Love Venice

100. Farewell - for now

2006-09-02T01:33:00.000+10:00

I've decided to take a break from writing this daily blog.

If you are one of the small handful of people who visited this site regularly over the last few months, and have enjoyed my daily stories of all things Venetian, then I am sorry if that disappoints you.

I enjoy writing about this wonderful place. I have never found it difficult to find ideas enough to stay four or five posts ahead of my self-imposed daily deadline, but the thinking and writing and checking and rewriting does take more time than may be apparent from the results, and I now want to devote that time to something different but related – at least for a while.

I'll leave you for now with another, less common, view of the magnificent Doge's Palace.

On each of the three visible corners of the upper gallery is a beautiful archangel. More Renaissance in style than Gothic, the sculptures of Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel must have been added later – probably after the 16th century fire.

This one is Gabriel. In Christianity, it was Gabriel who told Mary (and Joseph) she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit – which is why he is seen here with an Annunciation lily in his left hand; in Islam, it was Gabriel who revealed the Q'uran to Muhammed and accompanied him during his post mortem ascension into heaven; in Judaism, Gabriel was the force that prevented Abraham from slaying Isaac, and told Noah to get the animals into the Ark; and it will be Gabriel who blows his horn to announce Judgment Day (presumably a non-denominational event).

I think this exquisite sculpture is exactly what an angel ought to look like. Don't you agree?

99. The only real palace

2006-09-01T22:08:00.000+10:00

For a long time, the Doge's Palace was the only building in Venice allowed to be called a 'palazzo'. All the other palaces in Venice were simply called 'casa' – house – hence the names Ca' d'Oro, and Ca' Rezzonico, and Ca' Dario for some of the other magnificent palaces in this finest of all cities.

And that was justified, because all of the others shrink from comparison with this greatest of all gothic palaces, so different from everything that preceded it, whose architectural influence was felt almost immediately and reverberated for centuries.

The beautiful cloister-like colonnade at ground level - which has a biblical story carved into each corner (see #22, June 14), and a unique carved marble theme on every capital low enough for passers-by to see every detail - anchors the structure almost like guy ropes holding it down as if the whole thing would fly away like a hot air balloon if they ever let go.

Above it, even taller gallery arcades along the whole length of the Piazetta and Riva Schiavoni sides of the palace carry twice as many columns as the arcade below. Quatrefoils, not on top of the arches at the point like those in the Frari church but nestling between each of the arches, look from below like decorative details yet each one is taller than a man and massive enough collectively to support the forty foot high wall above.

And yes, the wall above. Boxy and rectangular, the palace's upper story is half the height of the building and houses some of the most spectacular rooms you could imagine, high-ceilinged council chambers capable of commanding awe and loyalty from friends of the republic, but equally capable of striking terror into its enemies. It should seem oppressively heavy for the delicate tracery below that supports it, yet the effect of the pink diamond patterned brickwork is light and airy like a damask tablecloth skirt. The massive flat wall area is punctuated by window holes that echo the shape and size of the lower arcade arches.

This palace started life as a 9th century fortified castle, and was rebuilt and enlarged several times after a series of fires. The design of the facades are from the 14th century, and the upper story was rebuilt after a fire in the 16th century destroyed most of the top half including – among many other artworks - several huge Giovanni Bellini murals. Oh, what a loss that was.

This palace is unique in so many ways, and it defined the meaning of the term 'Venetian Gothic' for everything that came after it. I love the fact that it is about 700 years old but it looks like it could have been built yesterday.

98. Social climbing

2006-08-31T00:20:00.000+10:00

Since its earliest days, Venice was ruled by its aristocracy, by the members of the old established patrician families. In 1325, this was formalised by the creation of a Golden Book, Il Libro d'Oro, which documented the names and lineages of these ruling families. If your name was not in the book, you could never be elected Doge, nor could you even be part of the Great Council, an automatic right that belonged only to the 2000 or so members of the 134 aristocratic families.

This palazzo, now known as Ca' Rezzonico, was built by Filippo Bon, a member of one of those great and ancient families. In 1649 he engaged Baldessare Longhena, the same architect who built the great church of Santa Maria della Salute, and began to build this huge palazzo with a marble facade. Neither man saw the job finished. Longhena died in 1682 and soon after, the Bon family suffered a financial collapse and work stopped.

Because of a war with Turkey, the coffers of the city of Venice were also pretty well empty at this time, too, because it was possible then - for a very substantial donation, of course - to buy your way into the Golden Book, and suddenly leap to the top of Venetian society. This is what the very wealthy but nouveau-riche Rezzonico family did, and they also purchased the unfinished palace from the impoverished Bon family.

The Rezzonico family never managed to produce a Doge from among their ranks, but their newly acquired noble status was nevertheless real and their upward social journey was complete by 1758, when Ludovico Rezzonico married into the powerful Savorgnan family, and Carlo Rezzonico was elected Pope as Clement XIII.

The rise of the Rezzonicos was as spectacular as it was brief. The last member of the family died in 1810, leaving only this palazzo to carry their name into posterity. Their fine family home is now owned by the city of Venice and it houses a wonderful collection of 18th century Venetian artworks.

97. The last hurrah

2006-08-30T23:21:00.000+10:00

This very serious and impressive winged lion of St.Mark - clearly a lion this time and no other beast - commemorates what turned out to be the last futile attempt by Venice to try to regain some of its former glorious independence.

In 1797, Ludovico Manin, the last Doge, resigned when his city was taken over by Napoleon, who six months later signed Venice over to Austrian rule. During the next fifty years or so of Austrian occupation, much of the spark went out of Venice, it fell into decline and disrepair, with many of the fine old palaces abandoned and in some cases left derelict.

In 1847, Daniele Manin (who was no relation to the former Doge, but nevertheless a fierce Venetian patriot) presented a petition to the puppet consultative assembly that was critical of their Austrian masters, and he was promptly arrested and charged with high treason. The Venetian people rallied to the cause of this Austrian-hating lawyer and supporter of Italian unity and by March the next year the Austrian governor was forced to release him. But it was too late, rebellion was afoot and the Austrians soon lost control of the arsenal and they evacuated the city, leaving Manin to be proclaimed president of the Venetian Republic.

Determined to unify Venice with the rest of Italy, Manin resigned his powers in favour of Piedmont six months later, only to see Piedmont abandon Venetia to the newly reinforced Austrians who set about occupying the Venetian mainland and laying siege to the main city of Venice. The citizens stood firm against recapture and early in 1849, Manin was again appointed president, this time with unlimited powers to defend the city, which he did skillfully and energetically, to the best of his considerable organisational ability.

It was a doomed resistance. By August, ammunition and provisions were exhausted, and the Austrian batteries were close enough to start bombarding the city, at which point Manin negotiated an honourable amnesty, accepting exile for himself and a few others as the price of peace.

He never returned to his beloved Venice and died in exile in Paris in 1857. Two years after the Austrians left Venice for the last time in 1866, Manin's body was brought back to Venice and given a state funeral as the hero of the resistance, the man who gave the Lion of Venice its final roar.

96. A marble collage

2006-08-29T21:44:00.000+10:00

When you get up close and look at the façade of St Mark's Cathedral you would think that it was made out of a motley collection of all kinds of second-hand bits and pieces some of which must have fallen off the back of a truck. And you would be right, it was.

Because of Venice's unique situation, every square inch of building material had to be imported, floated in on a boat. The cost of carriage was the same for sandstone as it was for jasper or porphyry, so it made sense to ensure that each shipload was as valuable as possible. Venetian merchant ships became effective scavengers of the ancient world, buying an old marble column here, bartering for a load of bas relief carved panels there, purloining whatever piece of alabaster that wasn't nailed down somewhere else. As the Venetian empire grew, the ships of war brought home even more prize building materials from other civilizations, and gradually, the facade of St Mark's became encrusted with this confusion of stonework from here, there, and everywhere, seemingly almost at random.

It literally is a potpourri, a hotch-potch of colours and textures and shapes that weren't designed to go together at all, an eclectic mix of variegated stuff, every piece of which competes for your urgent attention when you are close enough to see the separate elements of this fantastic encrustation. It ought not to work at all, but it does, and amazingly well.

When you get back far enough for the separate components to start to blur into one another something magical happens, and the whole cathedral becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. The colours and shapes blend and shimmer and are transformed as the light changes minute by minute so that the surface of this most unusual cathedral almost breathes with life and colour, sometimes tinged with this hue, sometimes dominated by that, but always presenting itself as a cohesive whole.

The serious architects of northern Europe built their soaring cathedrals from a uniform grey lime stone or beige sandstone, or in the case of St.Peter's in Rome from almost white marble, but the Venetians would have nothing to do with anything so uniformly conservative and boring. Instead they injected their joie de vivre into this church with every different type of stone they could find, colouring and texturing it with their Mediterranean passion until its soul sings at you whether you like it or not.

How could you not love it?

95. It's official - black is back

2006-08-28T18:28:00.000+10:00

It used to be common for Venetian gondolas to have an enclosed and sometimes elaborately decorated wooden cabin called a 'felze', which gave the passengers inside some privacy, both from the gondolier standing behind them and from the outside world. There are still a few gondolas that have this feature and they are mostly used for weddings or other ceremonial occasions, but because they restrict the view of the passenger looking out, they are not generally much use for tourist rides.

In July this year, the city's gondola association announced that those gondolas which carried a 'felze' would be allowed to keep it, but all of the other 400 or so gondolas would be required to strip from their boats all the elaborate decorations which have become so common recently.

Pitching joyrides to tourists, especially out of peak season, is a very competitive business and more and more decorative features have been added by enterprising gondoliers to make their boat look that little bit more attractive to ride in than the one parked next to it. But no more.

Today's picture is now an interesting historic record because by the time you read this, the fancy upholstery on these and all the other gondolas may well have been taken off for good. In future there will be no more plush upholstery edging, no gilded ornaments, no fancy chains and pompoms, no embroidered cushions. The upholstery must now be plain leather only, and the allowed choice of colour for the interior will be black, dark blue, or purple. No scarlet, or burgundy, or turquoise, and everything else on the boat must be back to the basic black as decreed in the Sumptuary Law of 1562.

It's nice to know that there are some places in the world where tradition can prevail over commercial pressure.

94. How clever is this?

2006-08-27T10:47:00.000+10:00

The flatter and quite heavily stylised type of mosaic work that covers so much of the interior of St Mark's cathedral - similar to the picture of St Mark in his coffin in my post a couple of days ago (scroll down to #92) - is filled with narrative and symbolic meaning. It developed into a medium of great power, that could communicate its message even to an otherwise completely illiterate audience - a bit like comics without speech balloons. This was the very effective way that mosaic was used here up until the late 14th century or so.

When the early Renaissance artists began to understand how to use perspective to create the illusion of three-dimensional space, visual art became much more concerned with the appearance of the subject and the fidelity of the illusion, and less with the image's symbolic meaning or narrative function. So the later mosaics on both the inside and the outside of the cathedral are much more realistic representations of figures and other objects in space, but in other ways less interesting than the earlier works they replaced.

Ruskin (who I know I quote quite often but that is because he is such a quotable curmudgeon) greatly admired the Byzantine-style mosaic work. He thought the later mosaics were better than whitewash - but only just.

I can understand his point of view, particularly when you look at some of the syrupy schmaltzy images produced in the later Baroque and Rococo periods, with angels and cherubs that have now become such a cliche that they would look more at home on cheap greetings cards than in one of the world's greatest cathedrals.

On the other hand, just look at this example of Renaissance mosaic work from inside St. Mark's cathedral museum for a moment. Whatever the subject matter of the whole piece, aren't these a simply awesome pair of mosaic knees?

These are not just Byzantine outlines of limbs, these are totally convincing three-dimensional legs, legs sculpted and modelled with bones in them, with strong muscles and tendons flexed and holding upright the superior trunk and head of this man with the large sword at his waist. Whoever the artist was, he wasn't guessing at what legs looked like, he had looked hard at them. He knew how they worked and why, and he was able to arrange tiny little chunks of glazed tile in just the right way to convince you that they are flesh and blood.

Imagine the work that went into preparing the materials before he could even start to make this picture. There are at least fifteen, maybe even more shades and tints of this exact fleshtone in a precise gradation of density from darkest to lightest. Heaven knows how many glaze mixings and firings it took to get the colours of the tiles just right. Then they would have to be cut up into tiny pieces of an almost uniform size. Then with tweezers, the artist would have to select each piece and place it just exactly so in a bed of mortar.

I don't know who the artist was, but I have to admire his extraordinary skill with this fiendishly difficult medium.

93. A shop by any other name...

2006-08-26T20:38:00.000+10:00

When I first moved from chilly temperate London, England (my old home town) to sultry sub-tropical Brisbane, Australia (my new home town), the houses all looked vaguely wrong. It wasn't the style of them, which was admittedly very different, it was a sense that they weren't real houses. Eventually it dawned on me. None of the homes in Brisbane have chimneys! You don't need fireplaces in tropical houses, so you don't need a chimney, and if all the houses you have ever seen before had chimneys sticking out of the roof, a house without a chimney looks somehow incomplete or unfinished.

It took me a while to nail that same vague 'something's-not-right' feeling that I had about most of Venice's thousands of little shops, like this one. No, it has nothing to do with their chimneys – the odd thing that was bothering me was that there are no signs on them. In my home town EVERY shop has a sign over the door or window which shouts its name out to the world, and very often tells you what sort of shop it is at the same time – "Stafford City Newsagency", or the "James Street Fresh Fish Co." or "Christiaane – Beautiful bathrooms". Here, the fact that it has a window and a door with credit card symbols on it tells you that it is a shop. What's in the window is what the shop sells. What more do you need to know?

It has a certain logic to it. A prominent shop sign will not only uglify the whole street, there isn't much point to it in a place like Venice. If you are near the shop, then you can see that it's there and what it sells. A sign won't attract shoppers to it from a long way off because, in the narrow short streets of Venice, if you aren't close to it then you won't be able to see it or its sign. And why would you bother trying to build brand recognition to distinguish your shop from all your competitors, when close to zero percent of your business is repeat business? Most of the people who buy things in Venice's shops will be in the city an average of less than three days, and then they will leave and never come back to Venice, let alone this particular shop.

"Do you know where we could get some boots mended?" we asked in a shop where we had just bought some new shoes. "Sure, you go to Mancini's" was the reply. Following the helpful directions we found ourselves at a no-name shop that appeared to sell dog food and pet supplies. Obviously not Mancini the boot repairer. We wandered the streets and kept coming back to the same place. "Is this Mancini's?" we eventually asked. "Of course," was the reply with a shrug. But it wasn't Mancini's, because the name on the business card inside the shop had some completely different name. "Ah" explained the man on the counter when I challenged him, "the boot repairing business in the room out the back used to be owned by someone called Mancini".

There's nothing quite as useful as a bit of local knowledge. And if they put names on the shops, it would probably just confuse the locals.

92. Hide and seek

2006-08-25T22:46:00.000+10:00

This mosaic from the 13th century is unique for several reasons. It is in one of the nine lunettes (semicircular recesses) in the façade of St Mark's cathedral, but it is the only early exterior mosaic to survive, all the others having been replaced by more modern works during various renovations up until the 18th century. It is also the earliest representation we have of St. Mark's cathedral itself, which gives us a good idea what the front of the basilica would have looked like around 1250 AD.

We can see that all of the lunettes apart from the huge Christ over the doorway are shown to be at that time filled with just decorative designs, whereas now they are all figurative narrative scenes. We can also see that the front of the cathedral was no longer bare brick, which it was in the late 11th century when it was first built. A mere hundred years later it was already richly decorated with many different kinds of coloured stone.

This picture has the stylized feel of an Orthodox church icon, because when it was made it was still early enough to have been influenced by the then dominant Byzantine imagery and the Eastern church's craft skills. It is even possible that it was carried out by imported Byzantine craftsmen, as were so many of the mosaics in the interior of St.Mark's. It is dated after the beginning of the 13th century, because it shows the stolen horses of Constantinople, the Quadriga, already in place above the mighty image of Christ Pantocrator dominating the entrance to the church. This powerful figure has unfortunately since been replaced with a much less inspiring baroque group of figures showing Christ holding his cross at the centre with cherubs in clouds sprinkled all around him.

On the shoulders of the two senior clerics in the middle is a coffin containing St. Mark's body, shown entering the church. This is a big lump of artistic license, firstly because the corpse looks remarkably healthy given that by the time it arrived in Venice it must have been decomposing for about 750 years, and secondly, because it was not this church that St. Mark was carried into and buried, it was the first church built on this spot in the 9th century.

That church burned down in 976 AD, leaving the Doge, the Patriarch, the bishops and the clergy with a problem, because no trace remained in the charred rubble of exactly where St Mark had been interred. Only three people knew the exact location and they were now all dead. This present church was built on the same spot to replace it, and at its consecration, a High Mass was held to pray for the recovery of the relics. Miraculously, during the service, some supporting masonry crumbled away and a human arm protruded from the hole, an arm immediately recognized as belonging to the Evangelist. Amid great jubilation, the now 900 year old corpse was pulled out of its hiding place and reburied in the new cathedral.

I know what you're thinking, but no, that wasn’t the synopsis of an episode of Fawlty Towers, it's supposed to be what actually happened. Really.

91. A surfeit of saints

2006-08-24T12:58:00.000+10:00

The winged lion of St. Mark is on one of the two granite pillars. On top of the other one is the original, and largely forgotten, patron saint of Venice.

St. Theodore Tyro, also known as St.Theodore of Amasea, was an early Christian martyr. A young soldier in the Roman army, he was burned at the stake in 306AD for refusing to renounce his Christianity (and possibly also for burning down a pagan temple). For reasons hard to fathom, one of the symbols associated with St. Theodore is the crocodile, and this rather modern looking statue depicts him standing with a curiously odd version of that animal, most likely carved by someone who had never seen a crocodile.

St. Theodore is venerated in the Eastern Church and became the patron saint of Venice very early in the existence of the city, when it was still a vassal state of Byzantium, but he is not what you would call a major league saint. As Venice's power and its ambitions grew, it was in danger of being ignored by Rome as a religious centre of influence because it had no ecclesiastical clout compared to the longer established Christian centres in places like Antioch and Alexandria.

We will never know whether it was the result of a cunning plan devised by Doge Participazio, or just a quick-witted entrepreneurial action, but in 828 AD, two Venetian merchants managed to persuade the Christian church in Alexandria to let them smuggle the body of St. Mark the Evangelist out of the city – "just for his own protection, you understand". St. Mark had been the Bishop of Alexandria and had died there, but the city was then under Saracen control, and there must have been some genuine concern about the safety of this most sacred Christian relic. The colourful story goes that the smell of the decomposing corpse as it was carted to the waiting ship aroused the suspicions of the Saracen guards, but the merchants hid the cadaver under a pile of pork meat, which the Islamic soldiers were unable to go near, let alone touch.

The church in Alexandria never had any chance of getting their grisly relic back. Owning the entire body of one of the Gospel-writing Evangelists gave the city of Venice the Apostolic patronage and prestige it needed, immediately lifting it to a holiness ranking second only to Rome itself.

Poor old St. Theodore never got another look in, even though he still presides over the city from one of the two pillars at the city's ceremonial entrance. Strangely, that same area of the Piazetta was also, up until the 19th century, the chosen site for state executions, and many Venetians are still too superstitious to ever walk between these two great columns.

90. A most enduring symbol

2006-08-23T23:10:00.000+10:00

This is the same lion we met yesterday, and he has sat on his tall granite perch for about 800 years – apart from a quick trip to the British Museum for some restoration work in 1990.

In that time he has watched Venice emerge from under Byzantium's long shadow to become in her turn the most powerful maritime nation in the world; he has watched fleets of warships setting their ambitious sails as they row out of the lagoon towards Venice's enemies and former friends; watched kings and emperors and popes arrive and leave at the quayside below; observed Venetian society wax and grow rich, then wane and degenerate; he saw her conquered by Napoleon and eventually absorbed into the nation of Italy; he has seen candlelight replaced by gaslight replaced by electric lighting; seen most of the gondolas replaced by vaporetti; and now he patiently poses for the millions of gawking tourist cameras that flow through this city like a tidal wave every year.

He is synonymous with the city. The winged lion of St. Mark in all its forms IS Venice. He represents the power and confidence and protection given to all Venetians by the relics of their patron saint, the human remains of St. Mark the Evangelist himself, that supposedly rest in the centre of the nearby great basilica, from where this picture was taken.

Symbols are powerful things, they can unite and focus a people, they can inspire awe or fear, loyalty or rebellion. After the American tanks first rolled into Baghdad during the most recent of Iraq wars, people immediately gathered round the largest statue of Saddam Hussein and tore it down, destroying the symbol of their former oppression.

Was there ever political disagreement in Venice? Public dissent? Even treasonous acts against the state? Of course, such things are unavoidable in any authoritarian regime. But it is a wonderful tribute to the wisdom of the checks and balances built into the Venetian system of government, and to its essential humanity, that at no time in the city's long and chequered history was this most visible of symbols ever threatened by an angry mob. Not only was it never toppled, it was never even seriously attacked.

This symbol of the state has sat on his column for 800 years because the citizens of Venice allowed him to remain there.

89. The 'Lion' of St. Mark

2006-08-22T12:14:00.000+10:00

The Gospel according to St. Mark describes John the Baptist preaching "like a lion roaring". Perhaps because of this, the evangelistic symbol for St Mark is a lion. All of the four gospel authors have a symbolic creature associated with them – Matthew's is a man, symbolizing the human nature of Christ; Luke has a bull or calf, symbolizing the sacrifice of Christ; John's symbol is an eagle, for the omnipotent all-seeing eye of God. Mark's lion symbolizes Christ as king.

All four of these creatures are traditionally depicted with wings, which creates some confusion in many people's minds about whether Matthew's is supposed to be a man or an angel, but it does explain why there are winged lions all over St. Mark's Venice in the form of sculptures and reliefs and paintings and mosaics – even doorknobs and restaurant menus.

