Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  Lois has come to join me for an extended weekend, and it seems right that she should be here. She’s been the heartbeat of the journey. Whenever I’ve wavered, she has given me encouragement. If I questioned my motives for undertaking this indulgent fantasy, she said that she was proud to have a dad who would do these things. If I got fed up or felt lonely, as occasionally I did, she told me that self-pity didn’t suit me, that I was bloody lucky to be doing what everyone else dreamed of doing and I should generally buck up my ideas. Anyway I thought she would probably enjoy Venice and its oddities. The evening surfs through on a breaker of mirth and nostalgia.

  The next morning we all walk from the Rialto Market to Fondamenta Nuove to take the water bus to Torcello. It’s a brilliant, warm, sunny day. The city is looking at its most seductive. The faded pinks, browns, umbers, creams, yellows and streaky greys glow. The winding lanes of water, the hump-backed bridges, the endless variety of windows, doorways, door frames, wrought-iron gates and wind guards, tiny gardens and formidable fronts, and the varying heights of the buildings seem juxtaposed with perfect aesthetic judgement. Even decay – crumbling plaster, exposed bricks, braces preventing walls from sliding apart, blistered paint, decaying stonework – has an exquisite lustre. Every twist and turn of our walk throws up another and another perfectly composed cliché of buildings and canals, boats moored or moving at random as if placed just there by some artistic master hand.

  Quite by accident, just before we get to Fondamenta Nuove we stumble across the Chiesa dei Gesuiti strongly recommended by my brother Johnny. ‘Not to be confused with the Chiesa dei Gesuati. Not nearly so interesting,’ he’d said sternly.

  It’s as astounding as he said it would be, not for intrinsic architectural merit or even beauty, but for the singular craftsman­ship of the marble work. Johnny had been particularly taken with the steps leading up to the altar, where the marble is carved to look like a carpet flowing down over them. That is singular, but even more so are the curtains swagged and bagged either side of a pulpit balcony halfway down the nave. It takes me a minute or two to realise that they’re marble, too, and not cloth of some kind. Aside from these wonders, every wall is covered with black-and-white marble patterns of such bold intricacy that they remind me of Maori tattooing. The motifs rise to a nave and apse gilded and painted with hallucinogenic opulence. I might question the aesthetic judgement, but the exhibition of decorative skill is utterly captivating.

  Rather excited by this unexpected glory, we catch the water bus that goes to Torcello by way of Murano, Burano and Mazzorbo. The novelty of travelling by water bus never wears off. The very act of being apart from the land produces different perspectives, and there’s something soothing and leisurely about the movement of the boat. At the same time I have a sense of adventure from witnessing the skill and nerve of the bus driver negotiating the busy waterways, and from admiring the easy expertise of the conductor as he or she loops the mooring rope around the stanchions at each stop and uses the momentum of the boat to draw the bus into the correct part of the station so that we can embark or disembark.

  Most of the passengers disembark at Murano to look at glass blowing or Burano for cloth making. A few get off at Mazzorbo. By the time we get to Torcello after about forty minutes, the passengers have been reduced to a rump.

  Ernest Hemingway spent some months on Torcello in 1948 writing Across the Water and into the Trees (an unreadably bad book). It’s a good place to write because there aren’t many distractions, but on such a day as this, filled with cheer and excitement, with the sun shining and all very right with the world, Torcello is the only place to be. A path leads alongside a narrow canal, past a number of minor trattorias, to the Locanda Cipriani and its gardens, generally acknowledged to be one of the prettiest, if not the prettiest, restaurant to eat at in the whole Venetian lagoon.

  And so it is, flower beds lambent with colour, bosky and shaded. The Locanda has the easy, muscular confidence of a place that knows exactly what it’s doing and is doing it extremely well. It isn’t about the food so much, although the food is pretty good, but about that rare and happy synthesis of the senses, when pleasures at several levels fuse together into seamless experience.

  We sit in the shade. The flowers glimmer around. The tablecloth is crisp with starch, and as brilliant as the egrets on Asmara. The glasses and cutlery glitter. Waiters, dressed in traditional white jackets and black ties, move easily back and forth in that ordered choreography that I find as delightful to watch as it is to be served by. A great restaurateur told me once that perfect service should pick you up in a smile as you come through the door, and hold you in it until you’re placed gently back on the mat ready for departure. That’s the Locanda Cipriani.

