VENICE PORFOLIO: THE MEANING OF MUSIC IN VENICE

For hundreds of years, Venice and music have been closely related. The fluidity of the water, the freedom of the people, the strength and the weakness of a rising and then declining republic, all of these things have invited music into Venice where it now seems to have a life of its own, churning in the ways of the Venetian lifestyle and saying things about Venice that can help us to understand the city better. For me, the relationship of Venice and music is interesting because, during my three month stay here, I have noticed the way music, and even its absence, seems to be used as a tool and form of communication. As a musician, I was initially curious about why Venice is associated with music, the city having even been dubbed the “Republic of Music” during the medieval period, but, after walking the calli of the city, I became intrigued by something else. What surprised me most about my walks was not a lack of music, which I encountered often, but it was the small, seemingly designated spaces throughout the city where music seems to be contained. Why is this? I wondered, and what does this say about Venice and its people? In order to delve into the subject of music in Venice, I decided to compare the use of music in Venice to a reflection in a mirror. There are two ways to read the reflection of a subject in a mirror: one, what does the reflection say about the subject, who are they; and two, what does the subject say about the reflection, why do they look this way. Holding up a mirror to Venice in order to analyze its relationship with music demonstrates this condition. If we consider Venice the subject and the music of Venice its reflection, we can both read Venice by what its music tells us and learn about the music of Venice by looking into the city and answering the “whys” about the uses and existence of music in Venice. Analyzing the use of music in Venice will tell us what kind of a place Venice is to someone experiencing Venice, and, by looking at music with a knowledge about Venetian history, it will tell us why music in Venice is significant.

THE REFLECTION
If I were to draw a map of Venice marking only the places where music can be heard, and if I noted what types of music those spots represent, a very interesting view of Venice would appear. As I have already said, the Venice I have experienced is almost bare of music but for its confinement to certain spaces; the map of Venice’s musical spaces, therefore, would probably show trends throughout the city that might illuminate the character of Venice through their comparison. Differences in use of music in the areas on the map would illuminate not only where Venetians use music, but also how Venetians use music to communicate between and organize spaces, which would, in turn, allow us to understand what life in a city like Venice might be like. Before examining Venetian life, though, we must understand what exactly music is for in Venice and how it can be utilized, both consciously and unconsciously.

Music is a powerful tool that affects Venice in various ways. Although the idea of music and Venice together probably conjures a romantic vision in most people’s minds, such as a lonesome guitarist sitting in the moonlight on the steps of a stone bridge over a listless canal or the classy sound of violins singing into a starlit Saint Mark’s Square, music in Venice has a deeper significance for the city than the tenderness of these images. For hundreds of years, music has played various roles in Venetian society, from political and economical roles to social ones, and, within these roles, music has been both a resident and a shaper of the city. “Why reduce the reality of cities to their thinginess, or their thinginess to a question of bricks and mortar?” James Donald asks in Imagining the Modern City. “States of mind have material consequences. They make things happen.” Music, like any Venetian resident, has such material qualities. Music moves our emotions, communicating power and weakness, piety and romance, and in doing this music provides a sort of space in which the mind can wander away from truth and physical reality, changing people’s “states of mind.” James Donald would probably agree that music is therefore a solid part of the city, a piece of the “thinginess” of Venice aside from “bricks and mortar.” As I have found during my research, everything about music in Venice seems in conversation with concepts of space, so in a way music can be considered a type of space into which people’s mind enter and which can enhance any associated ideas, such as romance and piety, or even that of touristic and residential space distinctions.

The most important use of this power of music in Venice might be in the construction of a Venetian wonderland provided for tourists. Tapping into the power of music to remove the mind from reality, Venice uses music to enhance itself and its myth. The economy and ultimately the existence of Venice and Venetians themselves rely on music in some respects to make Venice real for tourists, taking their minds away from the “real” Venice into their “gaze,” as John Urry might put it (Consuming Places). For tourist in Venice, music represents their Venetian experience taken from mere physicality to mental and metaphysical levels as they enter the musical spaces provided for them (see sketches below). As Michel Foucault describes in Of Other Spaces, “heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.” For tourists, music is just this, a heterotopia that opens for them or, more commonly, they pay to wonder into. As music coincides with the touristic ideas of Venice, the tourist enters a sort of hetertopia inside the music where they can fully realize their “touristic gaze” (Urry, Consuming Places). As Foucault writes, “heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time-which is to say that they open onto what might be termed… heterochronies” (Of Other Spaces). Some tourists, such as those attending an opera in La Fenice or riding in a gondola in the company of an accordion player, take this time trip, finding pleasure in the Venetian myth that came before them and in the “heterochrony” of Venice’s close association with music (see timeline below). Yet, however tourists use music to enhance their experiences, music is a tool wielded by the Venetian economy to make Venice more accessible to their customers.