This 3-ton bronze sculpture perched atop a massive granite column in the Piazetta is the most important and most famous of all the winged lion representations in the city, yet it is one of the strangest. Although it depicts a suitably strong and fierce animal, and although its body is sort of leonine, it would be hard to recognize its head in any other context as being any sort of cat at all, let alone Leo, the king of the jungle.

This is not surprising when you realize that the head and body of this animal are not of a lion at all but of some sort of completely mythical beast. Art historians usually describe this work as being a Chinese or Persian 'chimera', but nobody knows for sure where or when it was made. Perhaps it was captured during the sacking of Constantinople, perhaps some Venetian traders acquired it, but there is no record of how it came to be in Venice.

The wings are also not original. They were probably made in Venice, and then tacked on to this bizarre creature's back to create a 'winged lion', shown with his paws on an open copy of St. Mark's gospel.

This huge granite column - one of a pair - was definitely 'souvenired' from Constantinople in 1204 during the disastrous Fourth Crusade, and this odd but very heavy hybrid sculpture was hoisted to the top of it sometime later, probably early in the 13th century – no mean feat in itself when you think about it.

88. Excuse me for intruding.

2006-08-21T14:17:00.000+10:00

In classical Greek architecture, three main designs for supporting columns evolved over many centuries. The first and simplest style was the Doric column, a straightforward pillar with no base and a simple unornamented roundel for a top, or capital. Later came the Ionic style, characterized by a decorated base and a more elaborate scroll-shaped capital. By the 5th century BC, the much more ornate Corinthian column had arrived. The base and column was similar to the Ionic style, but the capital had become an intricately carved profusion of foliage, traditionally canthus leaves.

All three of these styles survived into the Roman era and beyond – all three often being used on the same Roman building, like for instance in the great Colosseum in Rome, where all the columns on the ground level all the way round the huge stadium are Doric, all the columns on the middle level are Ionic, and those on the top level are Corinthian. The Romans had great engineering skill but little original imagination when it came to decorative design.

To the Venetians on the other hand, who had the rich visual vocabulary of Byzantium as well as the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome to play with, no formal design was sacrosanct. Everything was open to creative reinterpretation and column capitals in particular have been used more imaginatively in this city than anywhere else I know.

At a glance, from a distance, this capital on the façade of the Scuola di San Rocco looks like a typical ornate Corinthian capital until you look more closely. Suddenly, you are looking into the wide-eyed and rather startled face of a woman who looks like you have just walked in on her as she is stepping out of the shower, hurriedly sweeping up a frilly robe to not very successfully cover herself.

Who is she, and what is she doing on this building, like a ship's figurehead? I have no idea. What I called a robe could be fronds of seaweed, which might make her a mermaid, but as we can only see her torso, that's just speculation.

On the column capitals around the San Polo markets are all kinds of fish and other seafood, as well as boats and fishing gear, and fishermen and sailors. Around the Doge's palace the capitals are full of all kinds of animals and people, some of them very convincing portraits of obviously real people, with a wide range of facial expressions.

In the days when every part of a stone building was hand-hewn, not just assembled from factory produced components, the building workers didn't just blindly follow an architect's blueprint. Many of the decorative details relied on the expressive skills of the stonemasons who were artists as well as craftsmen and who took pride and care in their work – sometimes adding in amusing touches of their own invention.

This surprised lady might be one of them.

87. A Corner view

2006-08-20T22:32:00.000+10:00

Stand on the Rialto Bridge and look down the Grand Canal towards San Marco and this is what you see. You have to admit that it’s a pretty sweet vista.

The Fondamenta on the right is the Riva del Vin, which stretches out of the picture and under the bridge we're standing on and right round the bend to the San Polo markets. This was the quay that received and unloaded most of the shipments of wine that came into Venice, because round here were the main wine merchants – and quite a few bars and osterie as well. Now these hostelries are mostly tourist hotels and the quayside is no longer a commercial wharf, it is a parking lot for gondolas and the Riva is where the gondoliers pitch their rides to the passers by, of which there is now an almost endless supply.

In the hazy distance down the left side of the canal is a succession of palaces whose names read like a 'Who was who' in Venice over the centuries, although in this stretch of the Canal one name more than any other repeatedly pushes itself to the front. For instance, the large white façade above and to the left of the gondola is the Palazzo Corner Loredan. The grey one next to it on its far side is the Palazzo Dandolo Farsetti (don't forget you can click on the picture to enlarge it). Both of these have Byzantine facades of the 12th or 13th centuries. The next low red façade is the Palazzo Corner Martinengo which is from the 16th century, as is the pink one beyond it which is the Palazzo Corner Valmarana. The massive palace next to that is the Palazzo Grimani, followed by the …don't tell me, let me guess… another Palazzo Corner? You got it. This time it is the 15th century Palazzo Corner Contarini Cavalli. And so on.

Can you appreciate the extraordinary power the Corner family must have wielded in Venice? And what you see here isn't the half of it. The main Corner palace isn't even in this picture, it's down around the bend and is bigger and grander even than the Palazzo Grimani shown here.

But then the Corners were 'old money', tracing themselves back to the first Roman refugees who fled from the barbarians on the mainland, even though they didn't provide the state with the first of its three Corner Doges until the 17th century. By comparison, the Grimanis (only two Doges) were aristocratic latecomers, nouveaux riches who made their money from canny commodity deals.

Venice may have been the most powerful city state in the world for quite some time, but in terms of its ruling clique, it was always a very small town.

86. A surreal place to live

2006-08-19T19:38:00.000+10:00

This rather odd building looks like the ground floor beginnings of a palazzo that was never finished, and that is exactly what it is.

It is known to the Venetians as the 'palazzo non finito', but its official name is the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, and it was begun around 1750, quite a bit later than most of the completed palazzos around it on the Grand Canal.

The Venier family is one of the oldest and most distinguished aristocratic families of Venice, with three Doges to their credit, and nobody is quite sure why this palazzo was never finished. There is an architect's model of what it was intended to look like in the Correr Museum, and that shows the finished palazzo with a magnificent three level classical façade, grander even than the Palazzo Corner della Ca' Granda facing it on the opposite side of the Grand Canal.

Conspiracy theorists speculate that it was the even more powerful Corner family themselves who somehow blocked the completion of this building (perhaps with a dead horse's head in the city planner's bed?), because they didn’t want anything within view grander than their own noble pile, but the simpler – and more probable – answer is that the waning Venier family may just have underestimated the cost of building such a massive structure, and they ran out of money. Or, even more likely, by the time they got the ground floor in they realised that they would go broke if they kept going up, and chose to stop.

When you see the three massive entrance arches on the model, the two unusual foliage covered pillars in the middle of the unfinished entrance are easier to explain. In the bottom left of this picture just above the waterline is a yawning lion's head, one of many similar Istrian stone decorations along the front of the building. Why lions? No-one is sure of that either, but it is why the palazzo's name carries the 'dei Leoni' descriptor.

In 1948, the remains of this house were purchased by Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and niece of Solomon Guggenheim, whose arts foundation houses the huge Guggenheim collection at its eponymous museum in New York. Peggy was a free spirit in her youth, and married a Dada artist in Paris in 1922. The marriage didn't last, but she got to know many of the surrealist and abstract artists in Europe between the wars and used her money to support a wide range of them, amassing an almost unparalleled collection of modern artworks along the way. After the war, she settled in Venice and this palazzo became her museum of modern art.

Peggy continued collecting, championing artists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, and when she died in 1979, she bequeathed this semi-palace and her entire collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, who still run the museum in Venice, calling it as she herself did, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Peggy is buried in the backyard of this palace beside her many beloved dogs who lived here with her.

85. An afternoon's entertainment

2006-08-18T15:05:00.000+10:00

The Procuratie Vecchie, was, as its name suggests, the older of the two great buildings in Piazza San Marco built as offices for the city's nine procurators – the administrators who were responsible for, among other things, the six sestieri, or districts of Venice. Its counterpart on the other side, is a slightly later construction known as the 'new' offices, the Procuratie Nuove.

Almost since the beginning of their occupation, however, these two buildings have housed other activities quite unconnected with city administration.

When the Venetian ambassador returned from Istanbul in 1585, he reported to the Senate that the Turkish were fond of drinking a hot black infusion made from seeds they called 'Kahavé', that had the effect of keeping people awake. The first batch of these seeds were not brought back to Venice until 1638, when they were roasted and ground and served in the first coffee shop in Europe, located on the ground floor of this building in the Piazza.

Coffee was exotic then, and very expensive. It is less exotic today, but the coffee shops of San Marco are still among the most expensive in the world. The most famous of these opened its doors in 1720 as the 'Caffé alla Venezia Trionfante', the 'Triumphant Venice Café', but its first owner was Floriano Francesconi, so it quickly became known as 'Florian's'. Caffé Florian was the favourite haunt of many famous visitors, like Lord Byron, and it's still there on the Nuove side of the Piazza.

On this side, also still going strong, are Caffé Quadri, a newcomer of 1755, and Caffé Lavena, Richard Wagner's favourite coffee house. Gambling was another pastime of the Venetian nobility that went on in and around the coffee houses, and by the end of the 18th century, there were 24 such establishments just in this Piazza alone.

One level up, on the first floor of the Procuratie Vecchie, were the 'ridotti', small but very fashionable apartments where a gentlemen whose palazzo might be a lengthy gondola ride away could entertain his friends in the afternoons and evenings. So much 'friendly entertaining' went on that in 1767 the government banned women from frequenting the cafes in the Piazza altogether (obviously, the debauchery was all their fault), but that didn't stop them from strolling about the square and along the corridors under the porticos while they waited for their lovers to finish their game of cards and to get their caffeine hit.

Despite the sea of coffee tables and chairs covering large slabs of the square every day in the tourist season, there are far fewer coffee houses here today than there were two hundred years ago.

And for the time being at least I am pleased to say that none of them are yet called 'Starbucks'.

84. The sun's drawings

2006-08-17T12:27:00.000+10:00

John Ruskin wrote to his father in 1845, "I have been standing (but the moment before I began this letter) on the steps at the door – the water is not even plashing in the moonlight, there is not even a star twinkling, it is as still as if Venice were beneath the sea, but beautiful beyond all thought."

By his third visit to the city Ruskin could see deterioration in the fabric of the buildings, and he feared that most of their glorious details would soon be no more. He deplored the new enthusiasm for scraping centuries of grime ("the patina of the ages") from the marble facades, and he judged other renovations he saw as mostly disastrous.

As a result, his drawing style changed. Only a few years before, he had enjoyed making loose sketches, like his hero, Turner. Now he was frantic to record everything he saw before it disappeared, starting at 5:30 in the morning, drawing architectural details as accurately as he could and making copious notes all day until there was no light left.

Before he had recently left Oxford University, Ruskin had been told about the experiments of Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the 'daguerrotype' process, an early form of photography, and he had seen some of the first examples sent to England of what he called "the sun's drawings" .

However, as he said in 'The Stones of Venice', "Wholly careless at that time of finished detail, I saw nothing in the Daguerrotype to help, or alarm me; and inquired no more concerning it, until now at Venice I found a French artist producing exquisitely bright small plates (about four inches square) which contained, under a lens, the Grand Canal or St. Mark's Place as if a magician had reduced the reality to be carried away into an enchanted land. The little gems of picture cost a napoleon each; but with two hundred francs I bought the Grand Canal from the Salute to Rialto; and packed it away in thoughtless triumph."

And in his letters home about this new-fangled photo-graphing (light-drawing), he said "It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself – every chip of stone and stain is there – and of course, there is no mistake about proportions."

Ruskin left us hundreds of excellent drawings of the 'stones of Venice', but he doesn't seem to have ever considered learning the difficult process of how to make daguerrotypes for himself instead.

I wonder what he would have given for one of today's point-and-shoot digital 'sun-drawing' machines?

83. Normal working conditions.

2006-08-16T21:12:00.000+10:00

Near the right hand edge of the image of Ca' Dario posted here on August 10, you will see what looks like a 'No Entry' sign. You would probably think that despite what I had said on another occasion about the apparent lack of traffic restrictions on the waterways of Venice, that this meant the Rio (canal) next to the palazzo was one-way traffic only. You would be wrong. It is indeed a No Entry sign, but the words underneath (which are clearly visible in the original image) in fact say "Rio Chiuso Per Lavori" – Road Closed For Works.

This is the sort of works that make a Rio in Venice impassable. In Venice, you can't repair one side of the street, leaving the other one open. In Venice, it's all or nothing, you have to close the whole street - and then take the street away before you can start work. It is never the 'street' itself that's the problem, it's the sides of the road, the foundations of the buildings, that need the periodic attention.

In many parts of the world, if it rains enough to be soggy underfoot, building work stops. If that was the union rule in Venice, work would never start. What passes for normal building conditions here would trigger a walkout almost anywhere else in the world. Here it is always soggy underfoot, damp where you're trying to work, and smelly all round – especially this close to the canal-bottom sludge in summer.

Most of the buildings in Venice are brick, a porous material, but this picture reveals the secret of what makes building out of brick possible. On top of the wooden pilings that create a more stable floor, the foundations of most of the buildings are constructed from Istrian stone, chosen not just for its strength or for its easy availability, but because it is completely non-porous, creating a moistureproof barrier between the watery streets below and the brick buildings above.

Caissons, which seem to be made from steel and concrete, are lowered into place to seal each end of the section of canal that needs to be repaired, and then the water is pumped out. The seal is never perfect, so all the time workers are inside the drained area, pumps are keeping seepage from the lagoon at bay.

Spare a thought for the original builders of the wonderful - amazingly wonderful - buildings that were erected five hundred or even a thousand years ago in the middle of this tidal lagoon under the most adverse building conditions imaginable, without electric pumps or power tools, or any of the benefits of all the other modern technologies we take for granted.

I don't know about you, but I take my hat off to them in admiration.

82. One bridge too many

2006-08-15T13:19:00.000+10:00

John Ruskin visited Venice in 1836, when he was 16, and again a few years later when he was 22, both times accompanying his parents. Travellers to Venice in those days, whether for business or pleasure, had no option but to arrive by sea, approaching the island city slowly across the lagoon.

Well-heeled tourists like the Ruskins would have been rowed across in private gondolas, one carrying the family and several others transporting the 'cabin trunks' and other luggage, together with at least a valet and a maid, without which a Victorian gentleman's family would have been unable to travel anywhere.

Less wealthy travelers would have taken a gondola 'omnibus', the precursor to the modern vaporetta, much like the modern traghetto ferry, but larger.

In 1845, aged 26, John Ruskin visited Venice for the first time alone (well, apart from his valet and a 'traveling companion'). He was outraged to find that on the mainland where the Madonna dell'Acqua church used to be there was "a railway, covered with busy workmen, scaffolding & heaps of stones". Instead of being greeted with the sight of Venice in the distance he saw being built "the Greenwich railway, only with less arches and more dead wall, entirely cutting off the whole open sea and half the city".

I can understand his disappointment. To arrive in Venice slowly, at water level, perhaps in the fading light of late afternoon as the lanterns on the Grand Canal were being lit, would have been a magical experience and would have dramatically reinforced its unique island nature. Forever tying Venice umbilically to the mainland would have seemed to Ruskin to be a defilement of one of its most precious attributes – the freedom and independence of its watery isolation.

It is possible that some of the American students who were reading magazines or listening to iPods with their eyes shut or talking loudly about faraway boyfriends as they zoomed with us on this EuroStar express train over the long viaduct railway bridge to this platform in Santa Lucia station, may well have left the city several days later without even realizing that they had twice crossed a lagoon, or that Venice is anything more than just another old European seaside town. How sad.

81. Thalassocracy

2006-08-14T22:55:00.000+10:00

Thalassocracy is not a word that crops up much in conversation these days, but it applies to Venice perhaps more than it has applied to any state before or since.

The word describes a state whose empire is a maritime one, derived from the sea and from its naval supremacy. In earlier times, Carthage in North Africa was a thalassocracy, as was the Phoenician network of merchant cities. In later times, Portugal, Spain, Holland, and Great Britain all carved out far-flung empires for themselves mainly with warships rather than armies, and they too, are sometimes referred to as 'thalassocracies'.

But Venice more than all of them, is OF the sea. It is IN the sea. There is even a ceremony every year in May – La Sensa – when the city of Venice symbolically marries the sea. Starting in the year 1000AD, Doge Orseolo sailed out onto the lagoon with great pomp and solemnity in his ceremonial boat, and cast a gold ring into the waters with these words "We wed thee, O sea, in token of true and lasting dominion". Today, the ceremony is carried out by a local dignitary, but it still happens every year as it has for the past 1000 or so years.

Venice's empire was traditionally divided into three parts – the pre-eminent 'Dogado', which was the city and the lagoon; the 'Terrafirma', which was the city's holdings in the Veneto and other parts of Northern Italy; and the 'Mar', the overseas territories bound to Venice by sea.

The naval power of Venice came partly from its Arsenale, the dockyard that produced so many ships; partly from the fact that every one of its thousands of merchant ships were required to carry a certain amount of weaponry and armor and could be pressed into service as warships at a moment's notice; and partly from the fact that its navy never relied on slaves to pull the galley oars, the rowers were all recruited from among the citizens and this was an honourable occupation. It was also a convenient way for men who found themselves indebted to the city to work off their debts.

80. Annexe marks the spot

2006-08-13T14:14:00.000+10:00

This beautiful atrium staircase belongs to the historic Hotel Danieli (see 'Palazzo Dandolo: May 31), one of the busiest and most expensive 5-star hotels in Venice. The hotel is popular with well-heeled tourists, but less well-regarded by some Venetians, for reasons that I'll come to.

In 1171, the Emperor of Byzantium arrested all 10,000 Venetians in Constantinople and seized all their assets. Doge Vitale Michiel II immediately raised a fleet of 120 warships and set sail for the Byzantine capital. On the way, he was met by ambassadors from the emperor who convinced him that a negotiated settlement was possible, so he parked his fleet at Chios, and sent his own ambassadors ahead to Constantinople.

He was conned. The Emperor had no such peaceful intentions, he was just playing for time, building his own defences, and he treated Venice's ambassadors with contempt. Unfortunately, while the wasted months went by, plague broke out in the overcrowded warships and rather than face a mutiny, the Doge led his depleted armada back to Venice, without achieving anything at all.

When he confessed the failure and humiliation of his mission to a general assembly, and when they found out that he had also brought the plague back to Venice with him, a mob formed outside the palace baying for Vitale Michiel's blood. He slipped out a side door, hoping to take refuge in the convent of San Zaccaria nearby, but the mob caught him along the quay and one of them stabbed him to death.

There is no monument to the unlucky Doge Vitale Michiel II in Venice, but until recently his death was commemorated in a different way. His assassin was tried and executed, and the killer's house – which was next to this former Palazzo – was razed to the ground, and it was decreed that no stone building should ever be erected on that spot.

The decree stood for more than 750 years, until the owners of this hotel convinced the city to repeal it so that they could extend their premises and build a modern annexe on what for centuries had effectively been vacant land. The building approval was very controversial at the time - and in fact it still is - and the hotel was very fortunate that they were allowed to put a modern hotel building in such a prominent and historically significant location, on the Riva Schiavoni so near the Doge's palace.

I doubt that the hotel makes many of its guests aware that they are sleeping where the city's most notorious assassin used to live.

79. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari

2006-08-12T10:55:00.000+10:00

Even though 'The Frari' is listed in every guide book as a 'must visit' place for tourists, compared to some of the other grand buildings in Venice the very large brick church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari feels cold and unwelcoming, and looks awkward and unfinished. At least it does to me.

The main door into the place is typical of what I think is wrong with this building, with its chunky and unevenly proportioned columns each side; the three not very interesting sculptures perched precariously way up above the entrance where no-one can see them properly, two on the columns and one with little visible means of support at the pinnacle of the door; and the excessive roped braiding round the doorway, like a fancily embroidered cuff on the sleeve of a tatty blouse.

My brother says the Frari is a much nicer place to be when the choir is singing and the incense is swinging, and perhaps he's right, but I find it hard to excuse the unsatisfying design and clumsy finish of this church, given the prodigious effort that went into building it.

St Francis died in 1226, and by 1230 members of his new order were in Venice, looking for somewhere to build a church and a monastery. The Doge of the day, Jacopo Tiepolo, gave them this site and over the next hundred years a large Franciscan church was built, completed in 1338. By then the Doge was Francesco Dandolo, who expressed a wish to be buried in the new church when he died, which he promptly did within the year.

Dandolo left the monastic order much of his considerable fortune, and almost immediately, the Franciscans decided to pull their brand new church down and build another one in its place, even larger and facing in a different direction – a decision which somewhat complicated the burial plans of their ducal benefactor. The resulting church took another hundred years to build and this is the one you can now see in the middle of San Polo sestiere.

The Frari's main claim to fame is its massive size, the ostentatious tombs of some of the more famous people buried inside the church, and the quality of some of its decorative works of art, including several fine Titians and Donatello's painted wooden sculpture of John the Baptist. However, there are other churches and scuoli and palazzi and museums in Venice with many more great Renaissance paintings than you will find in the Frari, if that is what you want to see.

Despite my negativity towards this surprisingly much-loved church there is still (again, in my opinion) one very good reason for taking the time to visit it. In a smallish side chapel to the right of the high alter there is a Giovanni Bellini Madonna triptych that is simply drop dead gorgeous. Don't miss it.

78. Ca' Dario: Part 2

2006-08-11T01:28:00.000+10:00

Venice was an oligarchy. One with many checks and balances which worked well for a very long time, but an oligarchy none the less.

The foundation of the system was the Great Council, the Maggior Consiglio, which was made up of between 1500 and 2000 members of Venice's aristocratic families. Officially, no-one else in Venice had any political voice, and if you were not born into one of the designated aristocratic families your chance of ever participating in any of the many levels of government was absolutely zero.