  We’re cosseted. We’re flattered. We’re soothed. We’re managed with faultless professionalism and charm. A bottle of Prosecco, please. Brut, signore? Not so dry, please. Extra dry is better, signore; and it is. And so’s the Pinot Bianco that our waiter chooses when I suggest Pinot Grigio, and cheaper. And so are the gnocchi with scampi and chanterelles; and the John Dory with tomatoes and capers; and the pancake filled with sweetened ricotta flamed in Cointreau – my darling, so old fashioned.

  It isn’t great food, challenging or innovative, but it’s very good food. The flavours are genial and generous. Lois scoffs tagliatelle with Gorgonzola and prosciutto, and follows up with turbot with funghi porcini. Rory sets about fish soup and then monkfish and then apple and custard tart. We have a second bottle of the Pinot Bianco. We have grappas. We have coffee. We have fun. There’s an aura of sublimity about the day. It’s a time and a place for chat, for happy reminiscence, story telling, laughter and deep pleasure in life.

  We pay and wander round the corner to the elegant and handsome Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, a Venetian-Byzantine church of red brick, and home of the skull of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. It was founded in AD 639, renovated in AD 864 and then again in AD 1008. It contains some striking mosaics, some of the oldest in the lagoon, one a particularly energetic version of the Last Judgement, a rather disturbing Harrowing of Hell, the magnificent calm of an eleventh-century Virgin Hodegetria framed against a sheet of golden mosaic, and a wonderful hammerbeam roof. There’s just enough culture to instil a scintilla of serious purpose to offset the delicious indulgence of lunch.

  Possibly indulgence won out in the end, because, when we return to Venice proper, we go for a gondola ride. Brutally expensive, so naff, such fun.

  It’s a story of easy days, easy company. Each morning Lois and I walk from the flat I’ve rented in Dorsoduro; find breakfast of coffee, orange juice and buns filled with prosciutto and cheese; meet Rory; journey by water ferry, potter on foot; take a glass of Prosecco whenever we pass a bar; eat cicchetti, those little Venetian savoury nibbles of ham, mortadella, or cheese or salami or this and that at Al Merca, washing them down with un’ ombra, a glass of white wine; lunch at Al Corvo (indifferent); and dinner at Antico Pizzo Risorto, a curious dive near the Rialto, where we discover that the smart thing to do is to eat not what’s on the menu, but what’s off it.

  Lois and I pay homage to the Rialto Market, she marvelling at the brilliance of the vegetables and wrinkling her nose at the fishy smells. We wander through the Palazzo Ducale, so elegant on the outside, so opulent within. It isn’t difficult to imagine the great trading empire being controlled from these rooms, walls hung with monumental paintings by Carpaccio, Bellini, Pisanello and Titian celebrating the glory of Venice and its rulers, ceilings illuminated by Tintoretto, Tiepolo and Veronese, with their plasterwork of luxuriant exuberance, their carved wood and marble floors. The sense of prestige and pragmatism is palpable. Here the courses of argosies were chartered, delegations from Ottoman emir, Persian satrap, Russian czar and French king were received, listened to, politely dealt with, money lent, trade deals struck.

  ‘You couldn’t do it now,’ says Lois after a long silence.

  I don’t suppose you could. Those we
re the days when wealth was put on public display, the outward and visible sign of power and commercial dominance.

  What an extraordinary creation Venice had been, a City State with an elected governing body and an elected leader, even if the Doge was president for life, and a bureaucracy that matched that of the EU – Doge, Council of Ten, Signoria, (the Minor Council), Quarantia (the Grand Council), Sapientes, Consiglio de Pregadi (the senate), Savi and Savi Grandi, magistratura and so on and so on, layer upon layer of ledger-keepers, note-takers, archivists, customs officers, fetchers and carriers, made up from the great merchant families, the Rezzonicos, Foscaris, Pandolfos, Barbaros, Ghisis, Morosinis, Loredans and Veniers, whose colossal wealth built the palaces, houses and churches – monuments to Mammon as much as God – that still flank the canals, consummate façade after consummate façade.

