JaneLaverick.com

Venice is a remarkable city.  I have not visited anywhere else that looks good as it is and better when it it starting to decay.

I had seen news broadcasts about Venice imperilled by the rising tide but had little idea what this meant practically until I was there.

One evening, walking back to the hotel, we crossed St. Mark’s square and remarked to each other that we had not noticed a fountain, which had appeared, previously.  It was, of course, not a fountain at all but a large paving slab with a concentric ring pattern around a hole.  The hole was permitting the lagoon’s rising water entry through the hole to relieve the pressure on the surrounding slabs.  The water is ever present.

As the lack of building land is so remarkable, the hotel that we stayed in had a foyer and rooms in one block and, a short walk out of a back door and across a lane, more of a passageway, the dining room.  The dining room had large windows above massive stanking boards.  More of stanking boards later.  What was visible when looking down at the boards was a triple layer protection from the canal running past the window.  The outside board was metal, then there was a layer of some rigid thick board then the inner wall which was the dining room wall, painted a plain, easily re-touchable colour, unlike the upper dining room walls which were decorated with fancy Italian wallpaper.

What was visible, beyond the dining room window curtain, on the other side of the little canal, was this:

As you can see, this wall has been much mended, bricks have been inserted, gaps have been filled with cement and metal braces have been drilled in to keep the whole structure together.

The damp was not so much rising as galloping, leaving picturesque trails of mould around every brick and block that had a slight gap.

As you may also deduce, robbery by gondola is a hazard of living in Venice.  Every canal-side window I saw, throughout the city, had a metal grille over it.  This even extends to the second floor.  Venice is, after all, the first State whose shipbuilders invented a way of fastening scaling towers to seagoing ships, that made them such a devastating force in the middle ages against surrounding nations with sea walls.

In the picture, that blue-grey wavy line at the bottom is the canal.  There is nothing between the water and the wall.  If you are keen on household insurance, I imagine Venetian Insurers have left the clause about water damage right out.  There’s probably a wavy line under the one about damp possessions too.  We watched restorers in museums touching up twenty foot square painting from ground floor rooms of palaces.  I imagine, in the City of Art, picture restorer is a thriving trade with no slack season at all.

Yet, despite all the difficulties, this incredible city with endemic and regular flooding, is one of the cleanest places I have visited.  Near the hotel, across one of the hundreds of little bridges, was a restaurant.  One day it was flooded with brackish, stinking water, ankle deep.  As we came back from a walk a couple of hours later, the water had been reintroduced to the canal, and the floor cleaned so thoroughly, you could have eaten your dinner off it.

As I described in a previous post, cleaning, sweeping, litter removal and tidying up, all taken away by hand cart, happens continuously. As well as the rubbish landing in the rubbish barge, huge plastic bags of the rubbish, swept up overnight, are placed in large wire metal containers in some squares.  As I sat early in the day in a square to draw, there were three huge containers in a corner.  How on earth they could be manhandled over the bridges to any pick-up point, I have no idea.  But they were there when I sat down to draw.

There they were in a corner in front of the church. I did the drawings of the buildings first.  If my Latin is up to scratch, I’d say that’s the church of St Mary and the Angels.  That brown metal thing with the flower on it is a well head.  These are all over the city in squares, often near churches, some funded in previous centuries by wealthy citizens, hoping to book a place in Heaven, no doubt.

I drew all the buildings and started on the rubbish containers.  You may consider the drawing of the rubbish containers to be not very good.  I most certainly do.  I’d drawn the right hand one and had started on the middle one, then I looked up and they had gone.  I didn’t even hear cries of: To me!  To you!  in Italian, or any grunting at all.  They just vanished and the square was tidy again.

I love a city where so much effort is put in the keeping it beautiful, no wonder it is such a draw (and a colour in).

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Here is the latest of my Venice sketches to be coloured in.  If you are late to this particular party, the OH and I went to Venice in June, which was my second holiday in either 18 years or 8 months depending on your counting.