Giovanni Dario, who built this palazzo for himself, was not an aristocrat. He was a 'cittadino', a citizen, and therefore of the second rank and forever limited in Venetian society, a fact which in the light of his accomplishments, seriously pissed him off.

He was rich, he was a successful merchant, he was a respected diplomat who served Venice well – he had even successfully negotiated a peace treaty in 1479 between Venice and Sultan Mehmet II, the same Ottoman leader who had destroyed Byzantium – yet he could never receive the honours he felt he deserved, nor could he occupy a position of power and influence in the Republic.

When Dario retired from diplomacy, he built this lavishly ornamented home for himself worthy of the most exalted aristocracy. It was one of the first buildings in Venice to be completely faced in marble, and it was studded with decorative roundels of marble and porphyry, the Imperial stone, not the sort of material that an ordinary citizen would normally be presumptious enough to choose.

On the face of the building at canal level, he had these Latin words inscribed: "Urbis Genio Ioannes Darius" (click on the picture to make it bigger). This could be translated two ways. It could be taken to mean "Giovanni Dario, genius of the city", which you would have to agree was a pretty arrogant 'two-finger-salute' to the city fathers. Dario argued that it was in fact meant as a tribute from him to the city of Venice – 'genio' in Latin meaning 'spirit' – so it should be read as "Giovanni Dario, to the guiding spirit of the city".

He got away with it, but it must have been touch and go for a while, and you have to admire his cojones.

Although he could never be an aristocrat himself, Dario put together a big enough dowry for his daughter to marry into the Barbaro family, making sure that his descendants had ruling opportunities that he himself did not.

77. Ca' Dario: Part 1

2006-08-10T00:02:00.000+10:00

This beautiful Grand Canal residence was originally built for Giovanni Dario in the late 1480s, but it has a very unfortunate reputation. Legend has it that every subsequent owner of this palazzo – still known as Ca' Dario - has died under mysterious circumstances, either accidentally, or by murder, or by suicide.

However, like most widely accepted 'truths' involving the supernatural, when you start to dig for details, hard facts are not easy to come by. Yes, there have been suicides associated with the palazzo, most notably the death of Raul Gardini, one of Italy's best-known industrialists, who killed himself while he was the palazzo's owner in 1992, but that may not be any more significant than any of the other incidences that are supposed to have occurred in the last 500 years.

It may be possible to prove that this palazzo has the highest occurrence of unusual or sudden death of owners compared to all the other palazzi, but that in itself is not statistically significant. One or other of the palazzi on the Grand Canal has to be the owner of that peculiar honor, why not this one?

Isn't it possible that owners of Venetian palazzi have always tended to be successful, older, very rich, high stress type of people in the public eye, who have a greater propensity to being noticed when they die suddenly? And isn't it probable that such people are also more likely to be the target of kidnappers, robbers, and murderers? Given the stakes being played for at various times in Venice's history, I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few of the owners of almost any palazzo in Venice haven't been knocked off over the years, or haven't died 'unexpectedly', sometimes at the hands of relatives – after all, many of them lived lives that are a long way from what we would call statistically 'normal'.

One of the latest victims of the 'Dario curse' now being touted is John Entwhistle, the bass player for the rock band The Who, who leased this palazzo in 2002, and then died 'in mysterious circumstances' soon after. The cause of his death was cocaine induced heart failure. The mysterious circumstances are: which room of the Hard Rock Hotel/Casino in Las Vegas did he die in? (the managers of the hotel want to keep that secret to avoid fans making it into a shrine); and what was the name of the stripper he was rumoured to be making love with at the time of his death? (even old rock stars shouldn't tarnish their legends by snuffing it alone).

I am personally sorry that the world's greatest ever rock bass player is no longer with us, but I don't think the fact that he was renting this building at the time could have had much to do with his demise, do you?

76. Not much of a memorial

2006-08-09T12:26:00.000+10:00

It's not surprising in a city where building land is at such a premium, that there are many places where the houses and businesses have grown over the narrow streets below and made practical use of the space above a walking citizen's head height.

As a result there are 'Sotoportegi' like this one all over Venice, covered walkways that punch through and between buildings linking lanes and alleys at ground level. Some are very narrow and dark, some short and wide, some so low you need to duck your head (if you are, like me, a little taller than average male).

Some people find them a little sinister and threatening and avoid going through them, but I love the surprise of not always being able to know what’s on the other side. Sometimes you can go through a Sotoportego at the end of a narrow alley only to find yourself in another almost identical narrow alley, sometimes you can emerge into a bright and busy campo you didn't even know was there. Sometimes, if you’re not careful, you can end up in a canal.

All of the Sotoportegi worthy of that description have names, mostly unrelated to the names of whatever two places they are connecting. 'Malipiero' is an aristocratic Venetian family name best known in more recent years for the musicians and composers that it has produced.

Francesco Malipiero was an opera composer of the early 19th century, his son Luigi was a conductor and pianist, and Luigi's son Gian Francesco was a very successful composer and teacher of the early 20th century, among whose fans was Benito Mussolini.

On the other hand, there is a Ca' Malipiero Hotel in Castello that is housed in the 15th century former home of Pasquale Malipiero, the 66th Doge of Venice, so I think it is much more likely that this ancient-looking Sotoportego was named after him rather than after any of his musical descendants.

This sotoportego may not be the most extravagant of memorials to a former leader, but then Pasquale, whose reign from 1457-1462 was as undistinguished as it was brief, wasn't much of Doge.

75. Booty from Byzantium: Part 4

2006-08-08T21:04:00.000+10:00

Today I'm going to ask you to do something strange. I want you to feel sorry for an Emperor of Byzantium, a place which for most of its 1123 years of existence was the richest and most powerful empire the world had ever known. Nevertheless, I would like you to empathize with him and share for a moment what must have been for him a very painful experience.

In 'Palazzo Dandolo' on May 31 in this blog, I told you how Venice sacked Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, in 1204 and stole so many of its treasures. On June 16 and 17, and on July 10, I told you about the horses and the porphyry sculpture that Venice captured and has displayed ever since at the Basilica of San Marco. On July 7, I told you how Emperor John VIII Paleologus came cap in hand to Venice in 1438, imploring her help in defending what was left of his diminishing empire.

Imagine that scene in 1438. It is now 234 years after the sacking. Most of the wounds have healed. The Greeks under John VIII have been back in control of the Eastern Roman Empire again for 180 years or so. Trading has occurred. Venice and Constantinople are friends again. Well, sort of. John VIII arrives in Venice with his 600 strong entourage. He is housed in a large palace. He is treated with respect, welcomed with pomp and ceremony as an Emperor should be.

At some point during the sojourn, it is absolutely certain that the Doge would have invited his Imperial guest to worship with him at his private chapel. To not do so would have been disrespectful. To refuse would have been an insult. But this is the moment when the mighty power that Venice had become was able to psychologically crush its former master, and was able to do it passively, almost incidentally.

John VIII would not have walked to church from his palace on the Grand Canal. He would have ridden in an ornate vessel of some sort to the steps of the Doge's Palace, then walked, perhaps on a red carpet, the 100 meters or so to the Doge's own chapel – which just happened to be the Basilica San Marco – past this, the southern wall of the great church.

This image would have been the first part of San Marco that John VIII would have set eyes on. He would have known of and recognized the porphyry sculpture of his predecessors on the lower corner facing him, stolen from his home city. Perhaps he commented on it, perhaps he ignored it. Looking instead at the wall facing him, he would have seen slabs of marble and decorative panels that had once adorned the churches of Constantinople, now flaunted over every façade of the cathedral. Walking on, he would have looked up and seen the Quadriga horses from his own Hippodrome. Inside the church, in pride of place would have been the Palo d'Oro, a solid gold and jewel encrusted alterpiece containing dozens of Byzantine holy icons – all part of the booty boosted from Constantinople during the three days of rape and pillage following its fall.

Then, the ruler of Eastern Orthodoxy would have had to swallow even more of his pride and pray at a Catholic mass. His humiliation at the hands of his former vassal state would have been complete.

To his credit, the Emperor must have born his ignominious situation with dignity. Any other response would have surely been noted and recorded and gloated over.

But you have to feel a bit sorry for him. Don't you?

74. Zattere

2006-08-07T22:45:00.000+10:00

The usually fairly short paved stretches running partway along the sides of canals or fronting the lagoon are known as the 'Fondamente' – the 'foundations', which I suppose is an appropriate name for the place at the sides of the canals where the lower levels of the buildings begin.

Sometimes these walkways have a unique name of their own, for instance, one of the fondamente beside the Rio San Barnaba is called the Fondamenta Gherardini. Sometimes they will just take the name of the Rio they run alongside, for instance beside the Rio Novo is the Fondamenta del Rio Novo.

This particular fondamenta is longer and wider than any other in Venice and it has many names, although it is only ever known by one. It runs along the southern edge of Dorsoduro, looking across to the island of Giudecca, and at its western end it is the Fondamenta Zattere al Ponte Longo, which becomes the Fondamenta Zattere al Gesuiti, which runs into the Fondamenta Zattere Incurabili, then the Fondamenta Zattere al Spirito Santo, then the Fondamenta Zattere al Saloni, and finally the Fondamenta Dogana e la Salute, when it reaches the eastern tip of the sestiere at La Dogana at the mouth of the Grand Canal.

That may be its real names, but to most Venetians and to the world, the whole of this long promenade is only ever referred to as the Zattere.

Timber was the main building material in Venice, and rafts made of and carrying timber were floated from the Republic's forests on the Veneto mainland down the River Piave and towed across the lagoon to this quayside. 'Una zattera' means a 'raft', and this was once a busy dock where countless 'zattere' carrying vast quantities of building material were dismantled and brought ashore.

Nowadays, the Zattere is a very pleasant place to sit in the summer sun with an espresso at a waterside café, or, like this couple, to have a leisurely misty winter afternoon stroll to the shops.

73. A brief claim to fame

2006-08-06T23:25:00.000+10:00

There is a plaque proudly displayed on the front wall of the Londra Palace Hotel on the Riva Schiavoni, not far from the Doge's Palace, and it says this, translated loosely from the Italian:

"The great Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky stayed from the 2nd to the 16th December 1877 in this hotel, where he composed his Fourth Symphony."

I don't know about you, but I find that simple statement extraordinary. How could he have written such a huge piece of music as the Fourth in only two weeks? In a hotel room? But just suppose for a moment that he did, it must have been a Herculean all-out effort, which means that Tchaikovsky went all the way to Venice and did nothing else at all while he was there except write music! This must have been a fantastic hotel if Tchaikovsky preferred the inside of it to the exclusion of all else.

The truth of course is slightly different.

1877 was what you might call an up and down year for Peter T. On the upside, his Swan Lake was premiered in February to great acclaim. Also, his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, gave him several other commissions and enough money to keep composing fulltime, and in the spring he began to compose his Fourth Symphony (yes, the one on the plaque). Oddly, although she was a huge fan, Madame von Meck never allowed Tchaikovsky to meet her, though they corresponded almost daily for fifteen years.

Then the composer did something very unwise. Not recognizing, or more likely, not admitting even to himself that he was gay, he married a young woman ten years his junior. This was a disaster, and within three months his marriage was dissolved, Tchaikovsky had a complete mental breakdown, and he attempted suicide by plunging himself into the icy waters of the Moscow River. His musical friends rescued him by chipping in to buy him a long holiday in Italy.

I think by now you've realised that the hotel plaque is not telling the whole story.

True, the 'great Russian composer' did write some music while he was in Venice, but only the conclusion of the Fourth Symphony, not the whole lot as intimated on the plaque. And he didn't have a fabulous time at this albergo, either. He wrote to his brother Anatole, "I shall leave Venice without sorrow….it is only thanks to the monotony of Venetian life and lack of distractions that I could work so hard and so intensively". Venice... boring?!

What's more, that letter was written on Christmas Eve, which means that the hotel's illustrious guest was still in Venice but must have moved out of the Londra Palace by then and gone to stay somewhere else. I don't know what caused the composer to find a different hotel in the middle of his stay, but the reason is unlikely to be a ringing endorsement for the hospitality of the Londra Palace Hotel.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good bit of PR.

72. Hitching posts

2006-08-05T15:16:00.000+10:00

If you have never been to Venice it is easy to make quite false assumptions about it.

Every schoolkid who knows anything at all about Venice knows at least this: that the main roads are all canals. Consequently, we all understand that Venetians have to use boats instead of wheeled vehicles. It is then easy to make direct mental substitutes, one type of vehicle for the other, eg bicycles/rickshaws = rowboats; taxis/cars = motorboats; buses = vaporetti; trucks = barges, and at a functional level, this analogy works.

It would be very wrong, though, to assume as a result of that comparison that Venice is a lot like other cities, except with very soggy roads and different vehicles. The fact is that people in Venice have a profoundly different relationship to transport.

In most cities, vehicular transport is the norm, walking is the exception and very localised – and in some places, like Los Angeles, walking is an aberration to be discouraged, achieved only with great difficulty and physical danger from pedestrian-hostile traffic systems.

In Venice, it's the very opposite. Because of its island nature, everything in Venice is within walking distance, so most people who live here don't even want to own a boat, they walk everywhere. There is no Hertz or Thrifty Rent-a-boat service, so most visitors don't hire their own boat for the duration, they walk. Everybody uses vaporetti to get from island to island around the lagoon, or from one end of the city to the other, but otherwise they walk. And because of the total lack of any kind of wheeled vehicles in the land-based streets, Venice is a walker's paradise.

The relatively small proportion of residents who do own a boat also don't seem to wrestle with any of the traffic restrictions that vehicle owners have to cope with in other cities. There are no double yellow lines painted on the sides of canals, no Clearway signs, no roundabouts, traffic lights, stop signs, or parking meters. And there is so little traffic, they don't even have any trouble parking their boat when they get to where they want to go.

in the walls of medieval buildings in the old city centres of Europe, it is common to see iron rings or posts set into the stonework at about a metre above the ground. These are hitching posts and it is to them that you would have tied the reins of your horse when you wanted to park.

There were horses in Venice at one time, but I don't recall ever seeing that sort of hitching post here. Hitching posts in Venice mostly look like this – an iron ring set into the paving at the edges of the canals – and many of them are still used for their original purpose, which is to tie the reins of your vehicle to when you want to park. That's if you are unfortunate enough to have to have a vehicle.

Doesn't that make you green with envy?

71. Santa Maria della Salute: Part 3

2006-08-04T13:01:00.000+10:00

Longhena won the competition to design this church partly because he proposed that the whole building should resemble a crown, a fitting symbol for the Virgin Mother. The interior reflects that vision and it's dominated by this central octagonal space under the main cupola, with chapels radiating out from the centre.

I don't find the interior of this church all that interesting. It doesn't have the warmth of San Marco, or the intricate charm of some of the smaller churches in Venice, to me it's just a collection of neo-classical bits in a pleasant enough arrangement.

With this exception. The floor, like so many other floors in Venice, is superb.

The wonderful floor in this church (incidentally, also designed by Longhena) spreads out in concentric circles from the central rosette, with spiraling decorative strips of diamonds and triangles and squares and circles in all kinds of rich coloured marble – red Verona, yellow Torri, black Iseo, and white Carrara.

This city, more than any other, is a city of detail. The terrazzieri, the flooring artists of Venice, so often gave free reign to their imaginations and created inlaid incrustations of exotic stone and polychromatic marble and intricate mosaic – producing marvellous surfaces more like Persian carpets than what we normally think of as functional flooring.

Even when the floors of the foyers of our towering CBD mega office blocks – those modern day cathedrals – are finished in the most expensive and durable materials available today, the chances are they will be laid out in polished squares of uniform charcoal grey.

That's not a floor. But go visit the Salute. Now THAT's a Floor.

70. Santa Maria della Salute: Part 2

2006-08-03T11:52:00.000+10:00

The original design of this grand basilica was chosen as the result of a competition, won by a relatively young architect, 32 years old Baldessare Longhena. Although Longhena lived till he was 84, and worked on the church for the rest of his life, the scaffolding only finally came down on completion in 1687, five years after his death.

It has a number of unusual features: the double domes, one larger than the other; the octagonal shape of the main interior space; and the bizarre spiraling pinwheel buttresses surrounding the larger dome, like slices from some giant swiss roll.

Henry James described the building as like "some great lady on the threshold of her salon…with her domes and scrolls, her scalloped buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps disposed on the ground like the train of a robe."

John Ruskin was less enthusiastic in his 1853 book, 'The Stones of Venice'. "(Among) the principal faults of the building are… the ridiculous disguise of the buttresses under the form of colossal scrolls…"

Ruskin called the buttresses themselves on this "Grotesque Renaissance" building "an hypocrisy", and if his cited source is correct, then he was right in this assessment. Ruskin observed that Selvatico and Lazari in their 'Guida di Venezia a delle isole cirnconvicine' state that the cupola structure is made of timber. With a stone cupola, the downward and outward forces from the compressive weight of the dome would need reinforcing buttresses to hold it up, but with a lighter wooden dome, no buttresses at all would have been necessary.

Which means they aren't really buttresses at all and that Longhena put them on just for decoration. How Italian is that?

69. Santa Maria della Salute: Part 1

2006-08-02T11:00:00.000+10:00

One of the most recognizable silhouettes on the Venetian skyline, the church of Santa Maria della Salute dominates the lower reaches of the Grand Canal.

'Salute' means 'health', but it also means 'salvation', and the church acquired its name because it was commissioned at the beginning of an outbreak of the plague in 1630, as a prayer for salvation. The Redentore, on Giudecca, (see the post here on June 2) was built as an act of thanksgiving after the city's final deliverance from the previous plague attack in 1575, but this even grander edifice was started in the hope that the Holy Mother might be persuaded to intervene while the plague was still happening and protect the city from the worst of the current outbreak.

Arguably, the plan worked. This time, fewer people died, only 46,490 citizens perished compared to some 51,000 in the first epidemic, which in one sense was an improvement.

Equally arguably, the holy bribe failed. As the city's numbers had not yet recovered to their former levels, the dead this time represented an even higher proportion of the total populace than before, pushing the number of survivors left in 1633 down to only 102,000, the lowest city headcount for more than 200 years.

The project even started badly. The foundation stone was to be laid by Doge Nicolo Contarini on Ascension Day 1631, but he was bedridden on that day, and the laying was postponed for a week. On April 1, the Duke hauled himself from his sickbed and performed the ceremony, then died at 7am the following morning. That should have been a sign that Mary wasn't in much of a compassionately intervening mood, but the church construction went ahead anyway.

Each year on November 21, the city celebrates the Festa della Madonna della Salute, and a procession of worshippers approaches the church from San Marco across the Grand Canal on a pontoon made of boats, to then give thanks for salvation from the plague in the great octagonal church.

I suppose an optimist would say that although a third of the city died, two-thirds of it didn't, but that seems to me to be a flimsy and macabre cause for celebration.

68. Ghosts in the walls

2006-08-01T21:22:00.000+10:00

Doors and windows are not just openings in the outside walls of a building, they are a reflection of what is happening inside as well. People change their minds about how to use a building, and sometimes that means they need to change the building physically.

What used to be a hallway is now a storage space; one large bedroom becomes two smaller ones; enlarging the kitchen means moving the front door a metre or so to one side; and so on.

One of the fascinating things to me about Venice (and about Italy in general) is that when structural changes are made to a building, the builders very often make no attempt to disguise the effect of their renovations on the outward appearance of the building. Sometimes, they even make a feature of the structural residue, deliberately accentuating its former outline by rendering or painting around it.

Almost every wall in Venice carries the scars in its surface where doors and windows used to be, but where they are no longer.

I love these scars. I call them 'ghosts' – ghost doors and ghost windows – and I have collected hundreds of these sometimes clear sometimes faint echoes of the past. In the older walls centuries of renovation history are writ into the brickwork, successive outlines of windows speak of changing tastes in design and shape. Doors become windows and windows become doors, and both become shadows of their former selves.

The central window of this first floor pharmacy became redundant and was killed off some time ago, yet some of its bones very deliberately remain in place as its memorial.

67. The cheapest gondola ride in Venice

2006-07-31T01:13:00.000+10:00

This boat ferrying passengers across the Grand Canal is a 'traghetto' – which not surprisingly simply means 'ferry' in Italian. Fifty years ago there were about 30 traghetti ferry points across the Grand Canal, now there are only seven, but they are a wonderfully convenient way to cross this long and wide stretch of water that only has three bridges.

It looks very much like a gondola, and so it should, because the traghetti are all former working gondolas, but without the fancy seats and other ornamentation and without the counterbalancing metal 'ferro' on the prow. The ferro is not needed because unlike a gondola, a traghetto is always rowed by two people, one in the normal gondolier position and one closer to the bow in front of the passengers.

Gondolas used to be the most common form of general transport in Venice, and were not expensive, but now gondolas are used only for tourist joy rides. Any tourist who has treated themselves to a gondola ride recently will know that a 40-50 minute cruise under a few bridges and through a few canals will cost between 80 and 100 euros, depending on how good you are at negotiating and how busy the gondoliers are that day. By contrast, a short ride in a traghetto is exceptional value for money, each journey costing less than one euro.

There is no scheduled service, the traghetti cross the canal back and forth all day whenever they have one or more passengers, most of whom stand the whole way unless the boat is fairly crowded. If you arrive at the ferry stop when the traghetto is waiting patiently at the other side, the ferrymen will come across the canal to pick you up.

These old style ferries are a great service, and great value for money – and there's not much else in this tourist town about which you can say that.

66. Her name was Courage

2006-07-30T06:48:00.000+10:00

These walls surround the cemetery island of San Michele, a small island close to Canareggio in the north of Venice. In 1806, during Napoleon's occupation of Venice, it was decreed that Venetians could no longer bury their dead in the city as it was considered unsanitary, and this whole island and the adjoining San Cristoforo island were set aside as a burial ground.

