I didn’t have much time to walk the streets of Venice, the calli and the sottoportegi, to enjoy Venice early in the morning when there are only a few tourists catching an early morning flight and otherwise it is quiet with only dogs and the rubbish boats loading up.
A back street in Cannaregio:-
Lots of carved keystones:-
Everywhere one looks, one sees the Salute: from the hotel, across the canal, from where we had lunch, from the terrace where we had dinner: grand and majestic and slightly larger than life with its spiral volutes, designed by Baldassare Longhena, who was small and dapper and lacking in self confidence. But I’ve never actually seen it close up, so this morning I walked across the Accademia bridge and through the back streets of Dorsoduro to see it close up:-
We had lunch in the Palazzetto Pisani in a first-floor room on the Grand Canal.
This is the façade of the Palazzetto:-
We arrived by water taxi:-
After an afternoon wandering through pavilions in the Giardini which were variously political, it was a pleasure to walk into the Japanese Pavilion which is about pure visual pleasure, a complex piece of blood red lattice work holding up an infinite collection of keys: if symbolic, not political, but about life experiences sublimated:-
We visited the workshop of Luigi Bevilacqua, which still has fourteen looms from the eighteenth century where they handweave velvets, damasks and brocades to historic patterns. It may just be preserved as a historic relic, but what a relic:-
We went into the backstreets of Cannaregio to visit Orsoni, an old established industrial manufacturer of mosaics, with an amazing library of mosaic glass, every colour except fuschia:-
I thought I should pay my respects to S. Marco and to hear the band play at Florian’s, but I spent my time instead examining the sculptural decoration on the Procuratie Nuove, begin by Scamozzi in 1586 when the Empire was already in decline:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 