Aside from his economical use, the use of musical space for Venetians is much more complex than the simple, heterotopic touristic pleasure. Michel Foucault writes, “heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia [can] be found” (Of Other Spaces). For Venetians, musical space is still a sort of hetertopia, but instead of using it to find the “authentic,” old Venice, they use it to separate themselves from that very idea. Even during the brief period of time that I have had to roughly experience life in Venice, I have learned that the touristic uses for music in Venice are scrutinized and probably rejected by Venetians. This rejection, though, is not entirely conscious. Venetians must reject the ideas of the touristic uses of music in order to live in the present while being in Venice. During an interview with Paul Rainbow, Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of whether there are any forms of architecture that can actively liberate human subjects by saying “I do not think that there is anything that is functionally - by its very nature - absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice.” In the same way, the spaces of tourism and real Venetian life are not “by nature” separated, but these are areas of practice in which Venetians use music to define, both in place and time. The Venetian performer creates a space for the tourist off whom the Venetian makes a living, and, afterward, moves into a new space, either in place or time, to create or recreate the space for himself or herself by either choosing not to have music or choosing to listen to or even sing their own tastes in music, which normally include more modern, popular genres or, when singing for pleasure, traditional folk songs. The mixing of these two musical spaces may not work because they are in contradiction with each other, but, consciously or unconsciously, in the minds of Venetian residents these spaces merge everyday as they travel through their city (see sketches below).

The Venetian resident’s use of music is also a tool of communication between residents and a force in the city that helps to shape Venetian social culture aside from the separation of residents and tourists. “At the start, the builder needs to know where to build, with what materials, and in what form.,” writes Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. “Next comes physical effort. Muscles and the senses of sight and touch are activated in the process of raising structures against the pull of gravity. A worker modifies his own body as well as external nature when he creates a world. Completed, the building or architectural complex now stands as an environment capable of affecting the people who live in it. Man-made space can refine human feeling and perception.” This is a perfect description of how Venetians use music to construct their space. The presence of and acceptance of music into a space in the city is a communication between Venetians that a space is the type of space which residents wish to use it as. The division of public and private spaces, an important issue for residence of such a cramped city, is one example of this. Venetians tend to reserve the calli of Venice, for instance, as the space as public space, a place in which they can communicate with one another. As I spoke about in my essay “More than a Marketplace,” Venetian culture is tied to social life across the city. Using the open produce markets as an example, Venetians gather at the marketplaces to both gossip and communicate through actions just as much as they use it to buy food. In the calli, the same thing seems to occur, and we can find a reflection of this occurrence in the Venetian use of music there. First, rarely during my time in Venice have I noticed Venetians using headphones when walking through the city. Headphones create a sort of private space with which a person can block him or herself out from their environment. The absence of headphones, for no other obvious reason, can tell us that the calli are public spaces in which communication between travelers is expected. The same can be seen in the men working in the calli who often sing or whistle, usually with a smile or at least eye contact with passers-by that seem to just ask the travelers to recognize workers’ presence; the fact that workers communicate with people walking shows what social spaces calli are. In contrast, the touristic spaces of Venice, especially the public ones, usually include music, isolating tourists in their own musical heterotopias and reducing the social aspect of tourism which could retract from any romantic touristic experience. In the instances of residential silence or public singing, then, Venetians use the presence and absence of music to communicate a willingness to continue social tendencies and, as long as this continues, this use of music will help to form Venices social structure (see sketches below).

THE SUBJECT
With an understanding of the present uses of music in Venice and the power of music in general, we can take a more discerning approach in examining the subject of this musical reflection: Venice. The question is, why? Why does Venice have a musical past? Why does that musical past mean so much to Venice today? Obviously, the specialness of music in Venice is really what makes this issue different than that for other cities. In Venice, music has, as I have said, played many roles. John Martin and Dennis Romano discuss in Venice Reconsidered how closely Venice and its history are associated with the arts. “It is difficult to think of Venice without also thinking of Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Palladio, Veronica Franco, Giovanni Gabrieri, Paolo Sarpi, Carlo Goldoni, Antonio Vivaldi, and Giambattista Tiepolo, to name only some of Venice's major creative figures,” they write; then they turn directly to history, remarking that “nearby Padua, which had been under Venetian control since 1405, was the site of one of the most influential universities of the Renaissance, and from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century Venice was one of the leading centers of printing in the world.” This quote is a good indication of how music in Venice held greater value to the city than as a mere form of entertainment. Since Venice’s origins, basically, music has been important to the city for political and social reasons, and has even become an important economical tool.

Keeping in mind the power of music we have already discussed, that of removing people from reality and enhancing ideas, we can easily understand why Venice used music throughout history both to expressed their independent spirit and build up their wealth through the arts. In the medieval ages, music was something directly connected to religion; in cathedrals, including Venice’s many cathedrals, music was an organized device of worship that would work the space of the cathedral to create a metaphysical environment that would lift worshipers into a spiritual state. In Venice, though, religion and the republic led by doges, were merged; in fact, the cathedral of Saint Mark’s was under the authority of the doge for centuries. The doge and the church, though, were not the most import parts of Venetian politics. In truth, the most important part of political life in Venice was, in fact, its identity as a republic; the power of Venice itself was the most influential part of Venetian life. Religious holidays, as a matter of fact, were often associated more with Venetian historical events or patriotism than the actual religious event. As R. Lassels wrote in the 1600’s, “in the festive occasions the hero is not the saint whose day is being celebrated, still less any individual Venetian: it is Venice itself. The role of the Doge as quardian rather than ruler was emphasized at his election; he was taken to the place where the body of his predecessor had recently been lying in the church of SS Giovanni e Pauolo, and told that his body would lie there before long.” Landon and Norwich write in “Five Centuries of Music in Venice” that Venice was “a paradise of personal freedom,” so, because art is attracted to freedom, it is no surprise that secular music would find its way to Venice. Thus, due to the nature of the city, the music of the cathedrals gradually became the music of Venice.

