Seeing what few do: Venice particularly in mind

Venice, 1981

I know a few people who quite meticulously plan their holidays, and draw up a list of those museums, art galleries, great houses, archaeological sites, etc. which they want to visit. The people I am thinking of do this with genuine enthusiasm: they have no intention of ‘ticking’ places off as being ‘done’, or of impressing others when they return. They have a certain indefatigability and staying power, which — in this direction — I sadly lack. It is true that I am not the world’s best sleeper, and that this often makes concentration difficult. However that may be, it remains a fact that after the sixth case of Roman coins, Greek vases, African masks — or whatever — I find myself flagging, fairly consummately bored, and quite quickly wanting to be back out into the immediacy, mess, chaos, and vibrancy of the streets. What an admission to make! And — supposing the city in question to be Venice — if Browning, Byron, or Sickert happened to live in such and such a house, I do not care much. They do not live there now! All that was alive in their presence vanished with their passing. Nor is it any good looking for Turners’, Monet’s, Whistler’s, or Canaletto’s. That which they saw and transmuted we cannot.


Why then go to Paris, Florence, Venice or any other great city? Well, in my case it is almost wholly for the atmosphere. That, and for the great pleasure of eating out in countries where food is taken seriously. This is not at all to say that I do not visit churches, art galleries, and other venues firmly on the ‘tourist map’. But I prefer to wander the streets without any particular plan, and in a state of mind as near to the of Locke’s tabula rasa as I can manage! A great advantage to this approach is that you can avoid the coach loads of tourists following a guide with a furled umbrella raised aloft as a shepherd to the sheep! I believe that these people learn nothing, and as far as I am concerned they are so much clutter on the streets. Ocean cruises are for them, bur please God let them never land anywhere! A friend of mine — Diana — told me that the late (and delightful) comedian, Linda Smith, described golf courses as ‘easy–clean countryside.’ How then shall we describe the majority of coach tour holidays? Perhaps as, ‘Culture–tidy comfort trips’, or ‘Fallacies regurgitated — in between nice hotels!’

Over the years I have met a not inconsiderable number of people who have returned from Venice disenchanted, and from some of them the chief objection has been that the canals were ‘smelly’. I can only imagine that these people were either blindfolded or totally insensitive to beauty. My first experience of Venice — in the 1970s — began at the Statzione di Venetzia Santa Lucia, after a night crossing of Europe via Northern France and Switzerland. On arrival, I left my luggage at the station and set out on the vaporetto for St Marks Square to look for a pensione. That journey down the Grand Canal was one of the most wonderful of my life. I was in seventh heaven, and in a state of quiet ecstasy such as I had never experienced before, and have never experienced since. I could not believe that such beauty was possible.

Well, such an experience is not in any sense reproducible, but here below are some photographs illustrating the more ‘quotidian’ pleasures of the everyday street scenes of Italy.