« November 2004 | Main | January 2005 »
Follow the sequence to see how New Year's was rung in in the Piazza this year.
Everyone crams into the Piazza with a flask of liquor or a bottle of prosecco. At midnight, everyone breaks for the Bacino and angles for a prime spot to watch the fireworks.
Happy New Year from Veniceblog. Have a bellini on us.
The Brandolin Group ... the folks who are working on the restoration of the Clock Tower in Piazza San Marco ... have installed two new webcams at the top of the structure. Both provide excellent, high res images ... 640 x 480.
The first, seen below, looks down on the Piazzetta/Molo and toward the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Click here to see a live view. The colors at night are uber-dramatic.
The second cam (below) looks at the end of the Piazza opposite the Basilica, toward the Correr Museum. Click here for a live view. Not such a great night image (as you can see below!), but quite wonderful when the sun is up.
These new cams are almost (but not quite) enough for me to forgive the Brandolin Group for the inexplicable, wacky mural of the Tower of Pisa that has been draped over the entire span of the Clock Tower while it's being fixed. (See the picture below) 
Brandolin has an explanation, which I won't bother you with. Suffice it to say that most Venetians truly hate the mural and dream of tearing it to bits.
Veniceblog reader Marisa Pelligrini sent me a short article she wrote and photo illustrated in 1998 about an improbable Italian gondolier who plied the Great Pond in Central Park, Manhattan in an authentic Venetian gondola. It originally appeared in the now defunct magazine called The Journal of Italian Food, Wine & Travel. Click on the thumbnail to get the full picture.
Is this fellow still active, I wonder?
My wife and I have long been interested in screen printing, especially silk screen techniques. This holiday season, we've begun to work on some Venetian themed images destined for art prints, and in some cases, fabrics for handbags, etc. I like things enormous, so the resolution of the original images is very, very high, allowing me to scale to poster size and beyond.
Here are 4 images from a Pop series, with maximum 3 colors, using a kind of Kodalith technique on photo images as the starting point. Click on the images for an enlargement.
This is Il Redentore on the island of La Giudecca, of course. (That's today's Gazzettino in the sky.) Here's a variation.
Next, the front of the Basilica.
And here's a graphic of the Bacino, looking toward San Giorgio Maggiore. This one is perhaps the best suited for fabric printing.
Each time I've visited Venice over the last 4 or 5 years, I've brought high quality digital audio recording devices. I've skulked throughout the city wearing headphones and porting a stick holding a big fuzzy grey capsule (a wind isolation blimp) that contained a great stereo field microphone attached to a DAT recorder. 
Mission: capture the remarkable ambient sounds of the city ... sounds that we don't generally promote past the subconscious level, but nonetheless play a huge role in the magic gestalt of the Venetian experience.
Over the last couple weeks, I've been cleaning and primping the recordings, and am ready to start trickling them out here on Veniceblog.
The recordings will all be in .mp3 format, though eventually, I'll make an audio CD available. To listen, of course, you'll need any sort of .mp3/digital audio player software, such as iTunes or Windows Media Player -- both which will allow you to convert the recordings to CD for use in a conventional CD player.
This first recording is of the 6 o'clock PM bells as heard from a a quiet courtyard in Dorsoduro. It lasts about 7.5 minutes, beginning with a walk through noisy Campo Santa Margherita, crossing over the bridge into Campo San Barnaba, finally arriving in the little canalside courtyard just as the bells begin their course.
Windows users: right click on this link, choose "save target as" and specify where you want the file to be saved. Or simply left click to auto download it to your temporary folder.
Mac users: click and hold down this link, then choose "download link to disk" and specify where you want the file to be saved.
Please alert me to any trouble you have getting/hearing the file. Much more coming.
Veniceblog reader, Celina Rostam, was the first person to successfully identify the spot depicted in the mystery photo. It's in Cannereggio, off Strada Nova. Not only have I crossed that bridge - Ponte Pasqualigo - hundreds and hundreds of times, but I always used to enter the Canal Grande beneath it whenever returning from the northern lagoon in my boat. Here's the map Celina sent me, followed by a blurry, heavily enlarged photo she had taken from the window of a nearby hotel. Click on the images for enlargements.
.
The church in the background is S. Felice. All my reference books showed its splendid front facade (by M. Codussi), not the campanile or side of the church shown in the photo. Hence I never put one and one together. What really threw me, though, was the tall building in the left foreground in the antique picture. It no longer exists, replaced by the one story building seen above. This was the site of the former Standa department store, and now, the new (and controversial) Billa grocery store.
So any day now, I'll be sending Celina her book. Celina beat another Veniceblog reader, Jonathan Glixon, by about 2 hours. Jonathan, who's actually living in Venice at the moment, reports that the area in the right foreground where tables, chairs and shoes are stacked in the antique photo now often has pottery displayed for sale ... no doubt an inherited right that goes back God knows how far. Since he was so close (and so nice), I'll be sending Jonathan a book, too.
Recent Comments