In the 1600’s, years after Venice had acquired the honorary title “Republic of Music,” it was often noted that Venice was full of music, in private homes, during festivals, during processions, music was always heard throughout the city. Concerts, private musical performances, and music during times such carnivàle, expressed Venice’s spirit as an independent republic, free from strict papal rule. Moreover, as religious music become more secular in Venice and as the maestri di cappella of Saint Mark’s basilica and other churches began to venture further and further from the church, even writing music to make money on the side, music easily made its way from the church to the secular stages of performance to show off wealth. “Most scholars agree,” write John Martin and Dennis Romano, “that one of the primary sources of Venetian cultural dynamism was the large number and wide-ranging character of patrons, both institutional and individual, who commissioned works of art, employed musicians, subscribed to opera and theater seasons, and provided support for poets and other intellectuals” (Venice Reconsidered). These patrons were not independent in their interests, though, for, as Martin and Romano explain, “given its vast resources and the number of magistracies and courts that it comprised, the state was almost certainly the leading patron in terms of the number of commissions it undertook and in the dominant cultural narrative it created. The everyday business of running the state, as well as extraordinary moments of celebration and crisis, provided numerous opportunities for the government-through individual doges, the procurators of San Marco, and councils and magistracies to employ artists, architects, and musicians.” According to Justin Klotz, a professor at Vanderbilt University, “The acoustics of St. Mark's made polyphony sound muddled and caused composers to begin to write music that was more chordal with emphasis on sound and clarity of text. The Venetians love of pomp also led composers to include instruments as part of the choir and in 1567, salaried musicians were hired at St. Mark's. These styles and techniques would have a large influence on composers all over Europe as Venice became the musical center of Italy.” This was actually the start of opera, as you can follow in my timeline comparing musical and political history in Venice (below). At the same time, the affluence of printing in Venice, over 65 presses in the 1500’s alone, helped to spread word of Venice’s progressions towards secular forms of music. Low censorship attracted printers, and writers/composers from around the world and helped to make Venice a musical haven.


CONCLUSION
Music is very much a part of Venice, both historically and structurally. Due to Venice’s history with music, its involvement in the development of modern music and its many uses for music through the ages, Venice uses the power of music in many ways and for various reasons. By examining how the power of music is utilized in Venice, we have examined Venice as if we were looking into a musical reflection of the city. In our investigation into the issues of music, we discovered that Venice is both divided between touristic and residential spaces and united in its public spaces. When we looked at the reasons behind Venice’s association with music, we saw that Venice uses music because of music’s ability to speak for the city. The “Republic of Music” has been supported by music for agesI think this investigation into the musical nature of Venice is useful because every city and place can be read through its in some way, and I think we can examine the use of music in and of a place to get a better look inside the community. For Venice, this helped us to place music as a force in the city that has important consequences for those that live there.



SKETCHES

There are many musical spaces in Venice. To name a few and to help the reader get a more physical understanding of how music is used to construct space, I sketched them. The first is a sketch of the romantic, classy, luxurious setting of Saint Mark’s Square at night, a popular tourist location in the city where tourists take themselves into their idea of Venice, and especially the past, by entering the musical space and reflecting on their surroundings. As a grand piano invites customers to the café, a woman in a fur coat and sunglasses (who I added to the scene when I saw her at a vaporetto stop minutes after sketching this picture) sits lost in her world of luxury, able to fully “realize” her idea with the help of music. This is clearly a touristic location; real life in Venice consists of things beyond the pure entertainment value of this scene. The second and third sketches are of a small campo, Campo Del Milion, near the Rialto bridge, and even nearer a hotel I stayed at with my parents during the first weekend of October. I took a photo of Campo Del Milion and sketched the scene to show the touristic space of trattorie and ostorie in Venice. The first sketch simply shows the environment, bare of music. The second sketch demonstrates how, when my cut-out sketch of an accordion player is placed in the scene, music can change the atmosphere. The fourth sketch is yet another example of touristic space: the gondola. This demonstrates how the musical spaces of tourists and Venetians should not mix. Even though the gondolier is happy listening to an electric guitarist during the gondola ride, his customers are not. Tourists are not looking for the “real” Venice, the one that includes Venetians, they are looking for the Venice of their imaginations which have been shaped by those who have written or spoken of Venice, such as Lord Byron or maybe friends who have touristed Venice before. In the fifth sketch, I portray a guitarist singing in San Pietro di Castello, a cathedral in the eastern area of Venice. Cathedrals are spaces in which music is incorporated, notice the organ pipes and the choral seats. I added a guitarist to the scene to demonstrate how music can change a space that clearly instructs music. In the sixth and final sketch, I attempted to interpret the way a lack of music changes the social behavior of the nightlife there. Without the liveliness of music in Campo Santa Margherita, the people tend to stand in conversation make the environment more social and intellectually connected.The straightness and length of the figures shows the lack of music and focus on conversation. The people's behavior is instructed by the space, which, being surrounded by homes, has no music, especially after 10 o'clock (interview with Paolo Venerando). All of these sketches, aside from that of Campo Santa Margherita, are examples of musical spaces in Venice by which we can read the city.




