Venice thoughts, random

1. Pretty isn't really my thing, and I have a very limited tolerance for pretty pretty, plus everyone kept telling me that there is no time of year when the tourist concentration in Venice is not horrendous, so I was a bit apprehensive that going there would be very hard work. I wanted to go because of the romance of Venice's past, but not the eighteenth-century masked carnival bonbonniere type romance; rather the incredible muscular Venice of the middle ages. There was a time when this one city was a world superpower of a sophisticated and somewhat frightening type. (This is brilliantly conveyed in Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolò historical novels. I recommend these strongly, as long as you don't mind getting hooked on a long series; I read them in the space of about a week, getting home from work, reading until I went to bed, and then the same the next day, including lunchtime. The hero spends some time as an unofficial Venetian amabassador to Trebizond, and also at the doomed court of King James of Cyprus which Venice eventually annexes.) Anyway, Venice was not bad at all. I hadn't got that when Napoleon described the Piazza San Marco as the most elegant drawing room in Europe, this implied a certain homeliness. When I was there, except in the middle of the afternoon, it wasn't even badly crowded. In the afternoon it was pretty packed in front of San Marco, but the people who complain about this should try walking from my Cambridge flat to Pret a Manger for a coffee on a Saturday in the summer or before Christmas; there's a similar level of retardation, and in Venice the pay-off is much better. (Pret coffee has really gone downhill.) I found the city likeable in a way strangely at odds with everything I have ever read about it. On the train on the way back I read Jan Morris's Venetian Bestiary, which almost put me off the place again, with its fey tone. Compared to all the "magical, mysterious Venice" literature the city itself seemed oddly unpretentious.

2. An Italian friend gave me two good pieces of advice about visiting Venice: a) get lost, because you will anyway, so just go with it and see what you come across, and b) book everything in advance. You will notice that these two instructions rather contradict each other. You can book San Marco for free, and as long as you arrive there within your ten-minute time slot you can go straight to the head of the long queue. I also booked a really fascinating tour of the orologia, with its complex mechanism driving the unusual fifteenth-century clock. My guide was a very nice student (doing Oriental Studies) with a strong Venetian accent; she seemed to be calling the clockwork "geowhizz". I haven't yet worked out what English word this might have represented.

3. I don't know why people say Americans don't do irony; the ones I meet don't seem to do anything else. Going round the administrative parts of the Doges' Palace on an English, that is to say American, tour, my co-visitors never seemed to stop chuckling drily at the description of a society based on idealistic principles run by a concealed bureaucracy, traduced by its pursuit of its own interests abroad, reluctantly using torture to protect itself from internal threats, encouraging informers, responding to every new crisis by setting up another body with extraordinary powers to act irregularly against a few for the security of many. I suppose one should give the Americans credit for this, but it did get a bit tedious after a while.

4. Particulière is my favourite word to overhear in French.

5. I wish people would do as they are told when they are being tourists, especially with regard to photographs, and especially in churches. If I were in charge of a big church like San Marco these would be my rules.
a. no photos
b. no speaking above a whisper
c. no explications
d. mobile phones off
e. on entering everyone must sit in silence in the nave for ten minutes
f. after that you can walk around looking at things, quietly
g. do as the vergers say! they have electric cattle prods.
More realistically, if I'm genuinely trying to promote a sense of sacred space
g. vergers will escort you out if you break any rule for a second time
I think that people would get something out of being forced to sit still in silence for ten minutes. It might be harsh on those with children though -- maybe I'd have a separate side-chapel for them to sit in, and talking would be allowed there just in a whisper not out loud. The vergers would have to be people without a very judgemental attitude to sin, e.g. probably Franciscans. At their best, Franciscans can give off an air of love even while remonstrating with one for terrible behaviour. (But not in Jerusalem, the only place where I have been shouted at by an angry Franciscan.)