TARNISHED, BUT INDELIBLE

by Miriam Hancock

Venice is sinking. This knowledge shows us a picture of a beautiful and ancient relic that is about to disappear. Such a romantic image gives the city an air of ephemerality that, at least in my case, makes one desperate to go experience the beauty before it fades away: you must see the last bloom of the city now, or you might miss your chance.

Everybody wants to travel to Venice someday, take a gondola ride, get lost in the winding, narrow streets and alleys. I myself always dreamed of it, and when I went early this summer it enchanted me. As I walked around reading historical plaques and visiting museums, I realized how much Venice has changed over the years and how different it has become. The more time I spent there, the more my image of the city expanded and changed. Every day the city presented itself as a different vignette that I drew together and tried to make sense of.

Several hundred years ago Venice was a center of commercial trade. The colors and sites of the city were dazzling. Facades of building used to be covered with frescoes painted by famous artists like Titian and Tintoretto. Mooring poles for the gondolas were painted in varied, blinding colors to represent the families that owned them. Gondolas were even more sumptuous, gilded with gold, covered with intricate ironwork, and draped in silks.

Now our idea of Venice is rather different. Solid colors — some chipped or freshly painted — or even just simple stone have replaced the vibrant frescoes. Both the gondolas and their mooring are less ostentatiously decorated. After several laws imposed on the building and decorating of gondolas, they are now all painted black and limited to very strict forms of decorations, giving them all a sleek, uniform appearance. The city looks muted and worn, clearly showing the years it has lived through, yet without marring the beauty of the city.

However, the city's tremendous aging has not caused its appeal to flag. Thanks to numerous tourists wandering the narrow streets, Venice is a bustling, crowded place to walk through. But, due to the web-like layout of the city and the canals, the streets and alleys are infinite and winding, often leading even the most careful map readers to dead ends. Things grow quiet quickly once you move away from big attractions; even a mere hundred yards from San Marco’s Square a street can be completely deserted. Venice gives off an air of solitude that emphasizes the antiquity of the city.

I almost never put my camera away because every little piece of something that I stumbled upon needed to be revered and remembered, because despite all the bustling shops filled with Murano glass and modern designer shoes, you feel like you are walking through an antique. Every street shows signs of the passage of time, be it an ornate, outdated doorknocker, chipped and twisted, or the faded outlines of a mural on a wall. Venice mixes its history and modernization together on every surface, so you feel like you are moving through time and what age you will end up in is dependent on where you cast your eye.

In my time in Venice I saw many different cities; I saw a place that is fading and sinking into water; I saw an ancient city, filled with antiques and mementos of the past; I saw modernized streets, full of designer clothes, the latest technology, ogling tourists. Each image spoke to me in a different way, and likewise attracted me. Maybe what attracts people to Venice is that, whatever its appearance it had or has transformed into, the beauty lies in the lingering echoes of the past. Maybe we cannot really understand what it is, but whatever picture you see of the city, we can agree it is something palpable that we all share.
 

              About Miriam Hancock