TIMELINE
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VENICE IN THE DETAILS: THE MARFORIO DRAGON

As I touched on in my blog post "On the Walls," Venice is something of a never-ending cache of historical and romantic wealth. At any one point in the city, you can spot detail upon beautiful detail that helps to tell the spiderweb story of Venice and probably the story of places millions of miles away at the same time, and these left-behinds of prevalent history are so numerous in Venice that they are almost hidden in their own crowd, nearly forgotten regardless of their significance due to such abundance. In an attempt to address this situation, the "Venice in the Details" project asked me to choose anything in Venice, preferably an obscure, or unknown object, to analyze, gathering an understanding of Venice's richness as well as a better knowledge of Venice and the world through thought and research. I eagerly took this opportunity to learn about something that has always caught my attention, even during my first couple days in Venice. In Campo San Salvidor, on the corner of Via Due Aprile and Larga Mazzini Merceria, a black, iron dragon clinching a bouquet of three umbrellas in its mouth protrudes over the street, clinging to its spot on the corner while watching over its portion of Venice like a fierce and mysterious angel. I had always had particular interest in the dragon because of its grand appearance and prominence on the campo. As you can see in the photographs I took of it, the dragon has a long neck covered in feather-like scales, two elegant and detailed wings, and strong talons on which it seems to gracefully balance. Animals with twisting, meandering, yet strangely agile necks, arms, legs, tails, or bodies in general tend to unnerve me slightly, and in my fascination with my own fears, I always stared at this dragon on my walks to and from the Rialto Bridge, which is just about two Venetian blocks away from this corner. A certain friendliness about the dragon makes it less unnerving to me than it could be, though; the umbrellas it is holding are colorful, as are the decorative circles in the strip of pattern below it, and its extension down towards the people in the campo seems inviting rather than threatening. Unfortunately, its appearance is almost the only direct history I could find about it. The dragon was designed only about a century ago as a signpost for a leather goods store called Marforio, which was the largest and oldest leather goods store in Italy, run by the same family through five generations since 1875, until it closed about 10 years ago. I could not find any information directly connecting the dragon to Marforio, but the fact that Marforio was in the building on which the dragon still stands and that it initially opened as an umbrella store sort of makes that connection for me; the leather suitcases, handbags, wallets, belts, and other travelers' merchandise became more central probably after the store's success as an umbrella boutique and possibly after the creation of the dragon, but I have no evidence on which to base that theory. No matter my lack of knowledge about the Marforio dragon itself, though, this detail can say more to us than we might expect.

To begin with, the form and origin of the dragon reflects upon Venice's long history with commercialism and more recently with heavy tourism. In 1611, Thomas Coryat, an English traveler, wrote in his travelogue Coryat's Crudities,

"And many of them do carry other fine things of far greater price, that will cost at least ducket, which they commonly call in Italian tongue "umbrellas," that is, things which minister shadow veto them for shelter against the scorching heate of the sunne. These are made of leather, something answerable to to the forme of a little cannopy, and hooped in the inside with divers little wooden hoopes that extend the umbrella in a pretty large cornpasse. They are especially used by horsemen, who carry them in their hands when they ride."

The umbrellas hanging from the dragon's mouth, and the fact the Marforio sold umbrellas in the mid-1800's, shows an association of umbrellas to travel and luxury even much later than Coryat's time. Before umbrellas had made their way to England, surprisingly through Captain Cook rather than from Italy, umbrellas seemed exotic to English travelers, and it follows that umbrellas would also become a traveler's tool and sign of the upper class because knowledge of the exotic meant both money and education. Furthermore, umbrellas were a perfect piece of equipment for traveling in general, they could keep off the sun during a ride or a stroll, could keep off the rain if traveling happened to occur on a damp day, and they could simply display a traveler's position as someone able to afford this object of "great price," as Coryat describes them. Looking closely at my "detail," the dragon, you may even notice that the umbrellas are being held under a crown, which signifies the luxurious aura of the umbrella. During my presentation, Professor Emily Allen commented that the quote I read from Coryat's travelogue gives us insight into the word "umbrella" itself, because the word "ombra" in Italian means "shadow" in English. This directly ties the umbrella, as well as its classy persona, to Italy, possibly giving Italy an added boost of "classy" in the opinions of English and other western European travelers. As a french traveler remarked as early as 1680, the shops between the Rialto and Piazza San Marco give a "grand impression of Venice" to any traveler stopping through. Clearly, Marforio's location and its expensive merchandise placed Marforio in this collection of shops that made Venice luxurious to tourists even today. To be correct, Marforio probably chose its location because of the longstanding prestige of that shopping area in Venice, and now, even in the store's absence, it has left its mark with the dragon that somehow still speaks to Venice's touristic side. The effeminate yet powerful and historically fierce Venice seems to extend its neck to greet its visitors, making Venice a gracious host for its tourists, literally offering them comforts and luxury for their stay and the rest of their travels. Furthermore, the dragon is particularly fitting as a touristic marker because it is the remains of a story and history, leaving another slightly mysterious detail for which Venice is so well renowned. Tourists certainly see a romantic significance in the Marforio dragon today due to its age, its obvious use of Gothic aesthetics, and mostly its addition to the Venetian collection of random "details" that makes Venice so interesting.

