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Ask and you shall receive.
Here are a slew of pictures of the recent freakish snow that recently pummeled Venice, contributed by Marisa Pellegrini-Peoples (storm of February 21st), Rob Thompson and David Hunter (storm of March 3rd). Click on any of the pictures for enlargements.
I really envy those that were there during the mini-blizzards. In the year and a half I lived in Venice, I never saw so much as a flake.
Here are Marisa's pics.
Here's a shot (from a webcam) of the beach in Jesolo that David Hunter sent me. He remarked how he'd never seen snow on an ocean beach like this before.
Tom Kaminski, then visiting Venice from Chicago, wrote me an email describing the scene during the second storm:
The total accumulation was around 3 or 4 inches, and everyone we talked to said it was a freakish occurrence. One young man we talked to said that he had been brought up in Grado, and he had never seen snow on the ground in Venice
Here's what happened We arrived in Venice on the day of the snow (Thursday, 3 March). As we were walking through a portion of Castello in the late afternoon, we noticed some heavy, wet snow in the air. We stopped in a bar for a snack and to warm up, then we went into a Scuola [note from NH ... Scuola of San Giorgio, in Castello] to see a group of Carpaccios. By the time we came out half an hour later, the ground was covered and the wind was blowing fiercely. We were staying way off in the northwest corner of Cannaregio, so we took the #1 to S. Marcuola and walked from there--about half a mile. It was a hard walk through very bad wintry conditions.
We got to our hotel and simply decided to stay in for the evening. It continued to snow well into the night. When we got up the next morning, there were at least 3 inches on the ground (we're from Chicago, so we know snow).
When we walked to the S. Alvise waterbus stop next morning, we had to trudge through snow or slush all the way. Of course, we didn't have any boots, so our shoes got soaked. We decided to spend the morning in the Correr, and when I looked out one of the windows in the early afternoon, I could see that the sun had already cleared the snow from the north side of the piazza.
For the next several days, though, we often ran across snow in narrow calles or shaded places--for some reason, snow lingered in the whole area around the Salute for the entire week. It was quite an experience.
A reader from Australia wanted to know how to book tickets for La Fenice. No problem. Charta.it has an English language e-commerce site here, including gives a schedule of events. Also lets you book at other venues in Venice, such as the Malibran.
Here's a Serenissima-themed painting I goaded my friend, Tom McKinley, into painting for me ten years ago. It hangs in our dining room.
Tom and I roomed together in boarding school in the 70's, and he's since gained a reputation as one of San Francisco's top contemporary painters. He's represented at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, where he had a major show at the end of last year.
The painting is not actually of a real place, as such. The palazzi exist, but just not next to each other. A Venetian capriccio.
The Berggruen Gallery has one of those pesky flash sites that doesn't let you link directly to a specific page, but if you want to see more of Tom's work, choose menu >> artists >> Tom McKinley.
Don't confuse him with this Tom McKinley, what ever you do.
I haven't see Tom for quite a while, so if he reads this, he'll be happy to know his work now sits next to a pretty little Moroccanesque tableau that gets excellent light (and looks rather like one of his paintings).
Who's that girl fumbling with the map out in the Bacino in front of the Paglia Bridge? And who is the owner of the jaunty boater hat in her lap?
It's another Veniceblog Mystery Photo, and for a change this time, I actually know the answer.
A few hints. The date is July 7, 1905. It's the last day of her honeymoon. Both bride and groom are Americans. Both are personalities that would be instantly familiar to you, though they were unknowns at the time. Her husband (presumably the unseen hatless one taking the picture) would go on to distinguish himself with vessels somewhat larger than the gondola seen here, though that is not really his claim to fame.
Ah, but I've already said too much. The winner will receive the admiration of all and a lovely little book of watercolor paintings of the Venetian lagoon.
UPDATE: So much for that mystery. Michael nailed it in less than an hour from the time I posted it. Not even a single wrong guess. See the comment below for the answer.
At the 2002 Venice Biennale, there was an interesting art exhibit called Ashes and Snow that was held within the Arsenale in the old rope-making factory called the Corderie. It used photography, sound, film and curious art installations to vivify the spiritual intersection between humans and animals in the wild. The exhibit has just now come to New York City, hosted by the Husdon River Park, and I recommend it. Kids will like it too.
But cool as the exhibit was, I hate to say it, cooler still was penetrating a corner of the Arsenale itself. Once the Venetian Republic's most secret sanctum and core of its military might, the Arsenale is still a place that is largely off-limits to the public. At its peak, it's said that 16,000 men worked there, with walls that were 2 miles in circumference. Today, it still occupies an estimated 1/7th of the entire area of historic Venice. Yet few people -- Venetians or tourists -- really know the place.