Among the many graves of ordinary citizens are the remains of a number of famous expatriates, among them Igor Stravinsky, and Serge Diaghilev, Ezra Pound, and Olga Rudge.

Olga who, you say?

Olga Rudge, an American-born longtime resident of Venice, was a celebrated concert violinist until the outbreak of World War II, and later almost single-handedly revived the world's interest in the Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi, publishing a complete catalog of his work and discovering and publicizing a staggering 309 concertos by Vivaldi which had been lost or forgotten.

Proud of her artistic and financial independence, Olga is nevertheless best known as the lifelong muse and mistress of the poet Ezra Pound, the mother of Pound's only daughter, and a staunch champion of Pound and his work. During times when it was far from fashionable to have an illegitimate child with your married lover, she was loyal to him despite his many peccadilloes, and despite the threat to her own career. She remained loyal not only after he was arrested for treason for broadcasting and writing in support of Italy in the Second World War, but even when he was declared insane after his acquittal and confined to a lunatic asylum for a further 12 years.

Olga met Pound in 1923 when he was already married, and Pound's wife Dorothy was still alive when he died in Olga's arms nearly fifty years later in 1972. The two women hated each other and much of Olga's life together with Pound was an uncomfortable ménage a trios between herself, the compulsively womanizing poet, and either his wife or one of his many other mistresses and casual lovers, but Olga's house in Venice where she had lived since 1928 was always a refuge for him and it was there they spent his final years together.

Olga outlived her lover by 24 years, never wavering in her loyalty to Pound, and was buried beside him in 1996 on the island of San Michele.

Among the final lines of poetry written by Pound are these, and they would have been a fitting epitaph:

Her name was courage
and is written Olga.

65. Growing old in Venice

2006-07-29T07:11:00.000+10:00

You have to assume that this elderly lady was either born in Venice, or has lived here most of her life, because Venice is not the sort of place that you would choose to retire to and live out your final days. Life here is very demanding for old people, and not at all kind to them. In fact, growing old in Venice would suck.

Take something basic like shopping. In most cities, you could drive a car, or get someone else to drive you, and do a week's shopping in one trip. Not in Venice. Here, you buy only what you can carry, or what you can trundle behind you if your shopping bag has wheels. Which means you have to shop just about every day. That may be the best way to take advantage of the fresh produce at the markets, but you have to be reasonably fit and active to do that every day. Here, it becomes a daily chore, if, like this old lady carrying her distinctive Billa bag, you have to stop every few paces to cough into your handkerchief.

In most cities, you could get a cab to the supermarket if you were not that mobile. Here, there are only water taxis, which are very expensive, and anyway you would need to live on a canal to get door to door service.

Then there are the bridges. At least 400 of them, and there are always at least a few of them between you and wherever you want to get to, and no way to avoid them. Nearly all of the bridges have sides to them, but they don't all have handrails to hang on to or even steps with a non-slip surface.

Could Venice install wheelchair access ramps to all the old buildings; fit motorized tubular steel chair rails to all the ancient bridges; subsidise shopping delivery services; fit inside or outside elevators to all apartment blocks? It could, but it won't.

There has to be a tradeoff between the needs of the permanent residents and the needs of the temporary residents – the tourists – and the reality is that the tourists pay the bills. If Venice stopped being La Serenissima – the 'most serene one' – if it stopped being a cultural and temporal anachronism, a singularly unique and relatively unspoiled medieval city, and started looking more like a modern nursing home, the tourists would stop coming.

In the meantime, the old residents struggle on until their life in Venice becomes impossibly impractical. And then, I suppose, they leave.

64. Thank heavens for small mercers

2006-07-28T02:36:00.000+10:00

One of the problems that residents of Venice have is that their home has almost become a theme park, a single industry town devoted almost exclusively to funneling tourists through its most historically significant areas. Many of the services that other cities take for granted have all but disappeared, and simple ordinary things can sometimes be very difficult.

A button came off my coat. In a hotel, the concierge would have had it mended for me, but there is no such service with an apartment, so we went looking for a shop that could sell us a needle and thread, ideally, a haberdashery. I can confidently say there is nothing remotely resembling such a beast in the entire sestiere of San Marco. In our further wanderings up to Rialto, across the bridge to the San Polo markets, down through Santa Croce and Dorsoduro and back to San Marco – nothing.

One of the shopkeepers I spoke to was not only sympathetic, he was in a similar situation – he had a leaking tap (faucet) and the only hardware store he knew of had closed down and was being refitted as something more tourist oriented. He needed a washer, and although he lived in Venice, he no longer had any idea where to get one.

One day, north of Rialto, off the beaten track in Canareggio, when we had almost given up hope, there it was, a mercer! Mercery is not a trade that still exists in the English speaking world, but in earlier times a mercer was a dealer in silks and wool and fine fabrics, and the Worshipful Company of Mercers, their trade guild, was a powerful organisation in medieval London.

From the look of the shop, a 'merceria' was the Italian equivalent of what we would call an old-fashioned haberdashery. Inside, as I expected, this business was just what we were looking for, with tiny drawers from floor to ceiling full of all kinds of buttons and yarns and beads and embroidery stuff. It had just the mending supplies we needed – a needle and some twist.

Ordinary life is still clinging to the margins of this tourist-devoted city. Thank heavens.

63. Rocco the pestilent saint

2006-07-27T00:56:00.000+10:00

This is the Scuola Grande di San Rocco – the Great School of St Rocco. The Scuoli Grande are very old, and in some cases, very wealthy fraternal charitable organisations, but for now, what interests me is Saint Rocco. Who was he, and how did he come to have such a grand building named for him?

San Rocco is known as Roque in Spain, and Roch in France, where he was born about 1340, supposedly the son of the local governor in Montpellier. When Rocco was 20, his parents died and he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, which was not such a good idea as the place was at that time in the middle of an outbreak of the plague. Being a religious lad, he prayed for and tended to some of the victims, and in due course came down with the plague himself. Now infectious, he was banished from the city and took refuge in a cave.

He survived the illness, and despite being left gaunt and debilitated by it he made his way back to Montpellier several years later, where he was thrown into prison – same say as a vagrant, some say because he was accused of being a spy. Even though his uncle was now the governor of the town, Rocco could not get anyone to recognize him and he died in the prison some five years later, only being identified post mortem by a birthmark on his chest.

You might think that was hardly the kind of life that would rate a major sanctification effort, and it wasn't. But apparently after he was dead and buried, it was discovered that praying for Rocco's intercession brought about some cures from the plague, a result which ranked as miraculous, and a cult grew up around his amazing healing powers.

The mortality rate for bubonic plague is between 30% and 75% if untreated and much less than that, 1-15% if treated, so you could say that at least half of the people being prayed for would have survived anyway, praying or no praying, but St Roch's 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' miracle cures were enough to get him fairly rapidly elevated to sainthood.

Rocco took a vow of poverty when he set out on his fairly unsuccessful pilgrimage, and I expect he would be very surprised to find that he is now not only a saint, but the Patron Saint of Pestilence, and that his body is encased in a glass tomb in the richly decorated Church of San Rocco, near this other lavish and expensive building also carrying his name.

62. Shonky workmanship, or something else?

2006-07-26T01:28:00.000+10:00

If you walk around Venice with your eyes open you will see many examples of what appear to be the most slapdash cabling: fibre-optic TV cables snaking and dangling across the façades of very nice old buildings; cables draped loosely over sculptures above doors, and looping across and right in front of windows; electricity cable stapled into the stucco up and across in front of a beautiful gothic window; surplus cable just rolled up and left hanging on the outside of a building instead of being pulled through and hidden. And so on.

You would think that in a place as historic as Venice that they would be more careful to be discreet in the way they connect up electricity or TV cables, but they appear to do the job less carefully than you would expect a tradesperson to do at home in a country toilet.

How could this be allowed to occur, when so much of what surrounds us in this city was created in previous centuries with passion, with love, with immense care, enormous talent, and obsessive perfectionism? Have standards fallen so far that Italian tradespeople no longer know how to do a job right, or even care how they deface these historic places?

But what if it isn't incompetence? What if the laws against punching holes in ancient buildings to thread cables through, or carving channels in walls to bury and hide them, are so restrictive, so impractical, that leaving them exposed on the surface is economically the only thing that cablers can do? What's more, leaving them exposed in this most blatant way may be a silent protest against the regulations, perhaps cumulatively eloquent enough to force a relaxation of what is allowed.

There is another possibility, one that could be closer to the truth than either of the others. It may just be that this is another example of Venice and its inhabitants taking a longer view than other cities. It may be acceptable to feed TV cables to buildings in Venice in a crude and clumsy way like this, because they know that any technology is temporary, and it will change. Cable is the technology we need TODAY for this service, ugly and cumbersome though it is, but tomorrow is another story. The moment wi-fi services deliver TV, these cables will be redundant, and they can simply be unhooked and taken down again. No damage to the building installing them or removing them.

So the cables are a bit ugly for a few years. So what? Venice has endured a lot worse.

61. Palazzo dei Camerlenghi

2006-07-25T12:35:00.000+10:00

Unusually, this grand palazzo is not joined to any other building, so it has no façade as such, its façade goes all the way round the building. Standing on its own next to the Rialto Bridge, it has several other claims to fame as well.

The Palazzo dei Camerlenghi was one of the first buildings in Europe that was purpose built to be administrative offices. Originally housing the Venetian Treasury, the building still performs a similar function today as the 'seat of the accounting courts' (whatever they are).

Also, when it was built, this impressive example of early Renaissance architecture was originally the centre of one of the largest decorative efforts ever carried out in the city. Nearly two hundred pictures were commissioned for its interior from a virtual 'Who's Who' of Venetian painters, many of them very large works. When Napoleon conquered Venice in 1797, the collection was dispersed, some pieces destroyed, and some went 'astray', never to be seen again. The significance of this building to the development of Venetian painting has largely been unrecognized, but about 100 of the original works survived and many of those are now in the collection of the Accademia Museum, further down the Grand Canal.

Last, but by no means least, the carved capitals of the main entrance to the building are also famously vulgar (but unfortunately not visible in this picture – sorry about that). They depict a man with claws between his legs and a woman with flames emerging from between hers. These sculptures supposedly commemorate some remarks made in a tavern nearby during the more than seventy years long reconstruction of the Rialto Bridge after it burned down in 1514. The man is reputed to have said something thoughtful and eloquent like "that bridge won't be finished until my dick grows claws", to which the woman responded, "or until my pussy catches fire".

Who could blame the Government Works Department of the day for wanting to preserve these immortal observations for posterity?

60. Local delicacies

2006-07-24T21:41:00.000+10:00

A pre-lunch eatery window piled high with biscuits and buns and involtini – rolled up flatbread with various fillings – is a common site in almost any city in today's world, but if you look a little more closely you will realise that you could be nowhere else but Venice (if you didn't know you can do this, click on the picture to make it big enough to read the labels).

To the left on the middle shelf is a small pile of peculiarly Venetian fat crunchy biscuits with almonds on top known as 'Pan del Doge', or Duke's Bread. Next to them is a pile of similar biscuits, but dark with chocolate, here labeled 'Moretti', but generally better known in Venice as 'Pan del Moro', or Moor's Bread. Perhaps this was the very place that Desdemona came to buy Othello's favourite biscuits? It wouldn't surprise me to find some enterprising bakery in Venice making that silly claim.

There are other foods and some famous dishes that are very Venetian, many of them derived from the types of seafood commonly found in the shallow lagoon or beyond in the northern Adriatic. Mussels, clams, octopus, and squid are all high on that list. 'Pasta al vongole', pasta with clams, is one such delicacy, and any kind of pasta cooked in cuttlefish ink so that when it hits your plate it is black – and I mean really black, not some dirty-washing grey tint – is another dish the locals are very proud of. To me, the flavour of the squid ink is not that appealing, and the weirdness of the dish's appearance actually puts me off enjoying it, but the Venetians love it and you'll see it on almost every restuaurant menu.

Here is one very simple but utterly delicious Venetian dish:

Fegato alla veneziana

About half a kilo of calf's liver cut into slices
A couple of large onions
150-200g butter
A nice juicy lemon
Lots of parsley

Fry the chopped onions in a pan with half the butter and some salt and pepper. Tip the onions out (or use a second pan) and cook the liver with the rest of the butter, and of course with some salt and pepper. Put the onions back in with the liver and squeeze in the lemon juice. Serve on a plate covered in finely chopped parsley.

...Don't skimp on the butter. If you're worried about the calories, cook something else.

59. Precise but useless

2006-07-23T04:54:00.000+10:00

In most parts of the world, if your house was number 3883 then you would be living in a very long street. But this is Venice, and in Venice there aren't any long streets, and the longest streets are canals anyway.

So what does this number mean? Surprisingly, it is exactly what it appears to be, the postal address number of this dwelling. But this is not 3883 Something Street, it is number 3883 San Marco. The house numbers in Venice don't have anything to do with the street the building is in, they refer to the Sestieri, or six districts, in this case San Marco.

Isn't that a bit confusing? You bet it is. If someone said to you "Come to dinner at my place. I live at "Canareggio 7542" you would be very hungry indeed by the time you found it unless your host had given you some more detailed directions.

I have never seen any map of Venice that includes building numbers at all, let alone one that could let you find out where you are going if all you had was the official address and you had never been there before. And without sestiere border markings it isn't always easy even to know which of two neighbouring districts you are in, so even if you found the very number you were looking for, you could still be in the wrong place. Italian postmen must have useful maps or they would spend their lives going round in circles until they got to know the sequence in their district.

How do businesses advertise themselves? Do they use the 'official' address, or do they give their street name as well as a simple matter of practicality?

Astonishingly, they seem to stick to the official address. For instance, our favourite restaurant puts "Dorsoduro 1016, Venezia" on its business card. It also puts "(ponte dell' Accademia)" after the address, which might be helpful if the restaurant wasn't a narrow alley and several streets away from the Accademia Bridge. Another restaurant in the same district narrows your search down a little by adding "(San Pantalon)" after "Dorsoduro 3818", which gives you a clue to which Church Parish to start looking in if you have some knowledge of ecclesiastical geography.

It's not like all the streets and alleyways don't have names, they do, so it's baffling why they don't include the street as part of the address. This bizarre system has been around for a long time, so it must work somehow. How do Venetians deal with it? I've no idea.

58. The Hard Back

2006-07-22T01:03:00.000+10:00

Nobody knows when Venice began, when the residents around the estuary of the River Po began to live on the marshy islands out in the Laguna Veneta, the Venetian Lagoon.

Legend has it that the 'Repubblica Marinara' was founded in 422, which is as likely a date as any other, but there are no existing records to support that. What is more certain is that the original marsh-dwellers were Roman refugees, first from the Goths in 166-168 AD, then the Visigoths a few hundred years later, and later the Huns, under Attila. A land-based marauding army found it difficult to ravage the island-based marsh towns and villages without a fleet of boats.

The original seat of the government was on Torcello island, then later on Malamocco. It wasn't until somewhere around 820 AD that the seat of the Byzantium-appointed governor – the 'duke' or Doge - was relocated to Rialto (an abbreviation of 'Rivo Alto' or 'High Shore'), because it was more easily defended. Around this settlement the present historic centre of Venice grew.

One of the reasons why Rialto was the 'high bank' is that the deeper river channel, which later became known as the Grand Canal and that flowed out through that part of the lagoon, twisted and turned to get around a ridge of more solid ground at the southern end of a group of silty islands. This hard ridge became known as 'Dorsoduro' or 'Hard Back', and this area is today one of the six sestieri of Venice.

Obviously, there are no pictures of what Dorsoduro looked like back then, so here is a picture of part of that district today.

57. 'Venetian' colours?

2006-07-21T19:02:00.000+10:00

Forty minutes by Vaporetto from the Fondamente Nuove in Canareggio brings you to the island of Burano, smallish as islands go, but surprisingly, home to about 7000 people. As the island of Murano is famous for its glass manufacturing, Burano is famous for its lace, which is why so many tourists make the extra trip across the lagoon.

Lace from the Venetian lagoon has been famous since the fifteenth century, and there is a record of King Richard III of England (yes, "'a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" THAT King Richard) wearing a 'triumph of laces' from Venice at his coronation in 1483.

What makes Burano lace special is that it is needle-worked rather than created with bobbins like most other places that are renowned for the art.

What makes Burano itself special you can see a small example of in this picture. Unlike the main city of Venice, what strikes the visitor to Burano most is the exuberant colour of the buildings. No colour, no matter how lurid, is off-limits to the Buranesi. Bright pink, fluorescent orange, baby blue, peach, purple, and puce, everywhere the residents have indulged their most vivid preferences for the chromatic dramatic.

It's a pleasant surprise when you get off the ferry for the first time. It makes you smile and point. It makes you feel good, refreshed, irreverent, and you know just by looking at the place that the Buranesi don't take themselves or their historic little island all that seriously.

Then it makes you ask the obvious question: What stops the residents of Venice doing the same as the residents of Burano? Has it never occurred to any of them to say, "I'm tired of all those different shades of earthy reds and pinks and browns, I think I'll paint my house…mmm…turquoise instead"? I'm sure it must have, but I never saw any bright blue or lilac or heliotrope houses in San Marco or San Polo or Dorsoduro.

I love the warm subtle colours of Venice, the city has a chromatic cohesion like no other, but I don't think that kind of conformity can be easily imposed. There has to be something more than Heritage Commission regulation driving it. I think it has to be a combination of habit, and cultural respect. To step violently away from the normal range of Venetian colours would be almost unthinkable in the main city, an act of vandalism, an exercise of a freedom that only the Buranesi in this lagoon seem to be able to enjoy.

I once asked an Italian friend in Tuscany, "why are all the shutters in your town painted green?", expecting him to explain that it was a local heritage bylaw. He looked at me strangely, like it was a really stupid question. "Because when you need to paint your shutters, you go to the hardware store and buy Shutter Paint, and Shutter Paint is green". He didn't say "Duh!", but I heard it all the same.

Maybe all the bright colours go to the hardware store on Burano and they don't sell any other colour paint in Venice, apart from 'Venetian' colours.

56. Mario il bragozzo

2006-07-20T12:00:00.000+10:00

If you are a street trader, how do you set up your stall if the street is a canal full of water?

Simple. Your mobile shop is a boat – like this one and many others all over Venice – although the established street traders don't seem to need to be all that mobile anymore. This one at least was fairly permanently moored in its prime spot in the Rio de San Barnaba in San Polo Sestiere.

If I was the owner of the land-based greengrocery in this same street, I don't think I would be too keen on having a mobile competitor parked straight in front of my shop, but both were doing a brisk trade every time I went by. Perhaps they attracted more customers together than either would have alone, as they would have a wider range of produce for customers to choose from, and their proximity would tend to keep each other's prices honest.

In the modern world, fresh produce can come from almost anywhere, regardless of the season, but most of Venice's fruits and vegetables used to be grown on the outerlying, less populated islands – out beyond the big three, Murano, Burano, and Torcello. But with no pastures to graze sheep or cattle, the 210-mile square lagoon was the rest of Venice's 'farmland', and hundreds of boats just like this one dragged their nets across its shallow muddy bottom every day to feed the city.

The curled up prow of 'Mario' (Mario? Surely this should be 'Maria', all boats are female, aren't they?) tells you that this craft is a 'Bragozzo', a flat-bottomed fishing boat once common in Venice, but now almost non-existent as a working boat except for a few that carry tourists round the lagoon. This one may not be as seaworthy as she once was, but she is still working for her living.

55. Ca' d'Oro

2006-07-19T00:43:00.000+10:00

This beautiful jewel of a Palazzo framed between coupled spiral columns at the left and right front corners, is one of the most famous of all the palazzi on the Grand Canal, and one of the most unusual. It almost looks like two narrow palaces joined together, one half of the façade is so different from the other.

The Venetian-Byzantine canal entrance is a five-arched atrium with a central arch bigger than the pairs either side, while the two florid gothic upper floors have quatrefoil arched open galleries clearly inspired by the Doge's Palace in San Marco. This is hardly surprising, as this palace was built in the early 1400s at the same time as the main gothic parts of that other massive work, and some of the same master craftsmen are supposed to have worked on both buildings.

The façade is still unusually decorative with subtle use of red and pink and grey marble and finely carved details, but what we see now is very restrained compared with the way it was originally finished. The palace is known as Ca' d'Oro or the "Golden House" because at one time it was decorated in multicoloured red and blue with elaborate and extensive gilding. The canal front of this palace would once have dazzled passers by, glittering with reflections of the sun from its gilded features. Fortunately, none of this original 'flash' has survived. It is hard to imagine how that sort of exhibitionistic flamboyance could have been anything other than a gaudy distraction from the building's real merits.

In the middle of the 19th century, this palace was bought as a gift for the prima ballerina Maria Taglioni by an admiring Russian prince. The woman must have had something pretty special going for her, because she already owned two other Venetian palaces, presumably also gifts from wealthy admirers. She was better at acquiring them than preserving them, though, as she immediately carried out a truly disastrous renovation of Ca' d'Oro, radically altering the layout, destroying a glorious original internal marble staircase, and carting beautiful slabs of red flooring marble away as scrap.

Some of this damage was undone by Baron Giorgio Franchetti when he bought the place in 1894, and restored it as best he could, even tracking down much of the material that had been removed fifty years earlier, including the original 15th century courtyard well head carved by Bartolomeo Bon.

Ca' d'Oro is now a museum with a very fine art collection.

54. Gondola parking

2006-07-18T11:47:00.000+10:00

During the official 'low season' – which in Venice is really only the beginning of December and most of January, shorter than almost any other tourist destination in the world –most of the gondoliers take a vacation, leaving their gondolas tied up abreast beside a jetty with their traditional blue covers over them to protect them from the worst of the weather.

Just after I took this picture, a gondolier walked down the jetty carrying his single oar and its complicated twisty carved wooden rowlock known as the 'forcola', and jumped down onto the gondola nearest to the jetty. When he had unwrapped his boat, folded the covers, and inserted the forcola in its hole in the right side of the boat, he cast off the gondola, pushed out from the wooden post it was moored to, and rowed off up the Grand Canal to our right.

