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How do we first see Venice? It’s funny how time and space can affect the way we see the magical mirage that is the Italian city, or how we may see ourselves in in, writes Chris Wallace. After many trips, the New York-based photographer and travel writer shares an ode to Venice - a city which, even up close, appears to dance and recede behind a series of veils.
BY CHRIS WALLACE | CABANA TRAVEL | 14 DECEMBER 2024
How do we first see Venice? Bobbing, if we should arrive by boat, slightly askew. A coral-colored mirage shimmering from a murky lagoon. From above, Venice looks like a miniaturist’s model set for an opera buffa, impossibly ornate. A kind of toy. And, even up close, the city dances and recedes behind a series of veils — somehow evanescent, obscured by our own projections, and forever slinking away into its terracotta folds.
It hides. It obscures. And it's easy to suspect that it even shapeshifts like the Escher-esque architecture in dreams. In the syrupy light of the summer, Venice can seem to be performing, made up in the candy colors of commerce. Every piazza a stage set for tourists energetically pantomiming their fantasy selves for the internet.
When looked at through the resinous, bubbly glass made in the lagoon, the domes of the city smear against the sky — the spun roundel windows of the palazzi on the grand canal framing kaleidoscopic hallucinations in mauve and sea green. A wobbly-knee hallucination that echoes the Venice we see reflected in St. Mark’s basin, or in the labyrinth of canals marbling the city. On the slick, jiggling impasto surface of the water, the facades of Venice exaggerate their slouch, their dance, their wiggle, with a slight iridescence from whatever contaminants may be passing by.
But far from distorting our image of Venice, it is in these refractions that we see the real Venice — that is, an imaginary confectionary of a city: a kind of Italian Xanadu.
Because Venice is of course an imaginary place, a swampy Zion dreamed up by exiles, a fantastical harem built by gaudy oligarchs, a den of iniquity dressed up for the Grand Tourists. Venice is magical realism incarnate — and like any Shangri La, we can only really see them in extremis, or through Aperol-colored glasses. It makes sense of course that Venice would become for many centuries the world capital of glass (and mirror) artistry. Surrounded as it is by the looking glass of the lagoon, Venice has had little to do in its 1600 year history (when not fighting off attacks by marauders and the plague) but contemplate its own reflection, and Narcissus always needs another look.
In Murano's famous furnaces, Venetians are at work making a molten liquid into the most beautiful glass imaginable — as if they are making the lagoon itself into a solid, transportable, collectable. So that you too can have a little bit of the magical mirage in your home. A piece, a portal, through which — in the right kind of light — you can catch a glimpse of that misty Xanadu wherever you happen to find yourself.
It’s funny how time and space can affect the way we see the magical mirage that is Venice, or how we may see ourselves in it. After five or six years of visiting friends in the city once or twice a year, I happened to rent an apartment there for six months, eight, maybe more. Time in Venice is a bit elastic, or at least as rational as the calli, sort of meandering. And with a bit more time on my hands, becoming more and more subject to the city’s own rhythms and pace, I found myself wandering, lingering, listening in ways I’d never allow myself to do in New York, say.
One of the places I’d passed with great care previously — the woodshop where a craftsman makes the forcolas that hold a gondola oar in place — I now properly loitered around, and even poked my way into, made conversation in. So too did I visit a lace maker on Burano that has been in business for about as long as my country has existed. I spent time with one of the last great fishermen of the lagoon. I visited the city’s various forges where artists, artisans and manufacturers of various stripes are making tiles, decorative pieces, tablewares, and even statuary.
A friend who owns the Hotel Flora in San Marco took me to see a workshop where gold — actual gold — is pounded out into impossibly thin squares. Then, later that same day, the barman at the Aman hotel gilded a martini with one of those squares for me, with a kind of only-in-Venice sort of flare and decadence.
Of course, there are artists and artisans in Venice of every variety — whether their medium is cocktail making or conversation, the cello, or even collecting. But that same Spring-into-summer when I was wandering among them, indeed, living among them, poking my nose into their places of work, I never did see behind the magical veil of the city, never lost my trance, fell out of the hallucination. Maybe because all of the artistry there is a kind of magic, maintaining the miraculous mirage of a city of make believe.
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