” VENICE, VIDI, VICI “
Falling in Love With This Romantic City Isn’t Easy
by Chris Lehmann – April 28, 2002
( English text )
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/travel/2002/04/28/venice-vidi-vici/beed1a94-4479-49b1-a132-e2d43d06e481/
Excerpt from the article :
Of course, a less unwitting evocation of Venice’s character comes from those who have swooned headlong into Venice’s gauzy, improbable flight from the fusty realities that shape the lives of other cities. Consider, for instance, the local merchant Gualti, the proprietor of a small but flamboyant jewelry boutique off the Campo Santa Margherita.
Gualti’s shop boasts a host of odd plastic-looking pendants, earrings and rings in various shades of purple. Purple, too, is the prose in the explanatory manifesto Gualti has mounted alongside his creations. It explains that the objects are indeed plastic — or, as Gualti puts it, “little polymeric jewels springing from the skilled hands of our amphitryon.”
And he’s just warming up. The jewels are evidently wraparound affairs that can shape-shift in any direction, to virtually any size: “Rings with anthropormorphic suggestiveness, bangles which surround the arm in an attempt to wrap the whole body, necklaces that capture the subject like spider webs and transform [it] into a complementary object. . . . Bodies, birds, collars, jewels — ornaments to dress a way of life that finds its natural status in Venice because in Venice one is masked all the time.”
As our faux Valley dude back in the bar might have said, “Whatever.” Yet, by the time we stumbled onto Gualti’s manifesto, we had to concede he had a point. For a city suspended on poles plunged into the floor of a lagoon, the mundane forces of place and time can seem as frivolous, shape-shifting and self-consciously silly as Gualti’s sculpture-jewelry. In the long sunset of its imperial decline, Venice had come to stake most of its identity on illusion. Somehow this reflection, like McCarthy’s image of the city as a folding picture-postcard, was oddly fortifying.
As was another: Among other things, the fond civic dreams of Venice, which have inspired enthusiasts from Titian and Tintoretto, Casanova and Henry James, Ruskin and Byron, on down through Gualti, can be an allegory of romantic love, another supranatural wonder constructed in defiance of the grim determinisms of environment and history, and crafted from presumptions ultimately no more outlandish than those behind Gualti’s wares.
It was a charming, consoling thought — and if nothing else, our sojourn in Venice taught us what a deceptively simple thing it is to be charmed. What more can you ask of a honeymoon?
Chris Lehmann is deputy editor of The Washington Post Book World.
On his honeymoon in Venice, the author discovered the city’s central truth: There is no central truth. It may take a while, but the charms of Venice will finally reveal themselves.