But, Venice has not always had such a luxurious and romantic identity for travelers, and I think the very fact that tourists do not normally realize this or know a lot about Venice's history other than what writers and travelers have fantasized adds to the myth around Venice that the Marforio dragon taps into in order to bring money to Venice's tourist economy. Buzard writes in The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture” that "anti-tourists seeking distinctively enriched experiences relied mainly upon the mediating texts of European Romanticism to tell them what distinctively enriched experiences should fell like;" Venetian tourists come to Venice, assume that Venice has only existed as writers have utilized it, and never seem interested in learning about Venice's true past (or present, I might add). As I read in Venice the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World's Most Touristed City by Robert Davis and Garry Marvin, Venice's original tourists were medieval pilgrims who traveled from all over Europe to the Levant, through Italy to visit relics, and then on to the Holy Land. As pilgrims traveled through Venice, as they made their way East, they would rest for weeks on the peaceful islands, sightseeing, in a way, before they moved on. At that time, Venice was a growing and powerful city of trade. In Venice's high period, the city was respected as a grand, rising power, comparable to and even feared by powerful cities like Paris and London. The tourism we know today, associated with a romantic Venice, did not really start until the late 17 century and did not fall into full swing until the 19 century. Decline, beautiful, weak decay, and the feminine characteristics of Venice that began to fill the novels and poetry of visitors during these periods is what really fueled the up rise of tourism, but while Venice was an empire, that is during its reign of trade between the East and the West, it was hardly considered a romantic city. People traveled to Venice to do business, and although they also enjoyed Venice as a town of certain splendors and freedom, they came for purposes other than entertainment. Venice was a wealthy city, though, which attracted wealthy people, and, therefore, attracted luxury, such as the tourist-attracting luxury written of between the Rialto and Piazza San Marco. At one point, before Venice's decline, gold was so plentiful due to trade with Africa that Venetians began to value and trade with silver before gold, and, in the early 1600's even as Venice did begin its decline, the income per capita in Venice was 37 ducats on the islands to 10 ducats on the mainland. Tourism could not move in until Venice declined, which, again, happened slightly differently than tourists assume. After the direction of trade changed from East to West after the discovery of routes through the Americas, Venice's economy also changed. Although trade did not falter in Venice, prices did, and it soon became cheaper and more pleasurable for the most wealthy families in Venice to own their own farms and second homes on the mainland, which they also enjoyed as a social asset; Venice's wealthiest families pulled out of trade all together and began a more local lifestyle with both a main Venetian home and a pleasure farm in the country. As the most wealthy Venetians stopped trading, competition opened up for middle-class merchants. Unfortunately, the extraction of the wealth of the upper classes from the Venetian trading business was a strong enough development to send Venice into full economic decline. Middle-class merchants were too careful with their money, not willing to risk it on trade gambles. Andrea Tron, an aristocratic Venetian traveler who had often been to England and Holland, wrote to a friend in 1743:

"There is no commrse useful to the State in any country where the richest men do not engage in trade. In Venice we must persuade the nobility to put their money into trade... something of which it is impossible to persuade them at the present. The Dutch are all merchants and that is the cheif reason why their trade flourishes. If only this spirit could be introduced into our country (notice how Tron refers to Venice as a country) then one would soon see a great trade revival here."

But that never happened. Venetian upper classes were too content producing fish, fruits, potatoes, wine, and silks while enjoying a more diverse lifestyle, and Venice truly declined, becoming a place for romantic tourists from the countries that once revered Venice for its worldly power. Yet, as the economy in Venice changed from trade to tourism, Venetians were very aware of their prospects as a tourist city. Shops such as Marforio were opened, gondole became attractions, and Venice skillfully catered to its new buyers. The Marforio dragon catered as well, acting as a "sign," as John Urry puts it in Consuming Places: "the gaze is constructed through signs and tourism is involved in the collection of such signs." Tourists come, without knowing Venice for what is was or even what it is, and they indulge in the gaze, seeing Marforio's dragon and thinking not of Venice but of an image of Venice created by romantics. The dragon tells us about the truth, the truth of the non-truth. The Marforio dragon reminds us of the past, even though most of us do not know what past that is. And the dragon still invites in the tourists, both because it plays into their visions of Venice as Gothic, not its reality, and because it still offers them the shade and promise of comfort and classiness during their stay in Venice. This is the Marforio dragon, and it says a lot, even though it has nothing to say at all; we just have to notice it and remember it before it is lost forever in Venice's sea of details.