  In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Venice gradually ceased to trade in goods and began to trade on its history. It translated the legacy of its commercial past into the commercial present. The city’s mythology was perpetuated as the basis for its economic survival. Once its highways and byways were a Babel of Turkish, Persian, Lebanese, Indian, English, French and Spanish, the languages of the Baltic states, foreigners come to trade, borrow money, sell. Little by little they gave way to a babble of languages from around the world as tourists came to gawp at the legacy of Venice’s glory, and take away souvenirs of it.

  For Venice has turned itself into the most beautiful shopping centre in the world. Its innumerable thoroughfares scintillate with shops peddling goods for all tastes and occasions. Glassware and tableware, fancy pens and fancy papers, fancy fabrics for fancy houses. There’re clothes shops and shoe shops, bag shops and scarf shops, shops festooned with Murano glass, shops piled high with unimaginable dross, workshops and antique shops. And then there’re gelaterias and bars, cafés and trattorias in which to refresh between jousts with culture and commerce.The streets are one vast Milky Way of enticements to buy, the calls to spend ubiquitous and constant.

  It would be easy to dismiss this insistent commercialism as vulgar and degrading, as the dying mutter of Venice’s glorious trading past, but I prefer to see it in a different light: as evidence of the Venetians’ determination to survive, of their tenacity to keep their city going and to continue to live in their city by whatever means possible. In other words, the endless shops are evidence of a vital spirit, not the gesture of a dying culture. For beneath all this commercial armoury lies the steel will of the Venetians. They’re survivors. Permanent inhabitants may have dropped from around 100,000 to 55,000 since the 1970s, but those who do remain turn their hand to whatever business is necessary to keep the city alive.

  We have lunch at Antiche Carampane in Sestiere San Polo, handsome, well set up, and, like the Locanda Cipriani, confident by habit. We’re each given a little paper cornet of tiny fried shrimps. They crunch like cornflakes and taste of the lagoon. They pop up again, worked into polenta as thick as double cream, with fleshy slices of funghi porcini on top. Then moeche (or molecche), tiny soft shelled crabs, dipped in egg and fried; not drowned in egg and parmesan and then fried, as was once the way. A practice frowned upon these days, so I’m told, but still carried on at home. These are soft and crunchy, the egg and cheese in which they’ve been dipped just nudging the delicacy of that seaweed-and-shrimp sweetness of the crustacean. It’s proper, old-school Venetian cooking, artfully building on the inherent qualities of the ingredients, perfected through repetition, season by season.

  Venice may be filled with pizzerias, spaghetterias, bars and eateries of every hue peddling gastronomic junk that keeps the vast majority of its visitors happy, but when it comes to the culinary pleasures of its permanent residents, there’re still plenty of places that keep to the old ways

  We take the water bus back to the flat, struck, as every visitor to Venice is struck, by the changes darkness brings to the city. By day a gallery of aesthetic delights, by night it metamorphosises into an eighteenth-century theatre of mysteries. The precise forms of the buildings vanish into darkness. Only a doorway here, a window there, a hump-backed bridge over a silver-threaded canal are framed by some adjacent light. The black, slick water flickers and undulates, stirred by the sulphurous orange-lit boats moving along them, pulling into bright stops, caves of light, for passengers to disembark and others to embark.

  There’re other rambles, further bottles of wine and extended lunches and dinners with Rory, and then, suddenly, it’s time for Lois to go. We hug and hug on the landing stage as the water bus for the airport draws in. I long for her to stay, but these three days have been a gift and perhaps given her a taste of the city. She can always return when she’s older, perhaps share it with her own children one day. At least she knows of it and about it.

  She rings from the airport in distress. Susan, who’s been minding my elderly dog, Joe, while I’ve been away, has rung her as she couldn’t get through to me. Joe has a burst eardrum caused by a growth behind his eye, and is in great pain. He has to be put down. Do I want to come back to be with him? I’m devastated. I do, but I know I can’t get there for at least two days. Joe will continue to suffer all that time. I tell Lois that it would be better for Joe to go as soon as possible. She agrees. We’re in tears. Joe has been a constant in our lives, a dog of inherent sweetness and occasional snappiness. I feel bereft.