Something about what I had seen bothered me, and it was this: If the gondolier's boat had been the third or fifth boat away from the jetty, clearly he could easily walk over the ones in between to get to his own boat, but if another gondolier now came down to get his gondola from this row of boats, intending to do just what the first gondolier had done, how would he get to it? There was now a gap next to the jetty that was too wide to jump over onto something as narrow and laterally unstable as a gondola, and there was no dinghy tied up to the jetty that could be used as a ferry.

I tried to think of alternate possibilities. Could he use his oar like a bridge and walk along it? Not if there was a two-boat gap, or a three-boat gap, that could never be practical. Could the boatmen somehow swing or jump from pole to pole until they could stand down on a boat? No, the poles were too flimsy and unstable, and some of the gondoliers I had seen looked nowhere near agile enough, anyway. Besides, if that was how it was done, surely there would be footholds in the poles or short cross-pieces to stand on, they wouldn't be smooth all the way to the waterline.

I waited on the jetty for quite a while, hoping that my question would be answered in the best way – by watching someone do it. But it was low season, and the owners of the other boats were probably sunning themselves on a beach in Bali.

I decided that there must be some general courtesy rule for gondoliers so that if you found yourself unable to get out to your moored gondola you could simply hail the next gondolier who rows by, knowing he would always stop to give you a lift, passenger or no passenger, because you would do the same for him.

To me, that was in the end the only explanation that was plausible, reliable, and safe, but I don't know if I'm right or not. One day I'll remember to ask.

53. Going places

2006-07-17T00:11:00.000+10:00

If you look at a map of Venice, you would think that because it's such a tangled hotchpotch of lanes and bridges and covered walkways and dead ends, it would be very easy to get lost . In fact, it takes some skill to be disorientated for more than a few minutes because these obviously placed black and yellow signs are all over the city, and they anchor any visitor back to one of four landmarks, three fixed, one literally floating.

There are three main rallying points in Venice, around which most short term visitors cluster, and if you can find any one of them you can easily find each of the others. They are: the Rialto bridge – the main thoroughfare crossing the Grand Canal and linking Canareggio with San Polo; Accademia – the other main bridge over the Grand Canal, much further down the Grand Canal, linking San Marco to Dorsoduro right by the Accademia museum; and San Marco – the Piazza and the Basilica. These form a triangle around the points of which most of the tourist traffic gaggles.

About the only other arrowed sign you'll see, which is an even more common sight than the other three, points you to the nearest Vaporetto stop, wherever that happens to be. The Vaporetti are Venetian buses, motorized ferries that go round the islands and up and down the Grand Canal. Even if you are as far from the two bridges and the Piazza as you can get, the nearest Vaporetto will invariably, eventually, bring you back to at least one of them if not all three. It might take two hours if you hit one heading out across the lagoon to Murano or beyond, but sit tight and it will sooner or later bring you back.

The other sign in this picture is far less common – which is a sore point with many visitors. AMAV is the Venetian sanitation authority, and they run the public toilets, of which there are distressingly few for a city which regularly absorbs 100,000 visitors a day. In fact, there are only seven. Apart from the ones in the railway station and the car parking lots on the Venice side of the mainland bridge, there are two in San Marco, two more San Polo, and one each in Canareggio, Dorsosuro, and Castello. Santa Croce misses out. Don’t get caught with a full bladder in Santa Croce, because you'll have to walk to San Polo to pee. Better still, don't get caught short anywhere in Venice, because even if you know where the nearest public toilet is, until you get there you don't know how long you will have to line-up for it or if it is even open.

I guess if you're desperate enough the nearest canal is always open, but personally, I would rather walk into a bar or restaurant and order a beer or a glass of wine, and use the toilets there which are usually clean and empty. It's a good excuse for a drink during the day, too. Or you could go to the museum in Ca' Rezzonico, one of the best restored of the palazzi on the Grand Canal, because the lobby toilets are free and - miracolo - on the public side of the ticket booth.

When the Madonna in this picture was installed in her niche near the corner of this building, none of these things were an issue, and these signs weren't there. Neither were the little spikey things on the ledge beneath her next to the typically clumsy electrical wiring. The wire spikes are there to stop the pigeons sitting on the ledge and fouling the shopfront, which is why they sit on the Madonna and crap on her instead.

52. A unique beauty

2006-07-16T19:04:00.000+10:00

This could be a tiny detail from any one of thousands of ordinary (well, ordinary for Venice) buildings somewhere off the beaten track in any of Venice's six sestieri, yet for me it contains most of the key elements that make Venice what it is.

Here is a wall with a structural crack in it crying out for repair, and you know it would probably be worse were it not for the iron brace with its crossbar anchoring the wall to another perhaps more solid part of the building. Here, too, are enough Venetian red stucco fragments clinging to parts of the brickwork to give you a hint of what this wall might once have looked like. There is part of a doorway, not magnificently ornate and grand, but more than just functional: this once announced itself as an entrance, not just a doorway, even though its lintel is cracked and a bit lopsided. The ironwork is rusting, the brickwork is crumbling, the scars of the building written on its exposed surface, this wall is what it is – aging, cosmetically unconcerned, but still upright.

In most other cities in the world, this building would never be left like this. It would either be sanitized and renovated if it was historically worth saving, or bulldozed and replaced if it wasn't.

But Venice isn't like other cities. Venice lives in harmony with its scars, it accepts its decay as part of its life, it knows that all existence is cyclic, that birth and death and rebirth are ephemeral and eternal at the same time, and that what goes around comes around.

In Venice there are countless corroded fragments like this section of a wall, but the whole place is a lot greater than the sum of its shabby parts. If you look at a really interesting old person through a microscope, all you will see is the many wrinkles on the surface. If you step back and look at the whole person, sometimes you can see both the timeless beauty that is and the seductive beauty that once was shining through the wrinkles.

If Venice was a woman, she would be Lauren Bacall.

51. Canal dump

2006-07-15T15:21:00.000+10:00

I noticed a girl walking her dog on a leash somewhere in Santa Croce (although, to be fair, it wasn't this girl, nor either of these dogs, I wasn't quick enough that day. This picture was taken in Dorsoduro).

The young woman was in a hurry and walking briskly towards a bridge. The dog got to the bridge and decided to shit at the bottom of the steps. Her handler watched impatiently, tapping her feet while her dog crouched and completed his business. When the dog had finished, she fished a sheet of newspaper out of her bag, picked up most (but not all) of the poop with it, and then tossed poop and paper both into the canal. And walked on, up and over the bridge.

I stood where I was, momentarily shocked. How could she do that? How could she just throw her shitty rubbish into the canal like that? In Venice, for goodness sake! How could she befoul this precious fragile jewel of a city by throwing dogcrap into its uniquely picturesque waterways?

Then it occurred to me that I had witnessed something very commonplace and trivial compared to many of the things that the citizens of Venice must have dumped in their canals since the city began. The canals in Venice are reputed to be smelly and dirty, but today they are generally not nearly as foul as their reputation. You wouldn't choose to swim in them, and at low water on a warm day, the black sludge at the bottom of the shallower channels is sometimes partially revealed and is more than a bit whiffy, but what would you expect? Even then, it's not much smellier than the decomposing sludge at the bottom of my ornamental fish pond.

Go back a century or two, and the canals would have been far worse. Then they would have been open sewers, relying on the tide to gradually take the effluent of the city out beyond the lagoon. The canals of Venice have survived all manner of temporary insult, and still refreshed themselves.

One day the young Venetian and her dog – and us – will all be long gone, but other dogs will still be crapping in the canals, the canals will still be here, accepting our refuse and disposing of it, and Venice will still be Venice.

50. Non scribatur

2006-07-14T02:20:00.000+10:00

This magnificent staircase, which ascends from the courtyard of the Doge's Palace to the first floor loggia is known as the Scala dei Giganti', the Giants' Staircase, and it was at the top of this staircase that a newly elected Doge was crowned and presented to the assembled nobles below.

This particular staircase had not yet been built at the time of today's story, but in that earlier time there was another more modest set of steps that also went from the same courtyard to the same loggia, and at the top of those stairs, the Republic of Venice, for the first and only time, executed a reigning and legitimately elected Doge.

In 1354, seventy-six years old Marin Falier, the Venetian ambassador to the Papal court at Avignon, was elected to be the 55th Doge of Venice.

An irascible and cantankerous old man, who was also possibly somewhat senile, Falier developed, within months of being elected, an unreasonable hatred of some of the arrogant young aristocrats of Venice, who had insulted his wife and assaulted, among others, Stefano Ghiazza, the director of the Arsenale. Together with some other supporters, the two old men hatched a plan to use the army of workers at the Arsenale to stage a coup d'etat, which would give them the excuse to get rid of the young nobles and at the same time crown Falier as Prince of Venice, giving him the absolute power he wanted but which the Doge didn't have within Venice's oligarchic electoral system.

Like so many other failed plots, this one was undone by loose lips, and before the day of the coup the Council of Ten had all the information and evidence they needed to make sure that the coup was thwarted and all the conspirators arrested. Ten of the ringleaders were hanged in a row from the windows of the Ducal Palace facing the Piazzetta, but not Marin Falier.

Not sure what to do with him, the Council of Ten added twenty additional noblemen to their deliberations to consider Falier's fate. The aspiring prince, however, pleaded guilty, so he was taken from his private apartments in the palace to the Council Chamber and from there to the top of the staircase which led down into the courtyard of the ducal palace. Here, Falier asked the Republic to forgive him for his treachery, and laid his head on the block, whereupon he was beheaded with a single stroke.

The Council did not put Falier's name in the minutes, leaving a blank where it should have been in the list of the condemned, and writing beside it "non scribatur" – 'let it not be written'. In the frieze of portraits of the Doges that is painted round the walls of the Council Chamber in the Doge's Palace there is now one space that contains instead of Falier's likeness a painted black veil, underneath which is written "Here is the place of Marin Falier, beheaded for his crimes".

49. Inside San Marco

2006-07-13T12:49:00.000+10:00

It doesn't matter how many of the other great cathedrals in the world that you might have been to – Westminster Abbey in London, St Peter's in Rome, Chartres in France – none of these will prepare you for the gilded experience that awaits you inside St Mark's Basilica in Venice.

The gothic cathedrals of western Europe, like Chartres or Westminster, are characterized by their avenues of soaring columns reaching to the heavens, their intricate vaulting and their elaborate stained glass windows. The huge renaissance cathedral of St Peter's has a massive central dome decorated with marble and fresco. The ground plans of both types are shaped like a crucifix with a long central nave and shorter side arms, and they take your breath away with the light airy spaciousness of their interior spaces.

St Mark's is different. It's not a small church by any means, but it almost feels cosy, it's so enveloping and intimate compared with the others mentioned. This cathedral doesn’t try to overwhelm you with its physical scale, with its bold design, with the impressiveness of its structure, it just surrounds you with warmth, with the stories that matter to it, with the people at the centre of the mysteries to which it is dedicated. It beguiles you with its details and it invites you to sit quietly and think about them and share them. It is a much more spiritual place, if that word has any meaning at all to me.

San Marco is the kind of church that daylight should never be admitted into, a dimness that should always be lit by candles, flickering off the gold mosaic tiles on the walls like some stationary disco mirror ball, the air diffused with the haze of centuries of burned incense. Every square inch of the walls is covered in mosaic saints and martyrs and apostles and scenes of the prophets and events in the life of Christ, all set against a background of burnished gold glazed tile fragments.

The Greek cross layout with its five domes, four identical sized ones on the four equal length arms and the one much bigger central dome, betray the Eastern Orthodox stem of the religion as the origin of the style and character of St Mark's, so unusual in the west.

It wasn't until after I'd taken this photograph that I noticed the small sign nearby which said "Vietate fotographia" – Photography prohibited. No, really.

48.Essential public services – Venetian style

2006-07-12T07:43:00.000+10:00

This boat looks like it's carrying an advertisement for a toilet cleanser. Or perhaps a brand of tampons. Or, the two men driving it in protective clothing could be sewerage inspectors working for some state-run waste-disposal department.

In fact, Sanitrans is a large European private health-related transport company, the two men are paramedics, and this boat is the Venetian equivalent of an ambulance. Elsewhere in Europe, Sanitrans runs conventional fleets of light truck type ambulances, but here in Venice, the ambulances are all boats. Shortly after taking this picture, I watched this boat slowly chug down this street and pull up at some canalside steps so that the ambulance men could help an elderly passenger in a wheelchair down into their vehicle, and off they went.

Venice demands some ingenuity from all the organizations providing public services like transport for the elderly, the sick, and the handicapped. The lack of roads or any kind of motorized land vehicles, not even scooters – an impossible thought in any other Italian city – presents some unique challenges.

For instance, a firefighting boat might not have any difficulty finding a source of water, but the pumps and hoses could be some way from the fire down winding backstreets, and how would you get an extension ladder up to elevate a hose or to rescue someone stranded on a roof? A boat would almost never get close enough nor would it provide a stable platform for a big ladder even if it was right next to the flaming building. And even if you pushed the ladder there on a hand trolley, quickly maneuvering a long and awkward device such as that through back alleys and up and down over stepped bridges without knocking out decorative street lamps and without chipping lumps off 16th century balconies would be no mean feat.

And the police would have to be fit enough and fast enough to chase their quarry down on foot. Yes, they have speedboats, and I'm sure these are very effective if your criminals are letting themselves be chased up and down the Grand Canal. But it doesn't matter how big your siren is, can you imagine a high speed pursuit down two-way side 'roads' like the one this ambulance is on without bouncing off the parked boats on each side?

47. Going under...

2006-07-11T22:05:00.000+10:00

Is Venice sinking? This picture would suggest that if it isn't sinking right now, it sure as heck has been.

When this bricked-up doorway was first built, it would have been the main street (canal) entrance to this residential building. Visitors would step out of their gondola onto the now completely submerged stairway up to the entrance, the bottom of which would have been some way above the high water mark.

The day this picture was taken, the water level was exceptionally low, or we would not even be able to see the entrance steps at all, and yet it still only just reveals the bottom of the doorway. Clearly, the high water mark today is probably a fair bit more than a metre above where it was when this building was constructed. The water level could not have risen anything like that much, so the building has definitely sunk.

Now the doorway is a doorway no more. The lower level of this house is now a very wet basement, and the entrance is via a newer walkway which bridges from what has become the new front door down to the opposite side of the canal.

In most other places in the world, this would be a natural disaster, an argument with an insurance company, and a redevelopment plan. Here it is a shrug of the shoulders, an alternate practical solution, and a willingness to accept that, over time, everything changes.

46. Booty from Byzantium: Part 3

2006-07-10T00:17:00.000+10:00

A Byzantine Emperor who was born as the son of a reigning emperor, thus inheriting the title rather than ascending to the throne through violence or cunning, was said to have been 'porphyrogenitos', that is 'born in the purple', a colour only the imperial family was allowed to wear.

This sculpture of two pairs of embracing figures stands a bit less than 1.5m high, and is carved from porphyry, a dark purple stone often used, for obvious reasons, for sculptures of Roman emperors. It shouldn't take you too long to conclude that this, then, must be a sculpture of four Roman emperors.

Was there ever a time when there were four emperors at once? Indeed there was, and one of them was the father of Emperor Constantine the Great, which explains why this sculpture is another of the Byzantine treasures captured by Doge Dandolo after the Venetian sacking of Constantinople in 1204.

In Constantinople it stood in a building called the Philadelphion at a crossroads in the main commercial road, the Mese. Now it is attached to the southern corner of St Mark's Cathedral, and it is known as the Tetrarchs. You would think it would be better called the Quatrarchs, as there are four of them, but one of them is meant to be Emperor Diocletian, who in 293 AD appointed a tetrarchy of three other emperors to help him rule the massive empire that was Rome at its height. The other three are Maximian, Valerian, and Constantius Chlorus – Constantine's father.

This sculpture is not a portrait of four individuals, it is a stylized group symbolic of the unity of their rule, which is why they all look alike and are embracing each other in goodwill. The harmonious sentiment was nobler than the reality, however, because Diocletian's short-lived plan to set up a process for orderly succession started to fall apart soon after he and Maximian stepped down in 305 AD. Constantius died in England in 306 and his son Constantine was proclaimed Augustus, or senior emperor, by his father's troops, an action which set in motion a series of internecine wars with the four other claimants to the throne, which eventually left Constantine in sole charge of the Roman empire.

45. Piazza San Marco

2006-07-09T15:53:00.000+10:00

The only open space in Venice to merit the term 'Piazza' – the rest being simply 'Campi', or 'fields' – Piazza San Marco is the pigeon-infested heart of the city, the magnet that draws all visitors to it at least once whether they go anywhere else in Venice or not.

Napoleon called this square "the most elegant drawing room in Europe", and even though Napoleon himself did more damage to it than anyone else in its history, it still has a generous open spaciousness that is astonishing for a city where building land was more limited than any other in the world.

This view of the Piazza, from the loggia above the entrance to the Basilica, is the most dramatic and impressive angle to see it from. From the other end, looking towards the Basilica San Marco, the Piazza seems to be not so deep and more square, but from up here the square seems even longer than it really is. This is because the whole space is not an oblong with parallel sides, it tapers. The Basilica end is quite a bit wider than the other end so the effect of the perspective on your depth perception is exaggerated, creating the optical illusion of greater distance from one end and the contrary illusion from the other.

The magnificent buildings down the two long sides of the Piazza are the Procuratie Vecchie on the right, or northern side, and the Procuratie Nuove on the left. These were built as legal and political offices for the administrators of the republic. The 'Old' more Gothic building was constructed initially as a two story building in the 12th century, then rebuilt as a three-story block in the sixteenth century after a fire, while the 'New' more Classical block was not completed until 1640.

The less interesting smaller building spanning the width of the square furthest from the Basilica looks out of place in such elegant company, and it is. Originally both the Procuratie buildings had a wing which turned the corner at the western end, and in the space between the ends of the wings there was a small and very old church, which sounds like a much more appropriate arrangement than the one we have now. In 1810, Napoleon had all that demolished and replaced it with the much more boring ersatz classical 'Ala Napoleonica', supposedly just so that he could have a new ballroom – of all things.

Why is it that ruthless dictators like Napoleon and Hitler and Mussolini, who are so good at destroying buildings, delude themselves into thinking they are architectural experts when it comes to putting them up again?

44. A very Italian compromise

2006-07-08T03:15:00.000+10:00

Venice has an ambivalent relationship with its more than a hundred thousand pigeons.

On the one hand, because of all the pigeon poop on the historic buildings and the unpleasant smell in the residential back alleys where they roost and breed, the city has full-time pigeon-catchers on the payroll who systematically bait, net, and exterminate these 'flying rats', as a Mayor of Venice once described them. This program is carried out as discreetly as possible, in the side streets, in the quiet time just after dawn, to avoid harrassment from greenies and animal rights activists.

On the other hand, tourists everywhere never seem to tire of feeding pigeons in public places, so Venice licenses street vendors to sell corn in packets just to feed the same 'flying rats'. As a result, there is so much food available to pigeons that they can breed not just once a year like most other pigeons in the world, but all year, up to seven or eight times, two eggs at a time.

Wouldn't it be sensible to ban pigeon-feeding and stop selling corn to tourists? Then maybe the 'rat'-catchers could get the pigeon population down to a manageable level. Well, that would be the logical, practical, sensible thing to do, but that's not what the city of Venice decided to do.

Why not? One, this is Venice, and Venice is in Italy, so the fact that NOT banning pigeon-feeding is illogical, contradictory, irresponsible, hypocritical, corruptible, and completely absurd doesn't automatically mean that banning will happen. Two, corn vending is so insanely profitable at several euros a time for a couple of handfuls of corn kernels in a paper bag that the vendors can afford to pay more than a hundred thousand euros a year to the city for each vending license and still make a handsome profit. The city won't kill this cash cow because it pays for the whole pigeon control program and then some.

So, what's the city of Venice's solomonesque solution to the pigeon problem? They made it illegal to feed pigeons OUTSIDE the Piazza San Marco. Inside San Marco – pigeon heaven, no limit on how much corn you can give the vermin to eat. Ten metres away from Piazza San Marco – on the spot fines for you, and exterminators waiting to catch the little birds.

43. Fondaco dei Turchi

2006-07-07T13:34:00.000+10:00

In 1438, Emperor John VIII Paleologus, the penultimate ruler of Byzantium, was desperate.

Beset on all sides, his empire had been chipped away until it was little more than the great city of Constantinople itself, the last Christian stronghold in the east. He HAD to persuade the more powerful Holy Roman Empire in the west to help him defend eastern Christianity from being overrun by the forces of Islam.

The trouble was, his eastern Orthodox church and the western Catholic church had split in a bitter schism several centuries earlier, and Rome was not very interested in offering tangible help to Byzantium unless a lot of religious kow-towing went on first.

Venice was a long term trading partner and the closest thing to a friend that Byzantium had in the west, and it was to here that Emperor John came in 1438 to try – with Venice's help - to broker a rescue deal with Rome, or anyone else he could find in Europe with an army not currently busy elsewhere.

He arrived with an entourage of 600 priests – yes, six hundred Orthodox clergy – ready to compromise with Catholic demands. He stayed six months, conceding almost everything that was demanded of him and his clerics, and went home again with no binding promises of help.

This is the building in which John VIII and his retinue stayed while in Venice. It doesn't look that old, but that is because in the mid-19th Century this huge and ancient palazzo was so dilapidated that it underwent a massive renovation, conducted according to the historian John Julius Norwich with "marvelous insensitivity".

