"...seven!"

Venetians have an expression: L’amor non l’e amor, se no’l se desgusta sete volte.
“Love isn’t love if it doesn’t disgust you seven times.”

So, I guess it was love.

A short break

As it turned out, I did not take the day off today – too much on my “to-do” list.

But I did take my friend “L’s” advice and I let La Serenissima soothe me late this afternoon. The weather was beautiful, so I spent an hour at al Prosecco in Campo San Giacomo dall’Orio, my little corner of Heaven in Venice. I savored a paninetto (a little sandwich – how cute is that?) and a glass of their glittering organic prosecco… OK, it was two glasses. I settled down. I counted my blessings. Then I let my tired mind go blank. As always, al Prosecco’s brother-owners and Valentina treated me like royalty.





Afterwards I found this beautiful angel on the Salizada San Stae. His scroll reads, Domino locutum est per angeli - MDCCII. (I know MDCCII is the year 1522. Can anyone help me with the high school Latin?)

Sure hope this little break will banish the incubi and help me get back on track in the studio.

Sogni & incubi

A perfectly awful day in the studio yesterday!

It began with a gruesome nightmare – a grim, Frankenstein-ish kind of mind movie in which I saw that my own head had been sawed open and hastily sealed up again, but by what mad scientist, and why? I wondered what damage had been done to me! My terror awakened me.

Maybe this incubo (nightmare) came to me because I am attempting to sculpt heads and hands for a current project. I know just how I see them in my dreams. But I am no sculptor. I grow more frustrated and feel more incapable with each misshapen effort.

I tried to work, but nothing would work for me. Everything I touched, I spoiled. Nothing would fit, nothing would stick, nothing would stay put. Expensive materials were breaking to pieces in my hands. Then I knocked over my precious jar of gel medium. I saw it spread across my workspace, utterly ruining my best-loved work diary and gooping up many other things. The last straw! I ranted and raged, even as I cleaned up the sticky mess and tried to save what I could. When I was finally exhausted, I abandoned everything and went out with my camera, hoping to find some peace and inspiration, a small sogno (dream).

Instead I found these hideous, deformed cherubs… more incubi!

I think it’s time for a day off.

Hopeful too...

Look! Another optimistic scribbler in a different neighborhood!

Rio Chiuso

Venice may appear to have sprung to life from a billowing crest of seafoam tumbling over the pearly lip of a scallop shell, like Botticelli’s Venus. But that romantic idea fades fast when one watches city engineers drain, dredge, and repair the infrastructure of a local rio – a messy process you see in progress here.

In fact this elegant city on the sea was hard won, wrested from the unpredictable lagoon, pinned into place with thousands and thousands of wooden poles pounded into its sticky mud. By happy accident, those poles petrified instead of rotting, due in large part to the oxygen-starved lagoon waters, thus providing as firm a foundation for a city as one could hope for away from terra firma. Later came the gouging out of the canals…

When La Serenissima’s not-so-pretty underpinnings are exposed for maintenance, the contractors always rig up some flimsy blind to hide the grim activity. It almost seems they want to protect her modesty. But I suspect it’s really intended to protect the tourists, to ensure that their image of the “fairy city of the heart” (that’s Byron, not me) is not spoiled by visions of scaly pipes, mottled muck, and the rotted refuse that collects at the bottom of her shallow waterways.

Nevertheless, if there’s a gap in that blind, natives, near-citizens (me included), and tourists alike all stop and take a peek at the goings-on. Fascinating! A canal dredge is a slippery, slightly smelly reminder that lovely Venice raised herself up from the sea almost 1,500 years ago and, impossibly, still stands against all odds.

No Easter without leaves

Venetians have an expression: Non ghe se Pasqua senza fogia, ne dona senza vogia.
"There is no Easter without leaves, and no woman without desires."

I know one simply doesn’t say such a thing, but…

I’m not a big fan of spring. Not my favorite colors, not the sort of images and anticipations I like, not the weather I prefer. I’m more the sweaters & autumn leaves kinda gal. (My willingness to give up even one glorious October day in Central Park showed my true devotion to La Serenissima last year.)

Other than the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade, I don’t care for Easter much either. It always strikes me as macabre – the gruesome story commemorated in pastel icing sugar and fake flowers. In the cheery, childish trappings of this holiday, all I see is the ham-fist of the Church as it commandeered and twisted ancient and beautiful pagan traditions for its own ends. (For Heaven’s sake, people! “Easter Bunny,” “Ostara hare…” think about it!)

But the Venetians certainly got that proverb right. It’s the female version of “In spring a young man’s fancy… “

Alas, this woman finds herself with many far-fetched and very elusive springtime desires, and few means to obtain them. Spring arrived here in Venice much too quickly for me.

Her banner

The exceptional design of La Serenissima’s flag is enough to tell you that she is something more, something apart from any other place on the globe. Fashioned in blood-red and brilliant gold, it bears her self-styled legend of Mark the Evangelist, and its six tails flutter and undulate so seductively that it simply cannot be ignored.

Show me any other city, province, satrapy, kingdom, or country, now or at any time in history, represented by a banner as bold, as vivacious, as memorable as this one. Such a place did not and does not exist.