S. Worthen | Weblog

We flew back home from Venice, with clear skies over Italy and Switzerland. Here's Venice from above, the light of incipient sunset lying long across the lagoon.

The Twelve Days of Christmas have gone astray* in the commercial worlds of Britain and the US, in my experience. This year, my inbox received advertising for various 12 days of Christmas deals - all of which were before Christmas had even happened.

Historically, the days of Christmas start from the day after Christmas, which makes Epiphany, January 6th, the twelfth day. That's also why that was the day on which we took down our Christmas tree. (And it always feels odd to me to hear people apologize for not having taken it down by New Year's, even if they did buy it, say, weeks early and it's all but fire tinder now.)

This is also why, in Italy, the after-Christmas sales don't start until Epiphany. Christmas isn't properly over until then! Downside: a visiting Venetian friend who now lives in the US couldn't take advantage of the sales - her academic schedule required her to leave before today.

On Epiphany in Italy, the Befana comes to visit children and fill their stockings with candy. (Charmingly, she's an old woman who tried to go to Bethlehem along with the Wise Men, but got lost along the way. So instead she gives gifts to all other children instead.)

Venice in particular celebrates this with a regatta in costume. Today's weather was gorgeously clear, with vivid blue skies. A dozen or so boats rowed by men and women costumed as if Befane rowed down the Grand Canal, finishing past the giant stocking hung from the Rialto bridge.

This photo was taken a good half-hour after the race, with one Befana, along with three rowers who clearly weren't in the race, heading back from when the race had been rowed.

* Religiously astray doesn't matter to me in this case. *Calendrically* astray does.

This woodcut is pasted up as a grafitto, something which Swoon often does in various contexts. (See, for example, her work for this summer's Philagrafika.) I hadn't heard of her before today, but some of what I've now seen of her work is quite engaging, particularly for her use of the physical contexts in which the pieces are pasted.

Yesterday, the sandolo flew, and so did I. It had been in the workshop for a couple of weeks, recovering from time spent largely submerged. My father and I walked the long oar across town, carefully navigating the crowds. My mother took the vaporetto, with a cart full of floorboards. The board was perched near the entrance, ready for its departure. The crane took it up into the blue of the sky above, a flying boat, before depositing it on the edge of the north lagoon. My father rowed me home, my last moments in Venice spent on the water.

Earlier that day, we caught "Venezia che spera", one of many exhibits on the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. Highlights included Ipolito Caffi's sketchbooks; a number of stereotypes which I was successfully able to resolve with my eyes; a fascinating group of images portraying Venetian professions (including the professional cat-castrater); mid-nineteenth century maps, with Palmanova on the border between the Veneto and the Austrians; and photographs of churches, now long-since destroyed. After spritz with a friend and a quick lunch at home (featuring very fine chicken broth), we were off to collect the boat, and then I was off to the airport, and back to the UK once more.

I took few photographs today, but here is one from SS Giovanni e Paolo the other day. The strange woman dressed in 1930s pseudo-ancient clothing is presumably the Virgin Mary, mourning at the cruxifiction. She is part of a modern glass sculptural panel, all made from glass. Behind, through the transparent background to the modern installation, is a doge's tomb - I can't remember which offhand, but one of a family which habitually provided doges and whose tombs collectively take up the entire back wall of the church.

Today - a too-large portion of fabulously rich hot chocolate; lunch with a family friend; a lecture on a sixteenth-century Venetian fort and its soap-operaesque construction story from someone who turned out to have grown up in the very town where I now live (!); and a quiet evening at home.

Do you see that line of white over the far buildings? The air was so clear that the Dolomites were vivid from across the lagoon. The Colle Euganei were distinctive silhouettes. The sky was an unadulterated blue.

We went over to Malamocco for lunch, a feast of seafood followed by walk through impromptu beach sculpture. (More photos some other day of those!)

At the fish market this morning, I wandered off to take photos for a few minutes in order to clearly distinguish between me (not shopping for shellfish) and my mother. Then off for vegetables, young artichokes and sculptural puntarelle. There were no dried fennel flowers to be found; I had not realized, when I first bought a little jar at an Italian food fair in London several years ago, that this was a rare ingredient even in Italy. (Not that Venice is ever the best place to buy faintly obscure non-local food products.)

The weather has finally cleared and the air has a touch of spring to it. In one of the astonishingly innumerable cloisters at the hospital of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, cherry blossoms dappled delicately pink. The daffodils are blooming here too. No one knew how to dress: we saw everything from short sleeves through to furs.

I saw the miniature Google logo, wrapped in green and white and warm, and for a moment, had no idea which event it was commemorating: St. Patrick's Day or the sesquicentennial of Italian unification. Finally, the '150' gave it away. Red, not orange.

Down in the campo, the flagpole is holding up under an enormous flag, so high for the mast that it drapes down nearly to the ground. One of the newspapers came with a copy of the text of the constitution. The streets are quiet for the one-off national holiday, most of the shops closed. Many of their windows have tastefully color-coded pieces of nationalism in the country's three colors. The canals are quiet too, with no deliveries.

The Casinò has free entry this evening, in honor of the celebrations, but three-fifths of us did not think to bring ID to enable us to look around the building. We wait for the remaining two-fifths in an entry hall approximately three times the size of my entire house, although the decorations are second-rate. On the way home, we pass clusters of drinkers outside of bars, many of them wearing high-topped Guiness hats in honor of the day, whatever it is.

We took the train to the mainland yesterday, to the town of Conegliano, in the hills of the pre-Alpi, where a major Cima da Conegliano exhibition is showing. Our train arrived minutes before noon. We walked up the main street to the town square just in time to catch a ceremony, costumed historical recreators, and flag performers, featuring acrobatic tossing of flags to the beat of a drum corps. It struck geesepalace and me that here, recreating a past, flag performance is manly sport; in the US, it's a feminine one.

The down side to a conference with seven venues scattered across the city is that it is often logistically impossible to get from one to another in the given half-hour break between sessions. The up side is that some of these venues are spectacular: painted panels across all walls, cloisters of green for refreshment between sessions, and wide expanses of water. The Cini Foundation is on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, reachable only by boat - including the #2 vaporetto just coming in and half-hidden behind the lighthouse. (I caught it easily - it was trundling.)

Admire, towards the right, the enormous Bulgari ad, currently encasing the Bridge of Sighs, still under restoration. (Not decipherable here: the Marciana, the library opposite the doge's palace on the piazzetta, is covered in an very large ad for Istanbul.)

Also, I have now met thera_flu: a brief hour for lunch. She is delightful company.