FORMAL ESSAY: THE WAY GOETHE TRAVELED

Educated, of high class, wealthy, and worldly, a gentlemen of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (goo-te) period was someone who knew where he was going and who had something constructive to say about his experiences. Goethe, a successful German writer and member of a rich family, was just this sort of gentleman, and in reading Goethe’s Italian Journey, a travel journal Goethe kept during his first trip to Italy from 1786 to 1788, one does not get the feeling that Goethe is traveling strictly “by book,” a phrase that James Buzard uses in his study of tourism, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,” to denote the act of traveling by guide book, a common “tourist’s” practice. Instead, Goethe most obviously falls in with the high class type of traveler Buzard calls a “travel-writer,” one that analyzes his or her experiences and thoughts while traveling, almost in competition with the writings of travel-writers who have gone before, seeking the unique and unwritten. Buzard considers two distinct categories of travelers in relation with his examination of such “travel-writers”: the tourist and the anti-tourist. Although it is after Goethe’s first trip to Italy that these two categories come to the forefront, it is by these categories that Goethe’s journal about his travels through Italy can be examined to shed light on how Goethe traveled, or, in other words, what type of traveler he was.

Tourism is the hasty visiting of a place to claim some fraction of possession or relation to it, or, more commonly, to its idea. Somewhat like a sped up version of the late practice of "grand touring," tourism is a repeated collection of fleeting moments prewritten by travelers who came before and experienced by most visitors to the same place. Anti-tourism, which Buzard describes as “snobbish” and as “an exemplary way of regarding one’s own cultural experiences as authentic and unique, [set] against a backdrop of always assumed tourist vulgarity, repetition, and ignorance,” is a response to such common tourism. Buzard states that “(the) general project (of travel-writing) resembled the anti-tourist,” and I would agree that "anti-tourist" describes Goethe in many ways. “I was making this remarkable journey not to deceive my-self,” Goethe writes of a visit he made to San Giorgio in Verona, “but to become acquainted with myself through objects. I tell myself quite honestly that I understand little of the art and craft of painter.” A disclaimer of his ignorance, this passage from Goethe’s journal indirectly reveals his wish that readers see him as well educated and aware of himself as an intruder in a foreign culture, which coincides with anti-touristic notions. Also, throughout his journal, Goethe demonstrates his ability to look beyond mere tourism when he critiques the operas he attends, the art and architecture he views, and the Italian ways of life he comes in contact with. Furthermore, as Nicholas Halmi, professor of English literature at Oxford University, explained, Goethe had a purpose beyond sightseeing during his trip through Italy, he searched for truth in science and life; Goethe searched for the “primordial plant,” for instance, and I believe these sorts of quests influenced Goethe’s focus during his travels to include subjects beyond John Urry’s “touristic gaze” (lecture on European romanticism; Consuming Places). As a travel-writer, Goethe was an anti-tourist because he attempted both consciously and unconsciously to remove himself from the common tourist, but by looking beyond the obvious, we can actually distinguish an inner tourist through Goethe’s journal and therefore we can examine the anti-tourist’s inability or at least extreme difficulty to escape the “vulgar” identity of tourism.

Buzard connects the categories of tourist and anti-tourist when he contends that they developed in light of each other. Due to modern technologies and new ease of travel in the 19th century, Buzard says, the nature of travel itself caused tourism and anti-tourism to evolve into their own distinct categories, tourism burgeoning with the ease of travel and anti-tourism developing in response to the lack of uniqueness in the experiences of mere tourists. When we consider Urry’s “romantic gaze,” or the tourist’s unrealistic vision of a visited place, we can see that Goethe, the anti-touristic travel-writer, was a tourist in many respects. Firstly, one of his main objectives when visiting Venice, aside from a pursuit of truth, was to visit locations and memories that others had described to him. His father, for instance, influenced Goethe’s trip to Venice by giving Goethe a vision of Venice before Goethe saw it in person. “I rode through the northern part of the Grand Canal, around the island of Santa Clara in the lagoons, into the canal of the Giudecca, up toward St. Mark's square, and was now suddenly a co-sovereign of the Adriatic sea, like every Venetian when he reclines in his gondola. At this point I thought respectfully of my good father, whose greatest pleasure was to tell about these things.” In many of his descriptions, Goethe speaks of himself in Venice, and also on Lido by the sea, as having now “seen” it, which echoes the nature of tourists to gaze and be gone. This touristic nature does not only show up in Goethe’s longing to behold, though. Although Goethe strives to see Italy uniquely and fully, as we have discussed before and will see in the passage below, Goethe acts like a “tourist” even when he analyzes like an anti-tourist.

“Toward evening, again without a guide, I lost my way in the remotest quarters of the city. The bridges here are all fitted with steps, so that gondolas and probably also larger boats can pass comfortably under the arch. I tried to find my way in and out of this labyrinth without asking anyone, again only directing myself by the points of the compass' Finally one does disentangle oneself, but it is an incredible maze, and my method, which is to acquaint myself with it directly through my senses, is the best. Also, up to the last inhabited tip of land I have noted the residents' behavior, manners, customs, and nature: these are differently constituted in every quarter. Dear Lord! what a poor, good-natured beast man is!”

In this passage, Goethe is both tourist and anti-tourist. As he “makes his way without a guide” and in his analysis of Venetian behaviors, Goethe acts the anti-tourist, but at the end of the passage, when he says “what a poor, good-natured beast man is,” he seems to make a sweeping generalization that, I believe, speaks of Venetians more than anyone in a simplifying manner, and that plays into a romantic idea he holds about Italy and Italians, especially considering his belief that he will find “truth” and the “primordial plant” in Italy. If Goethe sees Italians as the putti that hold up his Italian journey, as many wealthy visitors did, then he holds a common vision of Italy that easily places him in the category of tourist. In Goethe’s journal, Goethe unconsciously demonstrates for us the way tourism and anti-tourism are related; as Goethe attempts to see Italy in a true sense, not simply as a tourist who knows nothing but glances at everything they possibly can, he still sees it through touristic eyes.