To me, what's more important is that underneath the cleaned up surface and the new ugly Grand Canal façade, the fabric of this building is still standing. That makes this – as far as I can tell – the ONLY surviving building in the world in which one of the Emperors of Byzantium ever lived. Can you imagine what a thrill it is to stand inside it? To visualize the heated theological arguments that must have gone on in every corner of it; to empathize with the daily frustration of John, trying unsuccessfully to win support for his cause; to imagine the impatience of the Doge and his Council at having to house and feed so many hangers-on, month after fruitless month?

Ironically, once Sultan Mehmet II had destroyed Byzantium in 1453, Venice sucked up to the Ottoman Empire instead and eventually turned this very building into a trading centre and warehouse for Turkish traders, complete with mosque, which is why it is now known as the Fondaco dei Turchi.

Today, it houses the Museum of Natural History. With all due respect to the scientists whose passion that is, who the hell goes to Venice to learn about the evolution of algae in the Adriatic? What a waste of such an historically significant building! What a perfect place for a museum that could explore the amazing 1100 years that was the Byzantine era, in which Venice, more than anywhere else in the west, played such an integral part.

42. God-fearing Communists?

2006-07-06T10:36:00.000+10:00

To many of the secular left, this image would seem to contain a massive contradiction – a Christian shrine at a Communist party headquarters? Who could be more determinedly godless than the Communists?

It was the 'godlessness' of the Communist movement that provoked the United States government – at the height of its anti-communist paranoia in the Eisenhower-led 1950s – to allow religious fundamentalists to insert the words "…under God" after the words "one nation" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and to add the words "In God we Trust" to every denomination of the dollar bill. Formally declaring their country to be a Christian nation, even if it meant surreptitiously undermining the world's first and best secular constitution, was seen by many frightened Americans to be their only defence against the godless hoardes of Communists supposedly springing up in their midsts.

But in most of Europe the idea of the separation of church and state has never been as strong as it was among the founding fathers of the United States. For instance, the constitutional head of Great Britain, Queen Elizabeth, is also (thanks to her predecessor, Henry VIII) head of the Church of England. The co-mingling of the spiritual and the temporal is particularly true in Italy, where the Pope was for centuries not just a religious leader, but also commanded armies and the church's own secret police, who were not just Inquisitors but also judges and executioners.

The Partito Rifondazione Comunista is also not what you'd call a hardline orthodox Marxist-Leninist party either. As the Soviet Union lost its international influence, many parties of the radical left in Europe – like this one – grouped around the idea of 'Eurocommunism', which made them look more like Social Democrats with a few retained 'communist' elements in their platform.

This overt display of Christian allegiance on the outside or this 'Refounded' Communist Party branch building in Castello is one of many hundreds of similar such shrines on buildings all over Venice, so it is as much part of the general cultural heritage as it would be a statement of the religious affiliation of the party members who meet here. I am quite sure that the probability of Communist Party meetings inside starting with a prayer is much lower than it would be at any Republican or even Democratic Party meeting in the much more fundamentally religious USA.

41. St. Nic the Wonderworker

2006-07-05T12:10:00.000+10:00

Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker was Bishop of Myra, an old Greek town in Lycia on the Mediterranean southern coast of Turkey, which later became a Roman harbour town important enough to have its own amphitheatre, the ruins of which are now part of the province of Anatolia.

Bishop Nicholas was a delegate to the First Council of Nicea in 325, called by Emperor Constantine to decide key matters of Christian doctrine in the vain hope that it would stop the incessant theological squabbling then going on in the church. Arguments that would seem like mystical hairsplitting by some today, were then important enough to excommunicate, exile, even to execute those on the losing side.

The Arian team – who held that Jesus, being the son of the father, was holy but not the SAME as the father, not made of exactly the same substance – lost. The winners, the Alexandrian team, held that Jesus was "God from God", truly divine, and that The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were actually all one. The Council, which resulted in the Alexandrian-supporting Nicene Creed, was not an unqualified success, because even though its supporters lost, the Arian 'heresy' took an awful long time to stop being a nuisance to the rulers of orthodoxy.

Nic was on the winning side – like most of the delegates were at the final vote – so he went back to his bishopric where he died on December 6, 330 AD. Sanctified for a number of supposed lifesaving miracles attributed to him, Saint Nicholas' official day in the calendar is the day he died, and that is why in parts of Europe, Santa Claus, or Sinterklaas, delivers his gifts to children on December 6, rather than on December 25.

St Nicholas is the patron saint of children (not surprisingly), pawnbrokers (go figure), and mariners. That latter capacity must be why he is celebrated in Venice, the greatest maritime power of its time, with this gloriously realistic mosaic portrait high up on the façade of St Mark's basilica.

I call this a portrait, because that is what it is, not a religious icon like the stylized Byzantine mosaics of Christ and his saints on the domes and walls inside the basilica. This is a much later work, and a real person sat for the late Renaissance artist who captured his likeness and made it permanent in tiny bits of beautifully arranged tile.

Who was the model? Certainly not St Nic himself, he was long gone. Nobles in Venice – those with money, anyway – were known to have had themselves portrayed WITH Christ and various saints, but not as far as I know AS one of the saints. The sitter for this portrait is much more likely to be an anonymous worker – a stonemason perhaps, or a baker, perhaps even a beggar with just the right face hauled off the street and cleaned up by the artist for as long as took to make the preliminary sketches.

Whoever he was, I love the character in his face, I love his beautiful halo, and I really like the fact that he's wearing a T-shirt under his vestments.

40. Have lute will travel

2006-07-04T00:29:00.000+10:00

There's something uniquely Venetian about standing and listening to a street busker playing a Renaissance lute on a bitterly cold day outside the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, better known simply as 'The Frari', in San Polo.

This unusual instrument with an extra set of bass strings is a modern version of a type of lute known as an 'arch lute' or 'theorbe lute', which was very popular with some Italian composers for solo pieces. The longer scale length of the extra strings gives the instrument a bigger sound than the normally more muted sound of a regular lute.

Lutes became widely used in the middle ages from about 1400 onwards, until keyboard instruments like the harpsichord and later the forte piano allowed more complex music to be played more easily. The lute was not invented in Europe, though, it and its antecedents had been around in the Middle East for several millennia before it came to the west – possibly via the moors of southern Spain, or possibly with crusaders returning from the Holy Lands. The word 'busker' itself almost certainly comes from the Middle Spanish word 'Buskar' meaning to wander, which became a noun meaning 'wandering minstrel'

The intricate but gentle music this busker played sounded to me very like a composition from Venice's own Antonio Vivaldi, but unless it was a transcription for solo lute, it was more likely written by one of his contemporaries. Although Vivaldi wrote for the lute, I don't think any of his pieces were for the solo instrument.

The monkish hat and cape must have helped to stave off the worst of the cold for this busker, but playing this particular instrument in the open air in the middle of January, even wearing gloves with the fingertips cut out, must have been very challenging, so most of the small audience of tourists around that morning showed their appreciation of his effort by contributing a few small coins.

39. Napoleon go home!

2006-07-03T23:15:00.000+10:00

Venice has hundreds of little backstreets and small campos where tourists rarely go except by accident. I was surprised during my last visit to Venice by how many wellheads and walls in these less frequented residential areas had been defaced by spray paint graffiti. There was so much of it, that it seemed like half the dwindling population of this magical city must have turned into graffiti artists – until I saw this classic piece of sloganeering, at which point I felt much less pessimistic.

The author of this two-word insult is either the most ill-informed political animal in Christendom, which is highly unlikely, or this is a very old piece of vandalism. Ronald Reagan completed his two-term presidency in 1988, so my guess is that this fading graffito is at least 18 years old, possibly more. Once I had figured that out, my next reaction was "why doesn't someone get a bucket of paint and get rid of it?" but then it dawned on me that Venetians must have a much more sanguine and practical view of this kind of transient damage.

Nothing attracts graffiti artists like a blank canvas. Once freshly painted, this wall is an open invitation to any other moron with a two-dollar can of paint. But if you take a longer and more tolerant view, and just leave it, you might be able to accept it as just one more visual texture no worse than most of the natural defacement around it.

If Venetians were obsessed with clean unblemished perfection, they wouldn't live in Venice, where every damp salt-sprayed surface is eroding, flaking, fading, discolouring, and falling off anyway. Eventually, this graffito will no longer be where it is, because it will either crumble away with the rest of the stucco behind it, or it will be plastered and painted over next time the owners of the building get enthusiastic enough to perform some renovating maintenance.

I like the idea that underneath the surface of some of the walls in Venice there are still 500 year old protests against Papal ordinances or Ducal decrees, or 200 year old insults against the invasion of Napoleon, that the people of Venice had the pleasure of reading for 20 years or more before they were finally hidden forever.

38. Giuseppe Garibaldi

2006-07-02T10:30:00.000+10:00

From the Fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, until the Risorgimento or 'Resurgence' in the 19th Century which resulted for the first time in a unified nation, Italy was a very fragmented place.

For centuries Italy was a shifting battlefield fought over by Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Greeks, Normans, the Pope, and others, until powerful city states like Milan, Florence, Genoa, and Venice emerged and operated as independent competitive nations. As the power of these city-states in turn declined, the French and the Austrians in the late 18th and 19th Centuries conquered and dominated large chunks of Italy, and the nationalistic ideal of a unified Italy gathered strength among the people in the patchwork of regions that make up the peninsula.

Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose monument this is, was a revolutionary and very successful soldier who, more than anyone else, was responsible for the unification of Italy . Popular hero of the people, he fought in or led numerous military campaigns over 35 years, eventually sacrificing his own ambitions and republican principles for the sake of national unity by throwing his support behind the King of Sardinia, Vittorio Emanuele II, who as a result became the first King of all Italy.

Considering that Garibaldi was not directly involved in any of Venice's liberation struggles against Austria, and given Venice's history of passionate independence – many residents of the Veneto speak the local dialect and consider themselves Venetian first and Italian second – you would not expect the homages to Garibaldi to be all that lavish here in Venice, but nevertheless they are.

This fine monument to Garibaldi stands in the centre of a garden at the junction between Garibaldi St and Garibaldi Avenue in the Castello sestiere, near the Arsenale. The fact that Garibaldi Street is long and wide and is one of the very few streets called 'Rio' that is not a canal, is an indication of the esteem in which Garibaldi must be held - even in Venice.

37. Il Cantine del Vino

2006-07-01T02:00:00.000+10:00

I've been to up-market wine bars in the West End of London, hot jazz and cool blues wine bars in Chicago, arty wine bars on the rive gauche of Paris, wine bars that have spent a fortune on creating just the right ambience, wine bars where the selection of wines on offer is astounding, but of all of them, this is my favourite – and you can't even sit down.

Almost opposite the 'Boatyard Where Nothing Happens' on Rio Trovaso is this liquor store and wine bar. It's very small, with one shop-sized room at the front and another smaller room out the back stacked with boxes and bins. Half of the front room – the window display and most of the walls – is the liquor store. The other half is a wide wooden topped bar with half a dozen or so open bottles of wine on a shelf behind and a glass-fronted display cabinet with interesting little nibbles in it, like crostini with herbs and garlic, or crunchy fried baby octopus.

A good thing about this place is that even if you only go there once it makes you feel like a regular, like you've been going there most of your life. Go there twice and you'll start imagining that you were born just around the corner. People recognize you and say hello, they talk to you, they stand outside with a glass of wine and a cigarette talking to passers by, and they lean on the bar tasting the food and the wine while they try to decide which of the hundreds of different bottles to take home.

If you are walking your dog in the early evening to get a little exercise you can stop in for a glass of vino and a chat, because nobody minds that they have to step over your mutt to get to the bar. And when you finally decide on the twelve euro bottle of Valpolicella, they wrap it carefully in tissue paper before putting it in a carry bag, just the same as they would if it was a three hundred euro bottle of Valpolicella.

Here are two more reasons why this bar is better than any wine bar in those other cities. One, it's in Venice. Two, no matter how long you stay, or how much you drink, there's no danger of being caught drink-driving on your way home.

36. Made under license in the PRC?

2006-06-30T12:20:00.000+10:00

It's hard to know how many gondola-building boatyards are still functioning in Venice. Some sources say three, some 'a few', and one story I read referred to this boatyard on the Rio Trovaso in Dorsoduro as the very last one still in operation.

I find that hard to believe, but if it is true, then tomorrow's gondoliers are in deep trouble, because the two men in overalls who seemed to be the only workers in this boatyard could not in anyone's wildest imagination replace or even do basic maintenance on Venice's substantial fleet of gondolas on their own.

Gondola manufacturing is a complex and skilled process. Each boat is hand-crafted from 280 separate pieces of nine different kinds of wood. The main frame is oak, and other parts are made from beech, cherry, walnut, mahogany, fir, larch, elm, and lime.

Making a gondola supposedly takes about three months and a new gondola, with its seven layers of black lacquer, supposedly costs somewhere around 15,000-20,000 Euros. I keep saying 'supposedly', because to me, that doesn't sound like a lot of money for something hand-crafted with great precision into something so uniquely beautiful yet durable and functional and twice the length of an average car.

The price might be feasible if gondolas were manufactured with the same boat-building efficiency that used to operate in the old Venetian Arsenale, but sadly, there was no evidence of that sort of organisation or sense of urgency in this boatyard. I walked past this business every day for two weeks. The two workers were always there, sometimes sitting and chatting, sometimes standing and arguing, sometimes just hanging around smoking, but in all that time, nothing moved in the yard, and no visible progress was made on either of the boats propped up on the sawhorses.

Perhaps this boatyard is an illusion created just for the tourists. Perhaps they don't make gondolas in Venice at all anymore. Perhaps they are actually stamped out of fiberglass in China. Don't laugh, that idea's a lot more credible than trying to imagine this boatyard as the engine room of the gondola manufacturing industry.

35. Mariano Fortuny

2006-06-29T11:03:00.000+10:00

This wonderfully private little courtyard is the 'backyard' of the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei in San Marco, which was the home and studio for many years of one of Venice's most acclaimed 20th century artists, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo. Although not a native Venetian, being born in Granada, Spain, Fortuny came to Venice when he was 18 and stayed, moving in to this Palazzo ten years later in 1899.

Fortuny was, among other things, a talented painter, sculptor, photographer, architect, theatre designer, inventor – a modern Renaissance man – but his fame rests mostly on his unique fabric designs. In 1907, when he was in his mid-thirties, and inspired by his muse and then new bride, Henriette Negrin, Fortuny began designing simple garments based on drapery from classical Greek sculpture. These were so good at complementing the female body in motion, they were soon admired and collected by dancers such as Isadora Duncan. It was quite probably a long and flowing Fortuny 'Knossos' scarf that Duncan was wearing which caught in the spokes of the wheels of her Bugatti and strangled her.

Encouraged by his success with the women of the 'beau monde', Fortuny developed secret new processes for printing exquisitely beautiful fabrics with transparent dies, so that his very colourful classical-looking designs were durable yet each one was an individual work of art, and in 1919 he set up a factory in a former convent on Giudecca to make textiles.

In 1927, an American interior decorator, Elsie McNeill, saw some of Fortuny's fabrics in Paris and came to Venice to meet the artist himself, where she convinced him of the commercial potential in his designs, which she then distributed from her business in Madison Avenue, New York.

When Fortuny died in 1949, Henriette persuaded Elsie to take over the running of the textile business, which she did with great success. Fortuny's factory on Giudecca is still going today, and the fabrics are still made with the same still secret processes, to the same high standards.

Unfortunately, the factory is off-limits to tourists – like Coca-Cola's secret formula and Kentucky Fried Chicken's secret herbs and spices, an important part of Fortuny's marketing still depends on the secret ingredients remaining secret – but Fortuny's old home is not. Palazzo Pesaro is now better known as the Museo Fortuny.

34. Making a mask

2006-06-28T09:14:00.000+10:00

This old backstreet mask-maker's window reveals some of the traditional techniques used to make a Carnevale mask.

The form of the mask is first modeled in clay, and a plaster cast is then taken from the model, making a reverse mold of the shape. Three of those plaster molds are on the shelf below the raw masks hanging around the window.

Into all the curves and crevices of this mold the maker presses a soft fibrous sheet of rag and paper pulp dipped in glue, trimming the overhanging edges to the shape of the mold. You can see that the mold on the left in this picture has a blue-gray mask base still inside it, waiting to be removed.

As this 'papier maché' dries, the glue sets to a hard but flexible finish with a smooth shiny surface, like porcelain. This surface is then buffed with an abrasive polish so that the white paint sealing coat will better adhere to it, and then the eyeholes are carefully cut into it.

Some of these masks are left with only the traditionally simple decorations on a white base, others are very elaborately decorated, incorporating all kinds of extra touches like fancy paint effects, feathers, gilding, glitter – some are even encrusted with 'jewels'.

Apart from the traditional cast of Carnevale masked characters, each interpreted by different makers in a variety of ways, a vast range of other characters have been introduced in recent years for the tourists, including – heaven help us – Disney and Pixar cartoon characters. Perhaps it's time Venice passed another Sumptuary Law to protect this unique traditional celebration from being further contaminated by American popular culture?

33. La Befana

2006-06-27T05:16:00.000+10:00

The early Christian churches hijacked the midwinter festivals of earlier religions and traditions – like various pagan winter solstice feasts, and the Jewish Hannukkah or Festival of Lights – and turned them into the celebration of the birth of Christ. The early eastern church fixed the date of this birth on January 6th, the western church settled on December 25th. Universally, the latter date is now known as Christmas Day, and the former date is called the feast of 'Epiphany', symbolizing the revelation of God in human form and better associated with the traditional visit of the Magi or three Wise Men.

Venice, torn as it was for so long between the eastern and western branches of the Christian religion, compromises by celebrating both dates. Children in the Veneto (and in some other parts of Italy, too) traditionally get a second stocking full of candy/lollies/sweets (depending on which part of the world you were in when you learned English) on January 6. This time, instead of being delivered by Santa Claus, the benefactor is 'La Befana', an old witch. La Befana also knows if you have been good or bad, and if you have been bad gives you cinders from her hearth instead of confectionery – these days of course, the cinders are coal-shaped lumps of sugar or biscuits made with black food dye rather than the real thing.

La Befana is also an excuse to hold a regatta on the Grand Canal. For most of January 6, specially built skiffs and racing gondolas push chaotically up and down the main reaches of the Canal around the Rialto, powered by single rowers, or by teams of two, three, four, or six, depending on the size and type of boat.

At this regatta, many of the boats – like the one pictured – are rowed by La Befana herself, gondoliers dressed up as the old crone, complete with broomstick. In some of the novelty races, the boats are rowed by teams of witches supposedly using broomsticks instead of oars, but in fact using oars wrapped in twigs to look like broomsticks. Oh well, I suppose it's an excuse for a little harmless cross-dressing.

32. The Campanile – bottom up

2006-06-26T19:21:00.000+10:00

When the Campanile collapsed, and the rubble was finally cleared away, the city engineers had a rare opportunity to have a good look at the foundations of a major building that were over a thousand years old. This was significant because building foundations in Venice are nothing like those of any other city in the world.

Venice is a city in a shallow lagoon. Basically a swamp. The hundreds of muddy islands that have been built on and are connected by bridges over the gaps between them – the canals – are sitting on a compressed clay layer at the bottom of the sea at the northern end of the Adriatic. It is not surprising that many of the buildings in Venice are wonky, the floors are uneven and the walls aren't straight. It is more surprising that any buildings stand here at all. It is a tribute to the ingenuity of early Venetians that they managed to invent building techniques that allowed immensely heavy structures like the Basilica to remain for almost a thousand years without collapsing.

The bottom layer of Venetian foundations is made up of close-packed pinewood pilings hammered into the clay. They don't rot because they are too closely packed together to allow water to circulate, which means there is no free oxygen that could support microbe activity.

The engineers who examined the foundations of the Campanile found that the pilings were as sound as when they were first put in. The building collapsed because those foundations were never intended to take the weight that the various iterations of the Campanile finally acquired, and in the end they could no longer support it. The original foundations were repaired, strengthened, and extended to better support a belltower of this size, and a hundred years later this equally heavyweight replica is still here.

31. The Campanile – top down

2006-06-25T01:17:00.000+10:00

The Campanile of San Marco dominates the only open space in Venice that carries the name 'Piazza'. It stands at one end of San Marco Piazza next to the Piazzetta which joins the lagoon to the main piazza. Originally, the Piazzetta was a dock, and where the campanile is today there stood a watchtower. When the dock was filled in to create the Piazzetta next to the Doge's Palace, the watchtower became a belltower, which has since been rebuilt several times.

The design of the Campanile reached its present form in 1514, but although identical in appearance, this building is not the one that was built 500 years ago. This one was built as its replacement in 1912, after its earlier incarnation suddenly collapsed on the morning of July 14, 1902, leaving nothing but a huge mound of white rubble and dust.

Amazingly, according to all reports I have read, no-one was killed. There may have been a cat under the pile of rubble in some reports, but not a single citizen or visitor was said to be missing. On any given morning today at around 9am, dozens if not hundreds of tourists would be wiped out, but in 1902, Venice was a different place.

You might think like I do that as Venetian buildings go it's not that great, why bother rebuilding it? Many Venetians in 1902 would have agreed with you, and there were some strong arguments that San Marco would look better without it, and rebuilding it would be a waste of taxpayers' money. Unfortunately, 'friends of Venice' in other countries donated enough money to cover the cost, and perhaps sensing that the future of this great city would rely more and more on its foreign visitors, Venice bowed to that external pressure and, regrettably, put it back up.

30. Art and kitsch

2006-06-23T01:14:00.000+10:00

These Venetian glass beads are typical of the kinds of traditional glass product that are in many of the shops around the main tourist thoroughfares in Venice. In terms of quality and style they fall midway between the most sublimely beautiful – and very expensive - handblown art glass pieces, and the ugliest, tizziest, and most vulgar glass products you can imagine, such as stale urine coloured ornate chandeliers with hundreds of dust-catching dangly bits.