There is a vast amount to see in the city of Art.  A week was not really long enough.  Some of the most famous Renaissance artists are buried in Venetian churches, some of the best architects of their age were engaged to make or improve public buildings.  Because of the extraordinary possibilities for maritime trade that arise when a city is situated on water, at the fulcrum of so many great civilisations, and because of the emergence to power of so many trading families, there have been in Venice, for hundreds of years, wealthy patrons of the arts. For centuries families with spare cash have been vying for the attention of the best painters, sculptors, mosaicists, metal workers, textile artists and anyone else who looked likely to immortalise them in art.

The other crucial factor in the story of the emergence of the city as art capital of everywhere, is the lack of ground to spread out on.  Any other city would have burst out of its mediaeval city walls and spread, and many have done, benefitting the transport system with the custom of many tourists.

The protective walls of Venice are the water.  It was first a group of small wet islets settled by people fleeing assorted marauding hordes. It started with Attila and his Huns in 452 AD.  He was followed by the Lombards, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths and the Vandals.  The Italians, who would become the Venetians, kept fleeing to the safety of the marshy islets, in the process becoming the brilliant sailors who would found fortunes by trade, and also by conquest, of other nations on the surrounding seaboards.  They had opportunities to view wonderful works of art in gold, precious stones and wrought metals and, in some cases, nick them and bring them home. A case in point being the wonderful bronze horses on the Basilica San Marco.  These were either ancient Greek or Roman and were stolen and moved around until they were nicked for the penultimate time in 1204 by the Venetians, who sacked Constantinople. and purloined them from the top of the starting gates of the Hippodrome. Napoleon stole them from Venice in 1797 but they were finally returned at the start of the nineteenth century to the high balcony of the Basilica and were only moved inside the building to be replaced by exact replicas in 1982.

They are a bit larger than life, they glow like gold and have such nice faces and are so strong and well done and just so very encapsulating of everything we have ever felt about horses, in short, such great art, that it’s practically impossible to see them without immediately wondering where you would put one if you could get it home in your suitcase.  Trickier down the aeroplane steps than Donald Trump no doubt, but definitely worth the struggle.

Good on the lawn?  Nice in a conservatory?  Super in a palace?

It’s easy to see why the Venetians patronised the arts, when they had such examples to hand.

However the end result of so many patrons of the arts coexisting in rivalry in such a confined space, is that many works of art are hidden in corners.

Such an oeuvre we came upon by serendipity.  The OH had spotted a sign for a rooftop restaurant on the window of a corner bar.  Looking up with difficulty, because the building on the opposite side of the pavement was only about six feet away, leaving you nowhere to step back and look up, we could just about see a hedge on the third storey roof.  Behind us a big door, and the base of a balcony, also on the third floor.

I do not like heights, so, with a promise from the OH that we could go down again if I got vertigo, we climbed up three staircases, ever narrower, and emerged on to the rooftop restaurant to find hidden art on the building opposite.

Above the third floor windows and the balcony, which was all you could see from street level, were two magnificent sculpted caryatids, supporting a pediment.

So, my pizza grew cold while I drew.

For the first time, colouring in, I’ve used jars of Australian liquid pencil, which have been sitting in a cupboard for a few years.  The heads, larger than life, had been sculpted in stone, possibly marble and looked like classical heroes, or ancient Gods.  They were at the same time, really well done, probably cost a lot to have made, and absolutely invisible from anywhere except the roof of the building opposite, where I sat letting my pizza fossilize.

Why put them there?  Had there been a space opposite which had been built on?  Would people originally have been able to marvel at them from the pavement?  If this was not the case, as an example of one-upmanship, they were a failure.

I’ll never know, but they were so typical of the Venice that I saw with art at every turn, every level, everywhere.

I’ll have to go back.

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Here is a typical bridge.  You can see by the moored boats that there is not much headroom.  There are a lot of bridges, 435 at the last count.  In this photo you can see the bricola beside the boats.  These oak posts, driven into the bottom of the lagoon, mark the navigable channels and act as signposts and mooring posts.  They only last ten to twenty years before they have to be replaced;  like everything else in the city, they are subject to the picturesque decay which occurs when you insist on building a city on water.

It’s absolutely crackers, really, which I also like very much.  The other amazement, you cannot see.  Look at the sidewalk in the picture.  What can you not see?  What is missing? What would you expect to see in a city with thousands of tourists, who are all walking, many, cleverly, eating ice cream or drinking out of disposable plastic bottles at the same time?  What do you think of it so far?