Although Goethe's journal was written more as an analytical piece than as a tourist's log, for he analyzes everything he encounters, we can read his identity as a traveler to discover both touristic and anti-touristic characteristics. As this blend demonstrates, tourism and anti-tourism can exist and may often exist together. In a way, anti-tourism and tourism are simply the extremes of a gradient scale on which tourists can be placed. When I read Goethe’s Italian Journey, I placed him nearer to the anti-tourist extreme, but, recognizing his romantic views of Italy, I placed him nearest to the center of such a scale. To his readers, Goethe was a travel-writer, first and foremost, but, looking beyond his writings, he was an anti-tourist with many touristic tendencies.

(Goethe in the Roman Campagna, painted by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein in 1786: a painting that I think displays Goethe's anti-touristic inclination by the cloak that covers his high class garb, but that reveals his touristic side by the very fact that Goethe is portrayed in front of a romantic Italian scenery void of Italians themselves.)

GO VENEZIA!

A few weeks ago, Venice played its final game of calcio, a.k.a. soccer, and Sara, Elyse, Maria, and I attended. Getting the opportunity to see an Italian soccer game live was actually something I was most looking forward to when I was accepted to this study abroad program, and Venice's D series team did not disappoint me. The Sunday of the game, we took the 20 from San Servolo, then rode over to the normally quiet Sant'Elena where Venice's small soccer stadium is located. Even though Venice's is a low level team, the fans of all ages were excited, wearing the team colors, green, orange, and gray, and some carrying banners, flags, and drums towards the stadium. The four of us headed back along our usual route towards the Dante Alligheri Institute, in front of which sits the soccer stadium. I was so excited at the prospect of getting to see an "authentic!" soccer game in Italy (where, so I have heard, life and soccer are intertwined like ) that when I received the news that I had been accepted to this study abroad program, soccer was the first thing that popped into my head. Sara and I stopped before crossing the canal that leads to the stadium to buy scarves. Firstly, all of us were nervous about the crowd... soccer fans, namely those in a few countries including Italy, can get notoriously rowdy and if we happened to be dressed in the colors of the opponents, we thought we might get into trouble; so, wearing scarves representing Venice's team (orange, green, and black) we figured would keep us protected. Secondly,

LA TRAVIATA AND OTHER OPERAS

I didn't have an opera mask or binoculars last Thursday as I walked across Venice towards La Scuola Grande dei Carmini (photo below, borrowed from www.scuolagrandecarmini.it); I did, however, have a pair of uncomfortable heels on that didn't mix well with the Venetian cobblestones, and therefore I also had a pair of blue flip-flops sticking out of my purse reminding me that the opera would not last forever. It isn't that I was not enthusiastic to go to the opera, but I was a little tired, tending to a sore throat, and apprehensive. I pomodori di San Servolo had managed to control their hunger with large slices of pizza and gelati on Campo Santa Margherita before heading over to the show, yet I had the foreboding of previous experiences with opera music that the pizza would not last and neither would I. Opera can be long and boring, it's a known fact, especially with the bad rap it gets as the snob's musical. I entered the opera house ready to stifle yawns and a grumbling stomach, but, as I said, I was nevertheless enthusiastic, and despite my misgivings I was curious to hear at least a little of La Traviata, an opera written by Giuseppe Verdi and first performed in 1853 in Venice's Teatro La Fenice. I was excited because I had heard excerpts of La Traviata in class, had enjoyed a short concert of various opera pieces a few weeks ago in Il Ateneo di San Basso on Saint Mark's Square, and had become enraptured by a segment of another opera, La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini, that very morning. In class, we had discussed the bombastic emotion of opera, the dynamics of opera attendees, and other aspects of the art (including its identity as kitsch: taking itself seriously despite its ridiculous, unrealistic nature) that made me aware of opera in new ways, especially in its ability to speak to people across both time and place. As we said in class, people don't go to the opera to understand it literally, although they may want the context of the emotions presented to better enjoy it; minus for the glam and class and culture, people go to feast on what is versatile about it. The stories are basic human stories about love, death, family, and feminine and masculine calamity, and the music speaks to everyone in a partly learned, partly inborn play on emotions. Opera has universal characteristics that last through the ages and that can be understood around the world.