Venetian craftsmen were the first to discover how to make glass mirrors, and for several centuries, Venice was the main producer of glass in Europe. Glassmaking was an important part of the Venetian economy, and skilled artisans were forbidden to move away from Venice, to prevent them taking their trade secrets to competitors in a rival city-state. It was such a respected craft that glassblowers, unlike any other tradespeople, were even allowed to marry into noble families.

As the glass trade grew, and as the city of Venice grew, the danger of fires spreading from the furnaces of the glassmakers and destroying the mostly wooden city was increasingly real, so a decree in 1291 moved all glass manufacturing to the island of Murano, about a mile north of Venice across the lagoon, where their descendants and many of the tourist-oriented glass entrepreneurs still live and work.

The best Venetian glassware is exquisitely original, and the product of centuries of skill development and techniques handed down from generation to generation. But wherever you get this many transient visitors, traditional crafts become corrupted by the need to meet the demand for affordable tourist souvenirs, so that is what many of the glass factories now concentrate on. As a result, the worst glassware produced in these islands is about as bad as glassware can get – pure kitsch.

29. Wherefore art thou, Othello?

2006-06-22T17:36:00.000+10:00

This gorgeous balcony window occupies almost the whole width of one of the sweetest little palazzos on the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Contarini Fasan, so-called because of the passion of one of its owners for pheasant hunting.

Even though it is one of the narrowest buildings fronting the Grand Canal, it has 'position' in its favour. Midway between Harry's Bar and the Accademia Bridge on the San Marco side, opposite Santa Maria della Salute, is a neighbourhood that's about as swanky as you can get.

One of the most perfect examples of the late Venetian Gothic style of the 15th Century, this skinny palace was built between 1470 and 1480. The three mullioned window pictured, with the most unusual and decorative stone tracery whirls, dominates the piano nobile; there are two single windows with similar stone tracery above; and three small windows without any decoration at all below at canal level. Together, the canal face of this building is symmetrical with lovely proportions and the architect and builders made the best of what must have been a challengingly small space to create a prestige building of great worth and charm.

Apparently, tour guides and even some guide books point out this building as the one belonging to Desdemona, wife of Shakespeare's moor, Othello, in his eponymous tragedy. It is even referred to on some tourist maps as "Il Palazzetto di Desdemona". Regardless of where they come from, it would seem that there are enough tourists who either don't know, choose to forget, or don't even care that Desdemona never actually existed, anymore than did Othello himself, both being completely fabricated characters in a work of fiction.

People will always choose to believe what they want to believe, and some will never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

28. Billa

2006-06-21T07:01:00.000+10:00

It doesn't look much like it from the outside, but this shop on the Zattere, a wide promenade facing Giudecca on the southern side of Dorsoduro, is a Venetian supermarket grocery store.

Despite the dearth of trolleys and neon street signage, Billa is a substantial sized supermarket inside, with a row of checkouts, fresh produce, meat, grocery aisles, freezers, specials, dump bins, and frequent shopper discount loyalty cards. All it lacks is customer service.

In the supermarkets I am more familiar with, the checkout operators scan the goods standing up on your level so that they can talk to you while they bag your groceries. In Venice, the operators are all surly and sitting down behind their conveyor belt and barcode scanner, so that you would be lucky to get any eye contact at all, let alone a greeting and some cheery banter. Instead of providing complementary plastic bags and a bagging service, these operators charge 0.05 Euros each for their red and yellow 'sacchetti', and they literally throw them at you along with your groceries. They also expect you to bag your own groceries and get away from the checkout area quickly, or they will throw the next customer’s purchases down on top of yours.

It takes some skill and some practice to do all this and get your credit card out at the same time. Trying to be prepared for the moment when an outstretched hand expected rapid payment, I momentarily held my credit card between my lips while I put my wallet back in my pocket and then put the card down on top of the till as the operator finished scanning my groceries.

She looked at me and looked at the card like we had both been dragged in from the cowshed, and made a big deal of finding a tissue to handle my now disgustingly soiled card, then she got another one so that she could use both hands to orient the card correctly for the reader. She was tutting and raising her eyebrows and shaking her head at all the Italians in the queue behind me, like it was obvious to all that I had an advanced case of the plague and what was I doing trying to contaminate her with my foreign diseases.

In case you need to cook crumbed veal one night in Italy, breadcrumbs are called "pangrattata". I mention it because in Billa they aren't where you would expect to find them, it's not the sort of word you find in phrasebooks, and hospitality is not a word that means much at Billa.

27. Barging in

2006-06-19T21:29:00.000+10:00

This narrow flat-bottomed barge is the Venetian equivalent of a delivery truck. Its load of mineral water and other beverages would probably be destined for one of the hotels or restaurants nearby.

Provisions to keep the millions of tourists fed and watered arrive daily over the bridge from the mainland by conventional wheeled trucks and are then kept in warehouse storage in the commercial port area to the west of Dorsoduro and Santa Croce. From there, supplies are loaded onto barges like this which weave their way through the canal streets to as close as they can get to their destination. At that point the goods are off-loaded onto the wheeled barrows that you can see on the front of the barge, and bounced up and down over the bridges and through the back lanes to their destination.

At a rough estimate, I would say there are about 80 trays of mineral waters and soft drinks on this barge, which had just arrived at this landing stage when I took this picture. About 2000 beverages. It would be safe to assume that every visitor to Venice stays an average of two days and would consume at least one non-alcoholic drink a day, and probably on average, at least one beer or glass of wine each day. The real figure may be a lot higher.

To keep 14 million visitors a year supplied with even that modest amount of liquid refreshment means that an average of around 75 bargeloads like this chug their way up the Venetian canals every single day. Half that number in winter, double that number at the height of summer. And that's just for the drinks, it doesn't include all the foodstuff as well – or the souvenirs, or the many bargeloads of garbage coming out, or bargeloads of laundry going both ways.

The barges may be motorized, but the barrows are still pushed through the streets as they would have been since Venice began. And providing for that many tourists – that's a lot of barrowloads.

26. All well and good

2006-06-18T00:17:00.000+10:00

Every campo, or neighbourhood square (campo literally means 'field'), even the small ones called a 'campiello' like the one in this picture, had its own freshwater well. Some wellheads were large and expensively decorated and very ornate, others were small, very plain, and strictly functional. This one is typically between those two extremes, simple and modest, but with some decorative touches.

For most of Venice's history, the wells were the only source of fresh water for the dwellings and businesses nearby, and although no longer functional, most of the wellheads are still there, with their lids sealed shut.

You would think that a well dug into an island in a lagoon would quickly fill with nothing but undrinkable sea water, but these wells are not designed to penetrate down to a source of water that is naturally there, they are just the access points for underground water 'tanks'.

Under each wellhead is a cistern, a storage container for freshwater, consisting of a large clay lined pit, filled with sand. Rainwater is channeled into the outer edges of the cistern through grilles in the pavement. The sand provides some basic filtration of the water, which seeps through the sand and fills the centre column of the well, from where it was usually retrieved by lowering a container down to water level on a rope.

Because of the importance of fresh water to any Venetian community, there were strict laws protecting the purity of the source, prohibiting animals from contaminating it, and preventing people from dipping unwashed containers in it to collect their water, even from fetching water with unclean hands.

Goodness knows what the citizens of old Venice who relied on the integrity of this water supply would have done if they had caught any of today's vandals who have marked so many of these old wellheads with spray painted graffiti. They would not have been amused.

25. Booty from Byzantium: Part 2

2006-06-17T23:07:00.000+10:00

When Emperor Constantine the Great decided to move the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to a more defensible location, he took these beautiful horses with him.

In 330 AD he chose the ancient city of Byzantium as his new capital and named it Nova Roma, but for the next 1600 years until the Turkish Government in 1930 renamed it Istanbul, the city was known to the world as Constantinople – Constantine's city. For more than 800 years (until Venice stole them in 1204) these horses and two others like them, together known as The Quadriga, stood in the Hippodrome of the world's most powerful and opulent city when Constantinople was the very epicenter of civilization.

The thing is, we know Constantine took them with him, but nobody knows where they came from in the first place. In all probability, Constantine didn't know either. They were obviously highly regarded and valuable artworks, but it is unlikely they were made in Rome, and certainly not made for Constantine. The best guess experts can make today is that they are probably Greek, and probably date from about the second century BC. Which means they would originally have been stolen by one of Constantine's predecessors – after a winning battle no doubt – and could have been in Rome for several hundred years before Constantine moved out, taking what was most important with him.

These horses are almost certainly more than 2000 years old, yet they breathe, they whinny, the stamp their feet and swish their tails, they toss their heads and champ on their bits. At least it seems like they do, and the longer you stand in front of them, the more alive they become.

Most guidebooks will call them 'bronze horses', but other, possibly more reliable, sources say that in fact they were cast in almost pure copper, which is harder to cast, but easier to gild, and these horses were at one time spectacularly gilded. Who could have made them? How could such exquisite skills have disappeared until something close to them was eventually rediscovered in the Renaissance?

And where will these horses go after they've had enough of Venice?

24. Booty from Byzantium: Part 1

2006-06-16T21:49:00.000+10:00

Inside the portico and to the right of the main entry door to San Marco Basilica there is a narrow and steep staircase. Near it, there is a sign saying that it leads to the museum, but it gives you no good reason for making the climb. At the top of the stairs is a turnstile and a cashier taking entrance money. While I was there, several tourists made it all the way to the top of the stairs before they realised that they had to pay several euros to go any further, at which point they turned around and walked down the stairs again.

They didn't know what they had just missed, and what great value they would have received for some loose change. Apart from the fact that you can look down into the whole of the magnificent interior of the cathedral from just the other side of the turnstiles, and that the museum is full of wonderful mosaics and other artworks, going through the museum is the only way you can get out onto the balcony over the front door of the Basilica.

From this open portico roof area, you can see the whole of Piazza San Marco, and the whole of the Piazetta, and the Campanile, and the Doge's palace, and the lagoon beyond. It is the best view in Venice and should not be missed by any visitor.

After Doge Dandolo led his expedition in 1204 to Constantinople, laid siege and broke into the capital and heart of the Byzantine Empire, he sent back to Venice some major prizes. One of the most spectacular things he stole was a set of four sculpted horses, harnessed for a pairs or quads chariot race. These were installed up here, where everyone in Venice could see them, and here they stood for nearly 800 years (apart from a brief holiday in France when Napoleon took them from here in 1797, only for the French Government to return them in 1915, after Napoleon had been defeated).

They would still be up there today, if they hadn't been replaced late in the 20th century with fiberglass replicas because of the increasing acidity of the atmosphere. Yes, these actual horses are not the real ones at all. These are plastic.

Fortunately, the real ones are still here inside the San Marco museum, out of the acid rain, about 20 meters behind these replicas.

23. Play misty for me

2006-06-15T23:27:00.000+10:00

Most of the tourist pictures you see of Venice show the city bathed in sunshine. The Adriatic climate may be semi-Mediterranean, but it isn't always that good. According to the locals, it rains a fair bit more than most tourists seem to think. Which either means that tourists tend to go to Venice only when the weather is nice, or Venetians like to complain a lot about their weather.

The city of Venice is actually more beautiful – if such a thing is possible – in the softer light of winter. Even when the sun is shining in the colder months it is lower in the sky, the shadows are not as deep or as harsh, and the glancing light shows the textures and details of the decorative buildings better than overhead glare.

Nothing else could be as beautiful as the basilica and the ducal palace when they are surrounded by the chill winter mist at dusk. Gondolas appear out of the haze, and the pink lampstands glow gently, making this place even less like any other in the world.

Sometimes a winter day can be clear, sunny, and pleasantly mild, but later in the day it will suddenly remind you that you are standing on a few small islands at sea-level in the middle of a lagoon, when the cold mist rolls in and wraps itself around you, sucking out your warmth.

It is the kind of damp that anywhere else in the world gets into your bones, but here it gets into your soul instead. Rather than shutting it out or hiding from it, you want to open your arms out and embrace it and dance in it.

And coming from a man with two left feet, that is really saying something.

22. The Drunkenness of Noah

2006-06-14T22:22:00.000+10:00

Genesis:9.20 - And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard.
Genesis:9.21 - And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

So goes the biblical story of Noah after he survived the flood, but who could blame Noah for sinking a few vinos after what he had just been through? His son Ham obviously did blame him, because he saw his father when he was legless and naked and did nothing to help him, but his two other sons, Shem and Japheth, covered him up – averting their eyes as they did so, naturally. When Noah sobered up, he cursed Ham, and rewarded the other two.

This extraordinary and remarkably finely detailed Gothic sculpture from about 1350 is on the south east corner of the Doge's Palace, facing the lagoon on one side and the canal that goes under the Bridge of Sighs on the other. It is a curiously human piece of sculpture for a religious subject, but then it is a very human story.

Noah, on one side of the central grapevine trunk is standing in a loose loin cloth with his eyes shut, and he is leaning at a precarious angle. In one hand he is spilling some liquid from a shell or gourd, with the other he is reaching out to the vine with his hand on a bunch of grapes. Whether he is looking for support, or for more fermented fruit juice, we don't know, but there is no doubt that the old man is in a sorry condition, and about to fall over.

On the other side of the vine are two of his sons, probably Shem and Japheth (the third, Ham, is on his own on the other side of the canal side arch). One son is gesturing impatiently at Noah as if to say "Look at the old man – trashed again!", and the other, who is hanging on to Noah's loincloth to keep him vaguely upright, is gesturing back "Calm down, it's OK, I've got him".

Supposedly symbolizing 'the frailty of man', I think the story is a fine advertisement for the life-preserving properties of wine, because this is how the bible chapter ends:

Genesis: 9.28 – And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years.
Genesis: 9.29 – And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died.

21. Café Chioggia

2006-06-13T22:52:00.000+10:00

"It would be hard to imagine a better location for lunch than this", we said to each other one day in London. From our window seat in a restaurant called 'La Strada' in St Paul's Churchyard, we were looking straight up the steps to the main entrance of that magnificent domed cathedral.

In Venice we found somewhere at least as good. This picture shows that from our table in the Café Chioggia we looked directly across the Piazzetta, the ceremonial entrance to the city, to one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture in the world, the beautiful Doge's Palace.

It was late afternoon in winter, just on dusk. The warm yellow lights of the restaurant were contrasting with the cold blue twilight out in the Piazzetta, and as the piano behind us inside the restaurant gently played, we sat and enjoyed a simple glass of house red, a glass of house white, and a small bottle of Coca-Cola.

I wasn't expecting the drinks to be cheap, but when I settled the bill for the three beverages, I was startled by their cost. For the same amount of money later that same evening we were able to buy three delicious meals at our favourite Taverna in Dorsoduro. For the Coke alone, we paid exactly 89 times the amount we would have paid for a similar amount of that Cola at our local supermarket at home.

It was worth every penny just to be there.

20. The University of Studies

2006-06-12T01:41:00.000+10:00

This gate into a walled garden entrance carried the name "Universita degli studi", or University of Studies, an odd and somewhat tautological name.

It also has a very serious and scholarly looking head at the keystone of the gated arch, as well as a very classical looking figure sculpture on the wall above the gate.

There is no story to this picture, except for the amusing juxtaposition of these two sculptures. I just like the idea of the disembodied head on the gate beneath a headless body. It's as if Aristotle – or whoever the head symbolizes – was standing on the wall when his head fell off and got caught on the top of the gate. OK, I admit it's a silly thought.

But I like the fact that Venice is full of old oddities and incongruities, with far more of them packed in per square meter than anywhere else in the world. It's the perfect place for an old oddity collector like me.

19. Ponte de' Sospiri

2006-06-11T22:06:00.000+10:00

The main council chambers of the Doge's Palace are huge and magnificently decorated, and one of their functions would have been to intimidate anyone unfortunate enough to be summoned before the powerful rulers of Venice to account for themselves, and to be judged.

Leading from the 'piano nobile', the noble floor of the Palazzo, across the adjoining canal to the prison of St Mark is this covered walkway, known as the 'Ponte de' Sospiri', or 'The Bridge of Sighs', supposedly a reference to the despairing groans of the condemned prisoners on their way to the cells.

On one side, palatial grandeur, wealth and power; on the other, grim squalor and a powerless fate too horrible to contemplate. To be judged in the former means your crime would be serious, and against the state. To then be dragged across this bridge to the dungeons, or to execution, would be to feel abandoned and utterly hopeless.

Lord Byron brought this Bridge, and Venice itself, to the popular awareness of 19th century England with this first verse of Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

"I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, thron'd on her hundred isles!"

John Ruskin, later in the same century, was impressed neither with the bridge nor the poet:

"The well-known 'Bridge of Sighs', is a work of no merit, and of a late period, owing the interest it possesses chiefly to its pretty name, and to the ignorant sentimentalism of Byron."

18. The heretical clock

2006-06-10T00:53:00.000+10:00

Everyone knows that a clock has two hands, the dial is numbered one to twelve, the two hands go round clockwise, and the numbers start at the top. Don't they? Who decided that clocks should be like that, and not like this, with one hand, twenty-four numbers, midnight on the right, and mid-day on the left? When did clocks like this one start being…wrong? There must have been some sort of standardizing event in the clock world, because all our pre-digital clocks have used the same layout for hundreds of years, but I don't know what that event was.

Another thing I don't know about this clock, and this fact would be very helpful to know, is exactly when it was built. Why? Because the sun is in the centre of the clock face, with a much smaller orb towards the pointy end of the 'hand'. Every day, everyone who looked at this clock would be seeing a smaller 'planet' revolving around the sun at the centre of its 'universe'. This was a dangerous statement to be making in the Holy Roman Empire during certain parts of the middle ages.

If the clock was built after Galileo was forced by the Holy See in 1633 to recant his claim that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa, this clock would have been suggesting heresy every day for the next 125 years until the restriction on Galileo's theories were lifted. If it predated Galileo, then the clockmaker was a very well informed craftsman to know of the heliocentric theories of Copernicus which were not published until the year of his death in 1543, 90 years before the ban on Galileo.

The first church to stand on this spot was built in the 5th century, making it the oldest known church in Venice, but the present church is much later than that, and so is the clock. Could the clock have been built as recently as post 1758, when it was no longer heresy to say that the earth revolved around the sun? I don't think so. The unusual non-standard layout of the face would suggest that this is a very old clock as clocks go. Could it have been pre-1543? If so, the sun-with-revolving-planet design would have to be just an accidental coincidence, which seems improbable. The most likely date for the age of this clock would therefore seem to be somewhere between Copernicus and Galileo, around 1543-1633.

Unfortunately, that leaves us with another puzzle. If the clock was proclaiming heresy on a daily basis after 1633, why was it not destroyed while those ideas were banned? Venice was a very independent power at that time, not known for its obedience to papal authority, and so a papal edict about the solar system might simply have been ignored. But I suspect we'll never know.

17. St Mary the Beautiful

2006-06-09T12:51:00.000+10:00

This is not the sort of decoration that you would expect to find at the base of the tower of a church dedicated to Santa Maria Formosa – St Mary the Beautiful.

Originally commissioned by the Bishop of Uderzo, following a vision commanding him to build a church dedicated to the Virgin Mother, this church's facades were remodelled in 1542 and 1604. The fact that these renovations were paid for by the Cappello family doesn't explain the origins of the character in the picture, but it does explain why the outside of this church is now little more than a monument to Admiral Vincent Cappello, who must have been something of a bigshot in his day, because his statue appears over the main doorway rather than that of Christ or Mary as would have been more conventional.

John Ruskin, the 19th century writer and art critic, was not impressed at all by this particular grotesque sculpture, and said so in his book, The Stones of Venice:

"A head – huge, inhuman, and monstrous – leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant; yet let it be endured for more than that instant; for in that head is embodied the type of evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline; and it is well that we should see and feel the full horror of in on this spot, and know what pestilence it was that came and breathed upon her beauty…"

I think that's a tad harsh. You certainly wouldn't call him beautiful, but he quite brightened up my day when I found him.

16. Go the Gunners!

2006-06-08T11:28:00.000+10:00

This magnificent Classical style gateway is the Porta Magna, the main entrance gate to the Venetian Arsenal, which was one of the keys to Venice's commercial and military power. The gate was built in about 1460 to a design by Jacopo Bellini, although the two lions flanking the door were added about two hundred years later.

At its height in the sixteenth century, this naval shipyard employed around 16,000 people and produced both warships and merchant ships at a prodigious rate, using assembly line techniques not seen elsewhere until the twentieth century. It was already active around 1200, which was why Venice was able to contract to build enough ships to transport the army of the Fourth Crusade (see the post 'Palazzo Dandolo' for why that crusade went pear-shaped).

In 1574, the newly-crowned King Henry III of France paid an official visit to Venice, and because Venice wanted France's support in restraining Spain's ambitions, the city pulled out all stops to impress him with its wealth, power, elegance, and wisdom. Early one morning, the king was taken to the Arsenal, where he witnessed the keel of a warship being laid. At sunset that evening, he was taken back to the Arsenal to witness that very same ship being launched down the slipway, fully rigged, armed, provisioned, and ready to go to war.

The Venice Arsenal didn't just build ships at a sustained rate of up to one a day, it experimented with different types of firearms and manufactured small arms as well as artillery – which makes the Football Club reference in the title of this post a bit more appropriate. The London-based Arsenal F.C. was originally founded near the London equivalent of the Venice Arsenal, the Woolwich Dockyard and Royal Arsenal. The club's original crest not only featured three cannons – hence their nickname 'The Gunners' – but, coincidentally, given that it is also Venice's primary symbol, a lion.

15. The Plague Doctor

2006-06-07T11:22:00.000+10:00

Carnevale is a celebration of the passing of winter, and is marked with feasts, costumes, and masked balls. Its roots are in the old Roman Saturnalia, and it starts at Candlemas on February 2, and lasts through till the end of Mardi Gras, or 'Fat Tuesday' which precedes Ash Wednesday, marking the end of excess and the beginning of the austerity of Lent.

