildings, over 200 palaces and 137 churches with St Mark’s Basilica arguably the most significant and certainly the most popular. (A word to the wise: a guided tour in the evening is the best way to see and experience it and to avoid the crowds and queues). St Mark’s Campanile is the tallest structure in Venice and the view from it across the disordered roofline of the city is compelling and very informative.
Alongside St Mark’s is the Doges Palace where the Council of 10 reigned supreme, its prisons and dungeons awaiting their constant displeasures and numerous vengeances. The walk across the Bridge of Sighs (which first entered my imagination in
1967 virtue of Itchycoo Park by the Small Faces) is a journey where the savagery of its past is glimpsed and silence forever roars.
Doges Palace
The Doges Palace is one of the true landmarks of Venice.
Formerly the Doges residence and seat of Venetian government, it is a masterpiece of Gothic architecture, and filled with countless treasures. Everything about it being testimony to the wealth and power Venice once wielded.
In the Doges Palace, inhabiting the Palazzo Ducale is a suite of astounding, terrifying, and beautiful new works by Anselm Keifer, titled ‘‘These writings when burned will cast a little light’’ (see https://www.designscene.net/ 2022/04/anselmkieferpalazzoducale.html) . These 14 floortoceiling paintings incorporate materials as varied as zinc, lead, gold, clothes, shopping trolleys, submarines, sticks. Keifer’s breathtaking combination of paint and applied materials enables these works — openly acknowledging the 1600th anniversary of the founding of Venice — to vacillate back and forth between pictorial perspective and sculptural space. These multilayered paintings are about the very particular and chequered history of Venice. Keifer converges the past and present into a frightening whole, where Venice becomes a portentous parable and the metaphor of all things so imperilling mankind and the world today. Staggering in scale and achievement, it is surely one of — if not the — most important exhibition delivered this century in both its narrative powers and artistic accomplishment.
Danieli Hotel
A few doors along from the Doges Palace is the prestigious Danieli Hotel. And it was there overlooking the lagoon in 1945 after the NZ troops had liberated Venice from the Germans that General Freyberg based the Officers Club. In front of it and all along the waterfront and in St Marks Square are stacks of raised platforms, ready to be utilised when the next high tide floods in (usually from October to late winter) as everyone knows it surely must. This occurrence now so common is known as the Aqua Alta. And it’s just a case of ‘‘when, not if’’ any more for a city which is sinking and a world where water is relentlessly rising.