Padova

This morning I took the train to Padova because I had a 12:15 reservation to see the Giotto frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel. It's only a half hour train ride, but it felt like much more of a journey, going from the strange splendors of Venice to a city equally ancient, equally Italian, but one that obviously belongs to this century, with buses and cars and stoplights. Even though there weren't nearly as many people on the street as there were in Venice and few tourists, the traffic made it feel so much more crowded.

Which made it seem even more appropriate that you have to sit in a waiting room for fifteen minutes of decontamination before you're allowed into the chapel. The frescoes are amazingly well-preserved, but they're also very fragile; I think the psyche needs to decontaminate as well to go from the noise and bustle of the 21st century to the quiet of the 14th.

And it was quiet. The visit is only fifteen minutes and there's no guide or commentary, just 25 of you alone in a room with Giotto, no one speaking above a whisper.

No photos, of course. (No bags, for that matter, or jackets, though we were allowed to keep our shoes.) You can see images of the frescoes here, but photos are a poor substitute for seeing it in person. The paintings are the only decoration, with three tiers of images on both sides of the chapel depicting the life of Mary, and a huge Last Judgment covering the entire wall by the entrance. There are windows on one wall, so the frescoes were meant to be seen in natural light, and the colors change as you move, shadows seem to get deeper,there are flashes of iridescence. Enrico Scrovegni built the chapel to atone for his family's sins -- his father was the usurer Dante described in the Inferno -- and he may have practiced usury himself. (Then, it was a deadly sin; today we call it working on Wall Street.) I hope his sins were forgiven; his atonement is certainly spectacular.

Dante actually visited Giotto during the period he was painting these frescoes, and legend has it that he asked Giotto how a man who created such beautiful pictures could produce such plain children, and Giotto replied, "I made them in the dark."

Why I don't live in Venice

Venice is a dream vacation destination, but living in a city where you are either on foot or in a boat leads to endless accommodations.




Venice deliveries.

Venice police.

Venice 911.

 

Venice garbage collection.

An evening stroll through the campo

This is my favorite picture from the Campo Santa Margherita. The couple are dressed casually, while the woman in the wheelchair obviously comes from a generation where you dressed up if you were going to be seen in the campo in the evening, in a hat, stockings, and gloves.

Campo Santa Margherita

Campo Santa Margherita is the flip side of Piazza San Marco: no great monuments, no high-priced boutiques, and there are far more Venetians than tourists.

It was close to my hotel on the map, so of course it took me almost an hour to find it, as one promising street after another dead-ended at a canal, and I took an unexpected tour of parts of Dorsoduro that didn't look remotely Venetian, with the kind of drab apartment blocks you can see in any city in the world.

But I found it eventually, and I spent the early evening wandering around, sitting on one bench and then another, and buying a hazelnut gelato that was so obscenely delicious I immediately started calculating how long before I could decently go back for another.

As always, click to enlarge.

Living statue

I saw this man out of the corner of my eye and turned with the camera to take a picture before realizing that he was a man and not an interesting statue.

Then I took his picture anyway because he might as well have been a statue. He sat absolutely still, while everything whirled around him, in that dark jacket in the bright campo.

Dorsoduro dog

One advantage of a city with no cars: some dogs are just allowed to go about their doggy business, alone and leash-free.

A bracing dose of modernism

After a glut of Gothic and Baroque and Renaissance that verged on overdose, I decided that the best corrective was a morning spent at the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Dorsoduro.

I found that the art made me surprisingly queasy at first -- I felt as though I was back in the Atlantic, bouncing around on the waves. Maybe spending so much time on the water in Venice was giving me back my sea legs, or maybe Peggy's palazzo is not quite on solid ground, but I had to sit down in the courtyard for a while and close my eyes in the sun before I could go back to looking at Picassos and Pollocks and feel reasonably anchored on solid ground.

This is a typical canal in Dorsoduro, much less glamorous and touristy than the calles I'd walked yesterday.

Morning reflections

Here's the canal early in the morning, when the sun was just coming up, and before there was any boat traffic to disturb the reflections.

My own private Venice

I was so tired that when I came back to my hotel around seven, I immediately changed into my pajamas and got into bed.

Then I opened the windows, ate a piece of pizza I'd bought at a bakery down the street, and watched evening life on the canal until it got dark.

Women coming home from work carrying grocery bags. Children playing tag. Teenagers flirting on the bridge. A man coming out of the apartments opposite and going for a run. A little girl watching from a window.

Grand Canal

I didn't plan to take a lot of photos of the Grand Canal. I'm more interested in the back streets and people-watching than in the great palazzi.

And gondolas? Does the world really need any more photos of gondolas?

But the vaporetti have those nice outside seats, so convenient for taking pictures, and I might as well have kept the shutter permanently pressed as I just kept taking picture after picture after picture.

What news on the Rialto?

The big news for me was that I found it at all.

And that was after successfully locating Santa Maria della et Cetera on the tenth or eleventh try. At first I was just grateful that the church offered a cool, shady place to sit down, because the Titian "Assumption" altarpiece I had made such an effort to see is just awful. I hated it. Hated it. The virgin looks like a teenage girl on a scary ride at Great Adventure. (I didn't bother to try to sneak a photo; if you're curious you can see it here.)

But there is a Bellini Madonna in a side chapel that was more than worth all the aggravation. This small sneaked photo doesn't do it justice, but I can't find a better version online.



The Rialto was so ridiculously crowded that I couldn't get out of there fast enough, but I did take a break sitting on steps like those in the photo above (note to co-workers: without falling in the Grand Canal.)

Typical calles

They may lead somewhere. Then again....