20111020 Thursday. Venice. Heavy rain, hard cold and wind. My weather. And off I went, umbrella in hand, thankful for the turtleneck shirt and wool hat and socks I packed in that ever too heavy suitcase. I walked the San Marco paroisse (?) for a couple of hours in the morning and disproved the shopping theory. It is possible to spend a lot of money on light items. It's called jewellery. The previous night when i had wandered in circles looking for the hotel, I noted some interesting shops. After the big box and internet shopping lifestyle, it's a bit startling to wander into a shop that specializes in magnifying glass handles. You wonder how they make a living. I found a shop that sold hand marbled papers, and that was my rhapsody.
I'm a bad Christmas shopper because the ratio of gifts to purchases for moi is a bit skewed. Venice is no exception. My grandmother travelled in Italy with a theatre troupe in the 1960s. She brought us back dresses, blue tiered birthday cake with a ribboned waist for Lynn and a slimming taupe a-line for me (what waist). She also gave me a gift of a silver charm bracelet from Rome which I still have, and a small cameo ring which i lost in a high school washroom in grade seven after washing my hands (to Susan Blampied I believe, a foul frizzy red-haired toughie from the other side of decarie). So that's the long way round to justify buying a cameo ring, and coral drop earrings which Meme had also given me years later (and I lost in some head swinging frenzy on dance floor, pre khaleegy, in university). Redemption. And there were a couple of trinkets acquired for friends too. ;)
I did head to the big palazzo, but the wind gusts and rain were stretching on foul for even me. So I stayed on the back streets. Lunch was a small restaurant, a prix fixe menu, chosen mostly because of rain saturation and general drippieness. Warm, dry, hot food. Spaghetti vongole, veal marsala, mixed greens, cappucino. Good. One of the boat guys came in for lunch. He was wearing a pair of navy blue farmer john bibbed and zippered gortex overalls. A bowl of "red", a glass of wine, an espresso, banter with the proprietor. Fine skinned and elegant features, a coiffed head of gray, eyeglasses of the latest vintage, he looked more professorial than proletarian. A Yankee seaman would be broad and ruddy, and his cologne would hint more at diesel than giannfranco ferre. Italy.
The rain had stopped by the afternoon, but the wind was still big, so I stayed inland, and ventured in the other direction. A square, an art gallery (francis bacon), a church, another square, academia bridge over the main canal, a vaparetto. A cappuccino in there somewhere. By now my ankle was throbbing, and I was deep cold and damp. Back to the hotel. Naaaaapppppppp.
The opera starts early. I was in an obstructed view seat, or what I would have imagined in another time to have been chaperone seating. Now this was a theatre, a six tiered birthday cake of gilded flourishes and red velvet, angels, cherubs, trompe l'oeil, chandeliers, on every surface everywhere. There wasn't a blank space for your eye to rest on. I was in a second tier box beside the stage, and it was exactly as I imagined, an arched hallway with little doors running the curve. A stern woman usher wearing a precise suit trots you to your box and opens it with a key (and locks you in, not).
Il Figaro is a Mozart opera, a farce unlike the usual tragedy, and a relatively early opera for the genre, with a harpsichord and speaky-singy bits. I thought I would bail at intermission, but even just hearing the music was lovely. So I stayed all three hours, in the dark, at the back of the box, keeping the couple in front of me from tumbling onto the floor with passionate abandon. Ha, bet they loved me!
Cold wet and windy night. Thank g&d i knew where i was, and with full confidence shuffled off quickly in a dark direction. Cafe counter, bought a sandwich and a marmalade cookie, back to my room, watched ghadafi news on CNN. Sleep.
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