Rubbish!

Exactly.  That’s what is missing.  Only once, well off the beaten track did we spot a swirl of rubbish in a corner.  Everywhere else was as clean as a whistle.  There were bins but there were also thousands of tourists. How did they do it, on foot with no bin lorries?

Just like this.  As you can see this is an hotel porter, acting like a lorry.  All round the city, every day, several times, we saw incredibly strong men pushing heavy loads up steps and, also, much more dangerously, down steps, surrounded by tourists not looking where they were going, like tourists everywhere.

Among the strong men were rubbish collectors, sweeping, picking up and otherwise accounting for, every last bit of anything that should not be on the ground.  All the rubbish was manually retrieved, placed into huge metal carts and wheeled away.

Actually, no camels but there was a heatwave.  It got up to 37 in my craft room with no one to blame, as I am the genius who designed floor to ceiling windows in a small south-facing room.

I decamped to the dining room, which has no windows and tried to work, I have some dolls waiting patiently.  The illustrations of Venice will return when the dolls are dressed.

Meanwhile, has anyone discovered how to survive in a heatwave?

I don’t know where you are reading this in the world, could be a place where 37 is a normal temperature and you’re wondering what all the fuss is about.  In 2008, when we were in Australia, meeting the new rellies, we visited a zoo on a day where the thermometer hit 40.  It was definitely a bit warm.

The problems arise, not when you are a visitor and can return to your normal conditions, but when your normal conditions have flitted off elsewhere leaving you in the lurch.

Given the global nature of the Internet, I wondered if any readers had routinely encountered the following problems and knew what to do.

How to put moisturiser on your face in a heatwave. I’m asking because I discovered that it slides off on a tide of sweat as fast as you put it on.  I didn’t even bother with the layer that shrinks your pores.  If you closed your pores up like the skin on a cheese, you’d be in trouble in a heatwave, expanding like a balloon.  Perhaps we should ask the former Prince known as Andrew, on televisual record as saying he never sweats, quite how he copes in a heatwave.

How to get to sleep in a heatwave.  I am the one with the south-facing bedroom, which, with three windows, got up to 39 degrees with ease.  I tried a rota of opening and closing curtains, windows and doors to deny entry to the extreme warmth.  I enlisted the aid of my greatest fan, which is floor standing and rechargeable.  I went to bed with my hair wet, dry, tied up and bunched.  I sought sleep on my side, my back, my front, hanging over the edge, propped up, flat and spreadeagled.  If one was really, really rich, one could afford flunkies to hold up one’s massive tits, a mixed blessing of age and genetics, entirely natural and nothing like those famed for their abundance such as Dolly Parton and Kim Kardashian, who must be struggling, at least, and fan underneath, which leads me to the next dilemma..

How to put a bra on in a heatwave.   It took the thick end of an hour. Any strap which did not twist, rolled, taking adjacent fastenings with it.  At one point I had both arms trapped, no boobs in, and three straps like maypoles and thought I might have to live the rest of my life like that, which would have caused a stir in the supermarket, even if I was just popping in, or out, for bottled water.  The OH came to me at this point for help, having his tee-shirt rolled up his back and stuck there.  I rescued him with my teeth to cries of ‘ama, oh damn, ama, no, try again, amateur!’

Who sells expanding fridges?  Day two of the heatwave, no one has been shopping seriously yet but there is not one square inch of fridge space left because anything left out is either mouldy or shrivelled instantly.  What is needed is a fridge with a rubber casing that will expand as you stuff stuff in with all the other stuff.  If there were to be an explosion of multiple chilly things towards the fridge opener, this would be welcome on the hottest day, I feel.  I essayed a tentative trip to the supermarket, finding the ice cream aisle strangely shopper-free, which was explained almost instantly by the complete lack of ice cream, which void had been filled by an engineer in orange overalls, standing waist deep in one of the chest freezers, on his phone, presumably to someone who knew what to do, if anything.  If climate change continues, people will be looking to move to a fridge with house attached.  Talking of which..

