So here it is...
A fantasy of mine is to visit Venice in the winter. I have always been fond of the cold weather in general, of course, dwelling in a Caribbean country where there is only a dry season and a rainy season, definitely puts a damper on things. I love the rainy season down here, especially when it's cold and I can snuggle under my covers with a good book in hand, and I enjoyed the coldness during the winters when I visited New York and New Jersey by my relatives and eventually fell quite in love with it. I came to the conclusion that since I loved the winter in America so much then it must be absolutely magical in the city I am yearning to visit, Venice. I could just imagine the serene beauty of the calm channels and canals, the chilly breezes and abandoned streets, which I have no problem getting lost in =) *le sigh* I can almost see myself there in the winter right now. Anyhow aside from that, I came across a rather beautifully written article on The New York Times website, which I have been reading quite religiously for some time now. I became instantly engrossed in the article the moment I started reading, everything was so vivid and clear, it was near impossible for me to tear my eyes off it until I was finished. I decided to share it, so here is the article...enjoy...
A Less Serene Venice by Marilyn Stasio
Published: Sunday, February 8, 1998.
IT has always been my dream to visit Venice in the dead of winter. Time enough, come summer, to pick up ''Italian Hours'' and bask with Henry James in those rosy mornings and golden afternoons when the city ''seems to expand and evaporate, to multiply all her reflections and iridescences.'' But when the sky turns to slate and a bitter wind lashes the deserted Piazza San Marco, I long to sink into a corner of the Caffe Florian with ''Don't Look Now'' and lose myself in Daphne du Maurier's bleak views of the city as a maze of sinister alleys and shuttered houses and bridges that lead nowhere -- except to a lonely death for the unwary tourist.
That's my fantasy, anyway; for, although I have traveled to Henry James's fair-weather Venice, shimmering with an unearthly radiance and overrun with tourists, I am a stranger to the wintry city of mystery novels, sunk in melancholy shadow and overrun with ghosts and murderers. Still, I dream.
In the stories that sustain me on my travels, the Venetian calendar year begins on Nov. 2, when residents dress in funereal black and make boat pilgrimages from the Fondamente Nuove to the cemetery island of San Michele, where they spend the traditional day of the dead. The storytelling year ends on Easter morning, when the city finally casts off the penitential fasting and self-mortifications of Lent.
Carnevale breaks into this dark season for a couple of desperately jolly weeks before Lent, allowing sun-starved Venetians to mask themselves and take to the streets for one last bacchanal. (This month it starts on Friday the 13th.) But the winter feast days all seem to have morbid undertones, like the Festa della Madonna della Salute, whose flickering votive procession across a floating bridge on the Grand Canal commemorates the end of the Plague of 1630.
To the fictional characters who guide my travels, each cycle of winter brings its own symbols of gloom. Guido Brunetti, the simpatico detective (''Venetian to the bone'') who broods over the destiny of his fragile city in Donna Leon's literate police procedurals, feels depressed in early winter, when the oily green waters of the lagoon begin to rise above the canals and creep onto the streets. ''He hated acqua alta with the passion that all Venetians felt for it,'' Brunetti says in ''Acqua Alta,'' confiding his ''rage at the gaping tourists who would cluster together on the raised wooden boards, giggling, pointing, snapping pictures'' of the ''unstoppable waters'' that paralyze the city and bring unwelcome intimations of its probable fate.
The vision of Venice claimed by those relentless waters and sunk beneath the sea is a recurring image in mystery and suspense fiction, whose characters tend to lose their mental footing when placed in physically unstable settings. In the du Maurier story, a tourist who has become unhinged by the vision of his own death declares: ''Venice is sinking. . . . One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone.''
The weeks between New Year's Day and the beginning of Carnevale are ''the loneliest time of the year'' for a young American currency trader in Robert Girardi's erotic ghost story, ''Vaporetto 13.'' From his office window overlooking ''the brooding skies, the mist of rain blowing across the rooftops, the sluggish gray waters,'' the deserted city seems ''a tomb.'' It is so quiet, ''you could almost hear the sound of the palazzos crumbling into the black water . . . ''
Despite the chivalric efforts of art restorers like the sculptor in Barry Unsworth's ''Stone Virgin,'' ancient churches and palazzos metaphorically slip into the lagoon with alarming regularity in genre fiction. Marble statues disintegrate into powder. Gilded paintings are eaten by mold. The bones of saints and doges come to dust in jeweled sarcophagi. Those images of decaying beauty in which Venice abounds are irresistible to writers whose fundamental theme is the mortality of the flesh.
''Which of us ever spares a thought for death?'' muses the young man in ''Vaporetto 13'' who unknowingly dines with the dead in an ancient church on the island of San Michele (on ''a black truffle mousse flavored with anise seeds, followed by black sturgeon eggs served on squares of thick black bread, black snails from the lagoon baked in a paste of blackened garlic, and octopus in its own ink served over black linguini''). In fact, death is all that writers ever seem to think about in Venice.
Just show me an author who can resist a reference to the stench of putrefaction from the canals. Or the hero who can pass up a midnight boat trip to the ossuary island of Sant'Ariano, to ogle the mounds of human bones spilling out of their graves and dropping into the lagoon. Although this annual literary stampede yields many picturesque descriptions of the ossario, none comes close to the opening chapter of Michael Dibdin's ''Dead Lagoon'' for conveying the ''irresistible dread'' that can send a sane man ''stumbling across that dune of human bones . . . running for his life and his reason from the isle of the dead.''
As the season deepens, even the giddiness of Carnevale provokes mystery writers to dark thoughts and evil deeds. The gaudy pageantry of the present-day holiday, with its costume balls and street parades, certainly makes a vibrant backdrop for an otherwise conventional murder plot. But the enveloping black cloaks and close-fitting, hawklike masks of leather and pressed paper worn at Carnevale also celebrate the secretive and infinitely subtle face of Venice, as well as the sinister side of her glorious history.
When the American hero in William Bayer's ''Wallflower'' arrives in Venice, he ventures out with an art guide to ''do'' the city. ''But he soon realized,'' Bayer tells us, ''that it was not great paintings of the Crucifixion that interested him; it was the lore of the old republic, her hardness, her cruelties. He understood, with a start, that it was her crimes he wanted to understand.''
For all their elegance, the cloaks and masks that modern Venetians don for Carnevale are vestiges of the disguises that some of their ancestors wore to commit murder and treason (as well as the more popular sin of adultery) during the peak of the celebration in the 18th century. ''The anonymity conferred by masks has been a potent force in our history,'' recalls an aged debaucher in ''Stone Virgin,'' ''adding to the excitement of intrigue as it grants immunity from the consequence.''
The Carnevale mask is also the prettiest of symbols for the glittering surfaces that pass for reality in this seductive city. ''Nothing was what it seemed here,'' Edward Sklepowich says in ''Death in a Serene City.'' ''Some of the time you couldn't even be sure if you were looking at the real thing or its reflection.''
In a city of such elusive reality and equivocal identity, it's no wonder that characters in mystery novels are always getting lost and coming to no good in that wintry gloom. But that is, after all, why we visit this enigmatic city: to become so disoriented by its beauty that we lose touch with reality and have visions. Or at least, well-plotted nightmares.
xoxo...~*Shallowbeauty*~
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