Every day in Venice, things fade into history. Maybe a shop that’s been open for 100 years closes its doors. Or a nose from a bas-relief face at the top of a 500-year-old palazzo tumbles unseen into a canal in the early morning hours. Or a folio from the Cinquecento unexpectedly dissolves into dust as a librarian at the Marciana opens it. Every day, Venice suffers the death of a thousand cuts. It’s like entropy’s showcase, a laboratory where every day it is newly proved that beauty that can thrive in decline.
That’s not to say that Venetians and others who love Venice don’t, as Thomas put it, “rage against the dying of the light”. It’s just that they pick their battles. Holding back the sea. Fighting moto ondoso. Restoring masterpieces. Reconstructing landmark churches. All without the illusion that they are doing more than forestalling the inevitable. If the idea of letting go unsettles you, then you will be unsettled in Venice.
But twice in its history, within a span of the last 100 years, Venice suffered unendurable losses. And both times, with a characteristic bravado, it said no to entropy. It would not let go.
The first time was when the campanile in Piazza San Marco collapsed on July 14, 1902. It was such a blow to civic self-image, such a neutering, that it had to be reversed. The bell had to be unrung. It was then that the expression (doctrine, really) “com’era. dov’era was born: the campanile was to be rebuilt as it was (“com’era”), where it was (“dov’era”). Venetians were not going to face life without that campanile, and so they marshaled all their resources and resourcefulness to reject time’s dictate. And within 10 years, the campanile was back on its feet.
The second time was January 29, 1996, when La Fenice burned. The morning after, standing in its ashes, Mayor Massimo Cacciari pointedly made the same vow: “com’era, dov’era”. From the day it vanished physically, La Fenice continued to remain alive as an idea, an irrepressible part of a city that refused to let it pass away.
And so, as we approach La Fenice’s physical rebirth this Sunday, it is much more than a triumph for opera lovers. It’s proof that sometimes the spirit is stronger than the stone.
And that death, every now and then, has an escape clause: com’era, dov’era.
===========================================================
Other La Fenice related posts on Veniceblog you may be interested in ….
Short La Fenice reconstruction Web Site review
Another short essay on the first concert I heard at La Fenice
http://croweau.typepad.com/
Posted by: EAU | February 08, 2007 at 08:24 PM