  I make my way back to the flat in deep sadness. Joe is the latest of several friends who’ve died in the course of these travels. The losses are distressing, not simply because the particular ease and warmth of affection, conversations and exchanges covering decades bound up in them have come to an end, but also because I sense the sum of humanity shrinking and time sneaking up on me.

  For a moment my natural solitude turns to loneliness. For the best part of six months I’ve been travelling alone, by choice. Friends have joined me briefly. I’ve forged friendships along the way, but most of the time I’ve been on my own, and been happy with it. It seems to me that solitude is different from being alone in the same way that being alone is different from loneliness.

  ‘What I am none cares or knows,

  My friends desert me like a memory lost:

  I am the self-consumer of all my woes –

  They rise and vanish in oblivious host...’

  So begins John Clare’s poem ‘I am’, surely the most melancholy lines in all British poetry and ones that define the essence and egocentricity of loneliness.

  Solitude, on the other hand, is the chosen state of the solitary. It is both active and passive. Solitude doesn’t preclude relating to what is going on around, but it’s unlikely that the solitary will feel entirely a part of it. While I enjoyed the concert by the ex-Broadway star on Favignana, I never felt the full weight of the communal experience. I remained outside it, and was happy to return to being alone afterwards.

  Perhaps solitude is one of the defining conditions of being a writer. By nature, I’m pretty gregarious, but writing is something I have to do on my own. No one else can do it for me. Travelling, too. The moment someone else joins me, the whole dynamic of travel is altered. Their company, their personality, their responses provide a different prism through which a particular experience is reflected. If I’m strictly honest, they’re a distraction, too. How much easier it is to chat away to them than it is to note what’s going on around me. I’m aware that the observations in my notebooks drop by about 75 per cent when there’s someone else about.

  At the same time, my various companions have added immeasurably to the texture and pleasures of my travels. There have been times when having someone with whom to share events and experiences has provided me with pleasures that I would never have had on my own. Nevertheless, I’ve been happy when they’re gone and I can resume my solitary rambles.

  It’s easy to slip from solitude into being lonely. Being lonely means you’ve lost the habit of communicating with others. You’ve retreated into yourself. You have to guard against s
lipping from being alone into loneliness. ‘If you’re lonely when you’re alone,’ said Jean Paul Sartre, ‘you’re in bad company.’

  Venice is a good city in which to feel bereft. There’s a melancholy about it, particularly at this time of year. Summer’s at an end. In the early morning the canals and the buildings are cloaked in mist. There’s a slight chill in the air at night. I continue my rambles around the city, solitary now – Rory left shortly after Lois – to Cannaregio, and Castello, to the Giudecca, to the Rialto to take pleasure in the smells and colours of the market once more. It seems to me that Venice is uniquely constructed to absorb what, at times, appears to be a limitless number of tourists. We can be dispersed throughout that vast labyrinth of calli, sotoporteghi, rami, salizzarde, fondamente, rughe and rughette, campi, campielli and corti, or along the watery canale and rii, or sent off to innumerable churches, palaces and museums spread across the seven districts or dispatched further to the islands scattered like odd-shaped plates across the lagoon.

  I do what tourists are supposed to do and gorge on the city’s beauty as I might on a vast box of chocolate truffles of unforgettable richness. I fall under the spell of the Basilica dei Frari, its vaulting red-brick spaces, its combination of power and grace, and with the Pesaro Madonna by Titian in particular. In the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, among a group of kneeling figures, is a boy, a teenager perhaps, looking directly out of the picture, solemn, owlish, challenging. His fierce gaze draws me into the scene.

  I listen to a man playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on a glass harmonica made from wine glasses, the eerie, resonant notes hanging in the air. I eat grilled eel and polenta at the Osteria di Quatro Ferri, the flesh of the eel melting beneath a crisp lacquer of skin, the polenta oozy and neutral. I go to the Guggenheim Museum, and am refreshed by the iconoclastic vitality of twentieth-century art after the smothering opulence of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.