I couldn't get shots of the interior of the Corderie, since they restricted photography during the show, but here are a couple photo links I dug up.
This one is from the Provincia di Venezia, and while it gives you the general idea, bear in mind that during the exhibit it looked vastly different: all the windows were darkened, and dramatic, hyper-theatrical lighting was installed. The Provincia's site says, in Italian, that there are 84 columns that span the building's 1000 foot length, supporting a ceiling over 60 feet high (though that seems exaggerated to me). Apparently, it was built starting in 1578 by architect Antonio Di Ponte, the same man who beat out Palladio for the design of the Rialto Bridge. Scroll down the page and look at the mask with the open mouth built into the wall. That's where the finished rope emerged to be used on the ships, like a giant dental floss dispenser.
Here's another look inside. This one shows an actual art exhibition in progress, and gives you sense of the possibilities of the place.
Below is a scan of a contact print of panoramic photo I made outside the exhibit (click on it for an enlargement). Below that is a shot of the exterior, with my then 2 year old daughter walking in the rain.
Unfortunately, getting a peak at the rest of the Arsenale is not so easy. The Italian Navy, perhaps fittingly, has a prime chunk of it right by the main entrance. You can sail through (but not stop) on a vaporetto to/from Fondamenta Nuove. Otherwise, you have to wait for exhibitions or the rare day when the gates are thrown open to the public. There are some private cantieri (boat workshops) there, too, I've read, as well as grand renovation and commercial project plans.
I certainly hope the Arsenale gets the reinvention it deserves. I think of the old train station in Paris that became the Musee D'Orsay. Or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, formerly the Tsar's winter palace. Reexpression fights urban decay and architectural entropy while preserving heritage and making cities more vital and liveable.
And besides, the ghosts of all those thousands and thousands of ship builders and galley slaves deserve a little company from time to time, no?
The entrance to the Arsenale near the naval museum.
As recently as a year ago, I worked two blocks from the main branch of the New York Public Library at 41st and 5th, in mid-town Manhattan. When I had heavy writing or thinking projects, I would sometimes set up a working camp at one of the long wooden tables in the library's football-field-sized Rose Reading Room rather than showing up at the Madison Avenue ad agency that writes my check. For connectivity, there are ethernet jacks built into some of the tables. For inspiration, you can lean back and gaze at the newly restored Beaux Arts ceiling, with its dreamy cloud paintings (kinda like Tiepolo canvasses before any of the figures were painted in.) And, of course, for information, there's a leviathan research collection (with a rather byzantine system of getting at it) from which I've mined more than a few of the stranger factoids reported in this blog over the last couple years.
For those of you with book mold allergies or who live outside the Gotham footprint, do not despair. Last week, the library announced it was opening a digital image archive that:
provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
So I thought I'd give it a spin and see what kind of Venice-related images where the archive held*.
It wasn't as vast as I'd hoped. All tolled, there are 66 images that come up when you search under the term "Venice", and many of these are not really of the lagoon city (eg., Merchant of Venice or Venice, California) If you use a term like "doge", you get a few more, so perhaps poking around the search engine can shake more images loose.
Despite the slim pickings, there's some browseworthy arcana.
Like this image, of what is listed as Teatro Goldoni. If this is an set inside the theater, it's pretty amazing. And what's with the people sitting at tables like it's dinner theater? Strange. Explain this image to me if you can.
Here's an engraving of Robert Browning's funeral cortege headed toward the cemetery island of San Michele, with Codussi's Chiesa di San Michele in Isola -- the first renaissance church in Venice -- in the background. It's from a painting by Henry Bacon in the collection of Colonel Gouraud (a strange provenance, as you'll see if you follow the link.)
Here's a Venice-themed Wills's "cigarette card" from the early 20th century ... apparently some kind of collectible for the soon-to-be-cancerous set. Here's another card, this one of the Orologio, from the Player's company. You can still find these things on Ebay from time to time.
Here are marble floor patterns from the Basilica of San Marco from a German book published in 1842. Another pattern from the same book is here.
Here's a hand-tinted antique photo of the pre-carbonized La Fenice, vintage unknown.
I hope they add more. I always keep an eye out for digital archives that might contain Venetian material. If you have a spare half hour or so, register at http://www.britishpathe.com/ and poke through the over 3,500 hours of newsreel footage archived there. There's lots of Venice content, and it's a great deal of fun, but it's a bit tedious to plow through, and the "free" stuff is low res.
*Unfortunately I can't actually post any of the images here, since licensing them would require mortgaging my house. Creative Commons, anyone?
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