How to adapt your house for a heatwave.  Which should really be how to adapt your house for climate change.  The unwise, upon prompting from the government, festooned their houses with solar panels and discovered subsequently that the energy required to shuffle the resultant solar power energy to the National Grid was going to cost quite a bit more than the revenue from the energy created.  No one yet has discovered the cost of replacing a roof which has caved in from the weight of solar panels balanced on the elderly tiles, but I feel it will come with time.  Then there are the wonderful winter heat pumps which require a massive white box, coming in the one colour carefully designed to show the dirt, to be fastened to whichever side of the building is most visible from the road, except in houses with very nice gardens, in which case it will fill the gazebo.

How to have romantic relations in 30 degrees and above.  If you have worked out how to do this, for example, if you are an actual circus acrobat or have discovered a practical use for an indoor parachute harness, please don’t tell me.  My head is full of disturbing images as it is, given the current political situation.

How to stop your bare feet sticking to your sandals.  If you put foot cream on them, you will slide, toes, bunions, instep and all, very painfully out of the front and be wearing your sandals round your ankles, with your bare, scraped feet on the tarmac.  This has never been advertised in the fashion press as ‘A Look’.  If you just inch your bare sweaty feet into the open sandal, one millimetre at a time, they will reach the personalised, foot-shaped depression and instantly lock in. You will be stuck until the first frosts.

How to rescue your expensive new leather sandals that you managed to ease off your feet in a cold shower, that now look like the old rag you scrub the car wheels with.  Sandal manufacturers know all about this, which is why sandals containing just enough leather to make a biker jacket for a bean, cost over £100.  They know you’ll be back for another mortgage-worthy purchase, or be tramping the pavements on your own home-grown callouses.

Let us not talk about other underwear.  Three changes a day, minimum.  I wish I had shares in Marks and Spencer.  Not for the little lace frilly things, or indeed little lace frilly thongs, which you would be able to thread through a needle with quite a small eye after half an hour of wear.  No. I am talking about the full body, solid cotton efforts that encase all the sweaty bits, which are all the bits, with enough absorbency to get to the two hour wear mark and that’s only in privacy, sitting quietly at home.  In public, such as staff meeting, company summer do on the lawn, parent’s evening, you’re on your own.

Hair. The need to wash your hair in the shower three times a day just to stop the sweat trickling out of it into your eyes, making your mascara run until you are completely panda-ed and blind as a bat, is I feel, not something that John Frieda has really tackled.  No amount of conditioner, anti-frizzy, caffeine, cough mixture additive or anything else in any brand at all has addressed this problem.  You can squirt your hair with Australian oil, middle Eastern clarified butter, or basic chip fat, nothing makes any difference.  Out of the shower it is instantly drier than the Gobi desert before you can even get a towel on it and sticking out at a ninety degree angle to every last follicle, except the ones adjacent to your neck which will lie flat as if superglued and sweat down your back, making your bra, which you had been trying to get on, hopefully, as wet as an open topped tourer, with sponge seating, in a car wash.

How to sit on boiling car seats, in shorts.  I wish I knew.  I had to take the OH to an appointment.  I  just about peeled my legs off when I got back without requiring a skin graft but it was a close-run thing.  Soothing skin gel does not stay where you put it, either.  In an instant it was soaking into my ankle sandals.

If climate change continues we will have to adapt very quickly.  The human of the future will have short hollow hair all over that squirts sweat six inches from the body in all directions.  Once procreation ceases we will all have to become nocturnal with huge eyes, like bush babies, and the new trillionaires will be fridge magnets.

No sorry, fridge magnates.  (Blame the heat, I do.)

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Every foothold that could be occupied was taken up.  Not one inch was wasted.  Every little bit of flat roof had a terrace patio on it.  Every roof which did not have a patio on it had an ariel, a cooling tower, a chimney, another construction to ventilate yet another room squeezed into another tiny corner.  To label the result as ‘density of occupation’ understates the case considerably.

I found the view utterly magical and, first into the bathroom every morning, used the time in which the OH was performing his ablutions to sketch the enchanting view from our window.  There was a lot to draw, it took all week and I enjoyed every minute of it.  The sketch is eight and a quarter by four and a half inches wide.  I may show you again because that will not be the finished size in the eight inch square scrapbook.  I may lose a bit off the left, to the frame.