Venetian masks have become symbols of the city itself, sold throughout the year as tourist souvenirs, and the variety of elaborate and very decorative Venetian masks is now endless. Traditionally, though, there is a cast of familiar costumed characters that are impersonated by participants in Carnevale events, and each has a distinctive and easy to recognize mask and costume.

Not all of them are happy, jolly, characters. This mask represents El Medico Dea Peste or The Plague Doctor. 'Italian Cooking and Living' says this about him:

"You will be able to identify El Medico Dea Peste by his mask; it has a long white beak like a bird, or a mournful vulture. He is also likely to carry a stick, from which he removes the clothing of the victims. Keep your distance! … He wears white or gray with an elaborate white, starched, ruffle collar."

Venice has a long history of association with the plague. Supposedly, according to several sources, doctors attending plague victims adopted a disguise like this in order to protect themselves in some inexplicable way from being infected by the disease - although I suppose it would have served to prevent patients who knew him well from greeting him with the traditional kiss on each cheek.

If I was just starting to break out in bubos and feeling more than a little unwell, I don't think the presence of this character at my bedside would be all that comforting.

14. Collecting the garbage: Part 3

2006-06-06T18:33:00.000+10:00

When the garbage trolleys are full, the collectors pull them back to one of the many emptying points, where a garbage barge will be waiting. This inlet off the Grand Canal next to Campo San Vidal and almost under the Accademia Bridge was one of the main garbage points, and it was in use almost every morning.

When full trolleys arrive, they are taken charge of by the shore-based assistant who positions them ready for the barge crane operator, who sits in the white cabin at the rear of the barge. The crane picks the trolley up by its big central handle, swings it over the barge and sets it down by its stubby lower handles on two horizontal bars over an opening into the barge's interior.

The crane presses the handle of the full trolley down, opening its double-hinged base which then spills its entire contents into the barge. Lifting the trolley up again closes the double underdoors and the crane plonks the empty trolley back onto dry land, ready to be dragged back into the Venetian alleyways by one of the young women who do that work.

All the operators of the barges and their assistants were men, suggesting that this part of the operation must be classified as much more important and highly skilled. Although it certainly didn't look like it, and why anyone would rather spend their time hanging around a smelly garbage barge when they could be keeping themselves fit wandering with a nice clean trolley through the infinitely interesting back streets of the most beautiful city in the world has me baffled.

13. Collecting the garbage: Part 2

2006-06-05T18:26:00.000+10:00

When I was still in Primary School, for a Christmas present - or perhaps a birthday gift, I forget which – somebody gave me my first set of oil paints, ten or a dozen small tubes of wonderful smelling paints with exotic names like 'Alizarin Crimson', Gamboge Yellow', 'Hooker's Green', 'Ultramarine Blue', and my all-time favourite, 'Venetian Red'.

The name meant nothing to me then, but I loved that rich and earthy crimson brown. The old masters used the pigment, called Venetian red because it was derived from almost pure ferric oxide supposedly quarried on the mainland in the Veneto district, to create their soft warm shadowy skin tones and rich velvety crimson and purple fabrics. Tints and shades and amalgams of this colour pervade and define the city of Venice itself; in its painted walls, its faded stone washes, in its brickwork baked from iron oxide tainted clay – even in the uniforms of the municipal workers.

The official city colours of Venice are this gorgeous red, together with this harmonized and almost perfectly complimentary green. Where else could winter protective clothing for garbage collectors also be a fashion colour statement?

Interestingly, the only municipal workers I ever saw trundling their garbage carts (when they weren't leaning on them talking into their cell phones) over the bridges and through the alleyways and side streets were young women, like these two, on their way back to the garbage barge.

Only in Venice.

12. Collecting the garbage: Part 1

2006-06-04T18:21:00.000+10:00

This is the front end of a City of Venice Municipal Waste Collection Unit – or whatever fancy name the Venetian garbologists like to give it. It is a hand-pushed, human-powered aluminium trolley with two small wheels sticking out in front, and two larger ones just forward of a halfway balance point.

There are a lot of these in Venice, because a city that hosts 14 million visitors a year creates a lot of garbage, and there are no motorized vehicles of any kind going from door to door picking up and emptying bins. Even if there were, they wouldn't get very far, because wherever you turn in Venice you are facing a pedestrians-only stepped footbridge.

Which is why the design of these garbage trolleys is so ingenious. The two sets of wheels are just the right distance apart to allow the pusher of this barrow to rock it back and forth and simply 'walk' it up and over a bridge with only a little more effort than it takes to push the thing on straight level ground.

On 'garbage day', residents leave tied up plastic bags of rubbish outside their front door on the footpath, and the collectors simply pick them up and throw them in the trolley as they trundle past. The system may be unlike that of any other city in the world but it is designed around Venice's unique environment and it works.

It may look a little untidy to see bags of garbage in some of the streets for a few hours each morning, but that has to be better than having thousands of bins cluttering up the narrow passageways between the buildings, which is where apartment-dwellers with no back or front yards would have to leave them all week.

11. A cryptic marker

2006-06-03T16:54:00.000+10:00

Somewhere near San Marco, I noticed this brick-sized paving stone just before I stepped on it. No other paver near it had any word inscribed on it, and there was no obvious reason for it to be there, so I just recorded it as an interesting oddity, and walked on.

I keep coming back to this picture and it bugs me. The other paving stones round it were not a random collection of recycled building material, they were all carefully laid from similar stone, apart from this one. It was not put there by accident, it was not just a piece of old stone that happened to have been carved with letters, the word must have meant something to the person who placed it or caused it to be placed where it is.

In Latin, 'sacrum' means a holy thing, or place, which seems a strange thing to call the middle of a public footpath. Apparently, it can also mean a sacrifice, or a victim. Was someone accidentally, or even deliberately, killed on this spot?

In the middle of the Piazza Signoria in Florence is a plaque embedded in the paving which marks the exact spot where Savanorola was executed by being burned at the stake in 1498. This ultra-orthodox priest was briefly the ruler of Florence after an overthrow of the Medici and was responsible for the original 'Bonfire of the Vanities' by ordering the collection and burning of such things as cosmetics, mirrors, fine clothes, and non-pious artworks and books. He also changed being gay from a fineable misdemeanor into a capital offence, so it didn't take long for the fun-loving Florentines to get rid of him, but he made a memorable mark on the city before it revolted against him.

Savonarola was famous, and earned his explanatory plaque where he died, but perhaps the victim commemorated by the single word on this lone paver was a simple commoner whose passing, whether innocent or guilty, deserved only this marker and nothing more.

I also like the way the cigarette butt balances the picture visually and conceptually.

10. The Redeemer

2006-06-02T02:08:00.000+10:00

Until about thirty years ago, and for nearly 400 years before that, as part of a commemorative deliverance celebration on the third Sunday in July every year, a bridge of boats was built stretching from the Zattere on the southern shore of Venice, where this photograph was taken, all the way across this waterway to the domed church on the far shore of the island of Giudecca.

The church was built by the celebrated architect Palladio, and it is the Redentore, the church of the Redeemer, itself a thanksgiving offering celebrating the deliverance of the city of Venice from a persistent outbreak of the bubonic plague which lasted from late 1575 until July 1577. On Sunday, 21 July of that year, the epidemic was officially declared over, but in the previous two years it had wiped out 51,000 citizens, including the artist Titian, Venice's favourite son.

The population of Venice at the outbreak was somewhere between 168,000 and 175,000, so the victims represented almost one third of the entire population at the beginning, and a little less than half of the number of survivors. The plague affected every family, whether high born or low life, and many families were completely wiped out. Given that almost anyone able to flee the city did so, it is not hard to imagine how deserted and depressing this normally thriving and busy metropolis would have seemed to the few left behind in 1576, as those around them succumbed to the plague.

There are moments when to live in a great city like Venice or Constantinople in its golden years is an attractive romantic fantasy. But try to imagine what life would really be like during something like a plague attack without antiseptics, antibiotics, or anaesthetics, and suddenly the past loses its allure as a place to visit.

9. Pimping the ride

2006-06-01T17:26:00.000+10:00

The decorative prow of a gondola is called the 'ferro' – the 'iron' – but its purpose is not just decorative, it is a counterbalancing weight for the gondolier who stands at the rear of the shallow and short-drafted boat.

With minor variations, as in these two not quite identical examples, all gondolas carry the same shaped ferro. Like many other traditions, and despite considerable research, nobody is quite sure any longer why the ferro is shaped the way it is. Local legend has it that the six prongs or 'pettini' in the front represent the six sestieri, or districts, of the city; the single prong pointing to the rear represents the island of Giudecca, just south of the main city; the 'S' shaped curve represents the Grand Canal; the big blade above is a stylized version of the cap traditionally worn by the Doge of Venice; and the lunette formed by the bottom of the blade and the topmost forward prong symbolizes the Rialto bridge. That explanation seems to me to be a contrived invention, but it is appealing and possible even if slightly implausible. The truth, which we will now never know, may be something else entirely, and probably much more prosaic.

The rules for the construction of a gondola are very strict, specifying in some cases to the millimeter what its dimensions should be. For instance, to ensure its asymmetry, the right side of the boat must be 24mm less than the left; it must be 10.75 meters long and 1.38 meters wide.

There is even a city law which governs what colour a gondola must be. When Venice was at its apogee in terms of wealth and ostentation, gondolas became competitively decorative – like a drug-dealer's car in Hollywood, they were 'pimped up' to outrageous levels, allowing 'les nouveau riches' with bling to upstage those with rank and nobility. As a result, in 1562, a Sumptuary Law was passed by the nobles in council that decreed all gondolas henceforth would be black. And so they remain to this day.

It might seem to have been a rather heavy-handed use of legislative power, but in retrospect, it was not a bad thing. Had this sumptuary law not been passed, then it is very probable that Venetian gondolas would today be as crassly commercial as London taxicabs, which always used to be plain and unpretentiously black, but are now just mobile billboards for phone companies, airlines, and condoms. Who wants to see that on the Grand Canal?

8. Cornos and courtesans

2006-05-31T23:45:00.000+10:00

These bizarre cross-dressing mannequins lampoon a number of iconic items of Venetian apparel.

The fancy jackets, which appeared to be the objects for sale in this retail establishment, are ostentatiously decorative in a very attention-getting way. The sort of 'look-at-me' way that caused a number of Sumptuary Laws to be passed during the history of the Venetian Republic , limiting at various times the amount of all kinds of showiness allowed by the city-state.

The top and bottom ends of these mannequins parody the highest and the lowest ranks of Venetian society. The extravagantly high-heeled platform shoes echo the built-up shoes known as 'chopines' that were worn for a while by fashionable society women, but became associated with Venetian prostitutes who wore them so they could be elevated above ordinary women and thus stand more chance of being noticed by potential customers. They also may have kept the streetwalkers' feet dry and away from the dirt during and after especially high tides. Made of wood, the thick soles of the competitive prostitutes' chopines eventually grew to ridiculous and immobilizing heights – up to thirty inches or 75cm, according to some reports.

The heads of the mannequins are those of Doges of the Venetian Republic. Which ones, I have no idea, but for over a thousand years, the head man in Venice was an elected official – a Duke elected not by popular vote, but by an oligarchy, a large council of nobles from the great families who were the government of the Republic. The checks and balances built into the rules of election prevented hereditary succession and controlled potential abuses of the office, and it was a system that worked better than that of almost any other nation-state in Europe.

The symbol of the Doge since the 14th century was the distinctively-shaped headgear worn by these models: a white linen cap called a 'cuffietto' underneath a single-horned brocade cloth helmet called a 'corno'.

The Venetian Republic came to an end in 1797, after it had been conquered for the first time in its history. As Napoleon's French troops took power, a final meeting of the Great Council accepted their terms and dissolved the Republic, after which Ludovico Manin, the last Doge, removed his corno and then his cuffietto, handing it to his assistant with the words "Take this, I won't be needing it again."

7. Palazzo Dandolo

2006-05-31T07:20:00.000+10:00

This sumptuous interior is the reception and visitors' lounge of the Hotel Danieli, one of Venice's most luxurious – and expensive – places to stay. Very close to San Marco and the Doge's Palace and facing the lagoon on the Riva Schiavoni, until the middle of the 19th century this building was known as the Palazzo Dandolo.

The Dandolo family, whose home this was for several centuries, is one of the oldest and most noble families in the history of Venice. Four of the Doges of Venice have borne the name Dandolo, and only a handful of Venetian dynasties, such as the Contarini and Mocenigo families, can boast more.

No Doge was more memorable, and few more enterprising, than the first Dandolo to become Doge of Venice in 1192. Enrico Dandolo was already old, reputedly in his early eighties, and blind, when he was first elected to the top job in the Republic, but he was a man of enormous energy and as cunning as a canal rat.

(About now, the connection with the picture at the top of this story starts to get a bit flimsy, because it was not Enrico himself but some of his later descendants who built and lived in the family palazzo, but bear with me, it's a good story)

Not many men have arrested an entire army and held it to ransom until it agreed to do what he wanted, and then used it to topple the most powerful empire in the world – in fact none other that I'm aware of – but Enrico Dandolo did just that.

In 1204, when the Crusaders couldn't pay in full for the ships Venice had built for them to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, Doge Dandolo hijacked the entire army of the Fourth Crusade which was charged with the mission to recapture Jerusalem from the Ayyubid Muslims, and used it to attack and sack Constantinople, the wealthy centre of the Byzantine Empire, instead. The Christian Crusaders never made it to Jerusalem, although after raping and savagely pillaging the largest and richest Christian stronghold in the region, many of them went home a lot wealthier than when they started out.

Pope Innocent III, the man who had launched the expedition, was furious with his Holy Crusaders when he found out what they had done: "You vowed to liberate the Holy Land but you rashly turned away from the purity of your vow when you took up arms not against Saracens but Christians…"

Enrico Dandolo ensured that his beloved Venice would never again be subservient to Byzantium as it had been for centuries, and he emerged from this violent yet almost farcical adventure with his city enriched beyond measure by some of the most priceless booty in Christendom, much of which is still in Venice and still on display to the world's tourists.

More about the stolen treasures another day.

6. Washing day

2006-05-30T12:57:00.000+10:00

There are six districts on the main island of Venice, known, not surprisingly, as the 'sestieri', or 'sixths'. They are: Canareggio, San Polo, Santa Croce, Dorsoduro, San Marco, and Castello. Each sestiere has its own character, and it seems that each has its own 'washing day'.

This street in Castello (yes, it's a canal, but all the main streets of Venice are canals, and only the canals carry the name Rio, which means 'street'), like most of the streets in that 'sixth' on that day, was festooned with washing like festive bunting from almost every dwelling. On the same day in another sestiere, there was no washing to be seen anywhere. Is it a city rule? Or is it just a convention by community agreement? And what if it's raining on washing day, is there a stand-by washing day that everybody in that locale uses instead?

It's easy to forget sometimes that Venice is not a tourist museum, it is a real city, where people live and work. Admittedly, not so many Venetians live in Venice proper anymore, the pressure of tourists and rising property values have forced most of them to move out to the other lagoon islands, or to the mainland, or to somewhere else entirely, and in the main tourist-centred district of San Marco there are almost no Venetian residents left at all squeezed in amongst the hotels, eateries, and souvenir shops. But there are still pockets of real Venetians in some of the back streets furthest away from San Marco. The ratio is about 14 million visitors every year, to about 60,000 local residents. The first number is rising, the second still dropping.

Hang in there, Venetians. It would be a shame if ALL the dirty laundry created in Venice was taken back in travel bags to some other part of the world to be washed. We'd miss the street decorations.

5. The last open bridge in Venice

2006-05-30T01:26:00.000+10:00

There are about 400 bridges in Venice. Or exactly 433. Or more than 450, depending on the source you are reading.

All of them have some kind of safety railing, or sidewalling. Except for this one, in Canareggio, the northernmost sestiere of the city. Most of the bridges used to look like this, an arched series of steps, but although this is not the oldest bridge in Venice, it is the sole survivor of a less safety-conscious age.

The canals in Venice were not excavated out of solid ground, they are bits of the surrounding lagoon filling the gaps between all the little islands that make up the city. The bridges are the glue that ties the whole place together. Every one is different. Every one is interesting.

I can't find a book about the bridges of Venice. Oh, lots of books talk about SOME of the bridges, the Rialto and the Accademia in particular, but there is no book about them all. That's one of my planned projects, one of my dreams. To live in Venice for 12 months, researching, writing, and documenting ALL of them, and then to publish the results.

First I'll have to count them.

4. The Cheese Shop

2006-05-29T23:39:00.000+10:00

The "House of Parmesan" is a cheese shop, near the San Polo fresh produce markets. Even with only one or two people in front of you waiting to buy cheese, it still takes an age to be served, but there are two reasons for this.

One of those reasons is that it takes two people to serve each customer. All of the shop assistants that actually handle the cheese – describing each piece's virtues and shortcomings, shaving off slivers for the purchaser to taste, then cutting, weighing and wrapping the portion of chosen formaggio (cheese) – are men. Hovering next to, well, behind really, each of these highly skilled 'customer relationship managers' is a woman, similar attired in a professional-looking hygienic white coat. No matter how busy the shop is, or how many people waiting, the female shop assistants never serve customers. They wait until the purchase has been decided upon, and then, on the instructions of the male cheese server, they handle the money, each completing the financial part of the purchase for their partner, and their partner alone. Is one of these tasks a ‘skilled’ job and the other only ‘administrative’? Is it a union labour demarcation, a hygiene regulation, or just a sexist cultural thing peculiar to Venice? I decided that either the men can’t count, or it makes them feel important not to have to actually have to handle money and give change. Given that Venice is (sort of) part of Italy, I think the latter is more likely.

The other reason for how long it takes to be served is that every piece of merchandise chosen is carefully wrapped in 'Casa del Parmigiano' paper, like it was a gift. Would you feel better towards your cheese when you get it home, savour it more when you eat it, and care less about the cost of it, if it was beautifully hand-wrapped rather than precut and vacuum-sealed from a supermarket? I think you would. And so did I.

Next to the cheese shop is 'Al Marca'. It is not immediately obvious what sort of business this is, but whatever it is, it is a very small business. In fact, it is a very small bar, where all the customers stand up for the simple reason that there is nowhere to sit down. The people in front, under the awning, are not waiting to be served, they are drinking a small glass of wine, or grappa, or cinzano, and probably also eating one of the tasty bite-size nibbles from the display cabinet. What food do they serve at Al Marca's? Whatever happens to be on the plates on show. Half an hour from now it will be all different. You take pot luck, but this was a very busy business. On market day, hundreds of people would stop for a few minutes for a quick drink and a snack, and because there is nowhere to sit, move on.

3. The Basilica of San Marco

2006-05-29T19:01:00.000+10:00

The Basilica of San Marco . Here is the bling-encrusted west-facing facade catching the last rosy rays of the twilight sun on a cold January afternoon.

You will often see the word 'Moorish' used to describe this wonderful cathedral, but there is no Islamic influence at work here, like there is in some of the grand buildings of Cordoba or Granada in southern Spain. The five-domed Greek Cross design with its rounded arches are the result of Venice being a vassal state of the Byzantine empire when this church was first built. Incredibly, this building was the third church dedicated to St Mark on this spot, and yet it was begun in 1063. To put that date in perspective, it was before the First Crusade, before the English King Harold lost the Battle of Hastings to William the Conqueror's Norman invaders, and 500 years before Michelangelo designed St Peter's in Rome.

This church is therefore twice as old as St Peter's, and was built before the breakaway Latin Catholics attained their dominant power in western Europe. Like the Christian church in Rome itself until 1054, this church owed allegiance to the then vibrant centre of Christianity, the Constantinople-based Greco-Roman Church, better known now as the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is no wonder that visually it echoes the multi-domed St Basil's in Moscow, or Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, far more than it does the familiar perpendicular gothic designs of Chartres or Salisbury, or the single-domed Renaissance cathedrals of St Peter in Rome or St Paul in London.

Surprisingly, it wasn't until 1807 that this Basilica officially became the cathedral of the city of Venice. Until then, this church had always been the private chapel of the Doge of the Venetian Republic, who lived in the adjoining ducal palace. Which gives you some idea of the wealth and power held by the Dukes of Venice.

2. The rightist tendencies of gondolas

2006-05-28T11:46:00.000+10:00

Ever wondered why gondolas don't go round and round in circles?

In a rowboat, if you pull on the left oar (or push in Venice), the boat turns to the right. Pull on the right oar and it goes to the left. Without a rudder, that's how you steer a rowing boat.

The propulsion force for a gondola is a single oar always on the right side of the boat, yet it goes straight forward. Why?

The answer is simple, and when you know it, obvious. All gondolas are built with a curved keel, so that they always steer to the right. Put a motor on the back of a gondola and it will just go round in clockwise circles. The single oar pushing the boat to the left counteracts the natural tendency of the boat to steer to the right, so it goes straight. Clever.

1. Venice will survive everything

2006-05-28T00:33:00.000+10:00

There is a character in John Berendt's book, City of Falling Angels, who bemoans the fact that so many well-meaning visitors - particularly Americans - come to Venice and want to 'save it', because it is sinking, it is doomed, it will be washed into the Adriatic if they don't act now and fix its problems. "Why don't they go and save Paris, instead?" he says.

Venice has always been sinking. It started sinking faster during the 20th century when artesian wells around the lagoon pumped water out for local industries, but that has stopped and the rate of sinking has slowed again.

Several layers of city down into the mud of the lagoon, during the excavation of the foundations of the new Malibran Theatre, diggers recently unearthed the 13th Century remains of the house that once belonged to Marco Polo.

Venice has been where it is, looking a lot like it does today, for many times longer than the United States has even been in existence. It will still be where it is today, long after most of the countries in the world today have ceased to exist.

Does it have physical, climatic, structural, financial, social, organizational problems? Of course.

Can they be fixed? Some of them. Maybe. Eventually.

What can you do in the meantime? You can love her for what she is - one of the oldest, the most interesting, and definitely the most stunningly beautiful city on earth.

Love Venice.