The colouring is done with watercolours.  I took the Stamperia metallic watercolour paint set, which is just over two and a half inches square and has a removable lid to use as a mixing tray and the Kuretake Kobako watercolour set, which has just five pans and a spare, which I replaced with another pan.  The Kuretake watercolours change as you paint, the more water, the greater the change.

Venice is full of opportunities to paint and draw; it has been designated the City of Art for a long time, having been attracting artists in every medium for centuries, by virtue of  the enormous wealth of the city state providing patrons who wished to be immortalised in public buildings by the very best artists.

I did not see anyone else drawing, though very few people were not using camera phones, in fact so many visitors had their phones in their hands I wondered what visitors had done in previous centuries.

Venice is a collection of streets, in which, as every map warns you ‘conditions on the ground may not closely resemble reality.’  The shortness of space has caused another little shop to be built in a tiny gap, so that a straight street now has a bend in it.  The streets themselves are so narrow that most professional basketball players would be unable to lie flat across the street.  There are no powered wheeled vehicles, the only possibility for getting about is on foot or by boat.  There are about 150 canals, 400 bridges and 400 gondoliers.

The OH, at first very annoyingly, until I observed newcomers doing the same, speedily developed the habit of running along a street with his phone held high, shouting that he knew where he was going.  Sadly, Google Maps did not share his conviction.  I learned not to try to keep up with him but to dawdle along and enjoy the shop windows until he came surging past me, going in the opposite direction.  Most maddening was encountering him at a cross street, spinning in a circle.

After a few days without my head in a phone, I began to develop a sense of where we were.

The best place to be is sitting under a big sun umbrella, outside a café, with a long cool drink, sketchbook in hand.  We had ventured to the south of St Mark’s Square, which is, without a doubt, the place to be (of which more later) and found a place to sit and draw and drink overlooking the Grand Canal.  I started drawing when quite suddenly a downpour began.  Waiters rushed out to close the umbrellas and take them in and we sought the safety of the dry colonnades, which surround three sides of the square. So it was a couple of days later when I returned to finish the drawing of the interesting skyline on the other side of the canal.

As you can see I am old, wearing bags, sunglasses and goodness knows what that you can’t see under the table (more bags) and concentrating fiercely.  The finished picture will be here, later.  I have done the drawing but just need to do the colouring in.

I discovered, over the course of a week, that the tolerance of the OH for sitting with a drink while I draw, lasts just as long as the drink. After sixty years of practice, the speed at which he can imbibe is not that surprising.  As the week wore on, my drawing speeded up.  There are few artistic experiences as annoying as the subject vanishing before the oeuvre is complete.

I drew everywhere.

The OH particularly wanted to ascend the twisty tower known as the Scala Contarini del Bovolo.  This tower which twists like a corkscrew as it goes up, was commissioned by the Bovolo family in 1499 with the principle aim of one-upmanship over the neighbours and some extreme showing off.

I did not wish to ascend for the views.  At this stage, several days into the holiday, I was worried that my gammy knee was about to collapse publicly, possibly due to the strain of climbing over so many of the 435 footbridges that span the canals that are the roads in Venice.

So the the OH went up and took a photo of me, sprawled in a tiny courtyard, drawing the tower.

That’s me, sitting on the step with my legs stretched out, drawing furiously.  I did not get this one finished; he went up the tower and back down again much faster than anticipated.

Drawing has much to recommend it as a method of recording an experience.  As I sat, drawing the tower, the observation of ascending tourists taking camera photos of every level and each other at every level, was somewhat inescapable.  I did wonder if they ever looked at the photos after the holiday.

We took photos, lots of them.  Venice has to be one of the most picturesque destinations in Europe. It is gorgeous when resplendent and even prettier in decay. The plan is to collect both sets of photographs in order to print off the best and put them in a scrapbook along with the drawings.

Venice has been dubbed the City of Art.  Wherever we went we found artists of every kind.  Leather workers, lace makers, textile artists, painters, designers and even a few big porcelain dolls masquerading as puppets in a shop dedicated to Carnivale, which happens in February.

The entire city is dedicated to art, appearance, gentility and power.

Of which much more later.  Right now I have some painting to do.

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