As a musician, I find the power of opera music especially interesting; when I began writing music myself, I pondered the power of music, what it was, why people like it, why music makes us feel. By now, of course, I think I have it figured out; music speaks directly to our emotions, it is a form of communication, the communication of emotion, that can almost wield us from the inside out. In our discussions of opera in class, I found this fact validated by the effect of the performers' foreign-tongued voices on myself and others, and thinking about this particular use of music, that flows directly through a human body into the audience, I became fascinated by the notion of voice without meaning. When the words are not understood, opera is pure voice expressing emotion, only hinting at where the emotion comes from through any action on stage. The singers take the audience on a shockingly desperate and earnest journey, belting out life like no real person would be able to off stage. When audience members leave the opera, they thank the show for releasing them from a need to scream themselves. "No risk:" Catherine Clément wrote in her book Opera, Or the Undoing of Women, "one makes a pretense of not being interested in the plot, which is completely unimportant. So one is moved for no apparent reason, what bliss!" The fact that most people cannot understand opera, because it is traditionally in Italian, is compensated for by this effect. But this side of opera is not what intrigued me most in our discussions. Opera as a use of musical power spoke to me further when we discussed La Bohème. At one point in our sample, during the song "Che gelida manina" in which Mimi enters Rudolfo's apartment to ask him whether she can relight a candle that the wind has blown out (which is the scene in the picture to the right, with Inva Mula as Mimi and Aquiles Machado as Rudolfo), Rudolfo sang a loud, long, crescendoing line that, after we had finished listening, turned out to mean "How do I live? I live." You can sample this song from La Bohème here. At that moment, opera became something else for me: a possibility. In a blending of emotional dialogue and literary depth, in the combination of melodramatic song and story, I thought I found a musical tool of exploration that could explore character emotion in connection with specific situations. Aside from simply enjoying bombastic expression of emotion through music, I realized that opera could give extra depth to the words of its stories if only we could understand them. I know this seems exactly like what we do with any other form of music, song, musical, but with opera using the music and narration together is different because opera is a musical form that follows the emotions of the characters rather than the melody of a methodical song. In opera every word is sung with emphasis on what the note can say to the audience, the meanings of the words are emphasized not by normal sentence emphasis but by the emotion of the characters. If the words were understood in this medium, the story might take on a sort of literary purpose, and opera would be not simply a feast of expressed emotion but a mode of speaking true inner emotion along side fact and logic. Really, this may be what opera started out doing, but has since become the opera that Clément loves, the one that enjoys emotional experiences in a minimalistic way. After I began to see opera in a literary way, I was anxious to hear La Traviata performed live, even if I knew I would not be able to understand it, or sit through it easily. I wanted to experience opera the "traditional" way before I ever delve into opera with deeper narrative meaning.

The lights went out, and the violins, the cello, and piano struck up one of the most beautiful pieces I have heard recently. In the dimness of soft spot lights, we waited for the story to start. La Scuola Grande dei Carmini is a small building just off Campo Santa Margherita containing a chapel and a nice collection of artwork and woodwork. On the ground floor, the chapel now acts as an auditorium for various types of performances (photo on left, www.scuolagrandecarmini.it), and the rooms above it, the old scuola, are now shown as a museum because their ceilings are decorated with paintings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, one of Venice's top 18th century artists. Down in the chapel, a low stage surrounds the front of a small yet lavish alter of the mother and child. For the first act of La Traviata, a row of chairs and a table with flowers waited for the characters to appear. We listened eagerly for the music of the intro to end, then smiled, at least I did, as the first singers came to the stage, already singing. One of the singers, who played the character Alfredo and who had sung the selections at Il Ateneo di San Basso, we were especially excited to see; not only is he excellent, we love the expressions on his face as he sings. We could just see the concentration and skill it took him to sing every note, which made me realize that opera is a challenge even for professional singers. All of the opera singers' voices were so loud I could feel my ears receiving the vibrations of music, and it immediately moved me, like most music does. The human voice sang so loudly, though, that this music connected me with the characters both physically and mentally. In class we talked about how opera is written to bring the audience into the characters positions, to experience emotion through the characters as a substitute or confirmation of the real thing. As I sat there, exposed to the tremendous voices of the singers, I experienced this effect. Although I did not know what they were singing, except for a few words like "grazie" "abbiamo" and "si," I knew the emotions and I probably felt new ones. It was amazing how the music so easily conveyed emotion, especially when I could physically feel the power of the singers and identify with them. At the same time, though, I was glad I knew what was happening in the story because as time past I became restless at points when the "wordless" songs seemed to last longer than was necessary. The story of La Traviata is basically the original and inspiration for Moulin Rouge, the 2001 film directed by Baz Luhrmann. A prostitute, recently recovered from illness, throws a party to celebrate her good health. Her name is Violetta and, when she meets a high class gentleman named Alfredo at her celebration, she falls in love and eventually moves to the country with her new lover. Throughout the first act, Alfredo and Violetta discover and sing of their love, and Violetta, almost in secret, finds her health may still be in decline. In the second act, Violetta and Alfredo are living in the country together where they are very happy. When Alfredo leaves for Paris, however, his father arrives to confront Violetta, the lowlife his son is treating as a wife and who is therefore a danger to the family. Alfredo's father begs Violetta to leave Alfredo in order to save the name of Alfredo's family which would allow Alfredo's sister to find a respectable husband. Violetta finally gives after much singing and she begins to write a farewell note to Alfredo. As she weeps bitterly over her quill and paper, Alfredo returns from Paris and they sing about their love. Once Violetta leaves under the pretense of attending a party, and Alfredo finds the note, Alfredo angrily goes to Paris to find her. In a gambling scene, he sees her with a past lover, calls her a whore, and throws two hand-fulls of gambling coins at her feet. In the final act, Violetta dies just after Alfredo has decided to return to her. The third act was a long act with little action besides the reunion and realization of death. The entire show was overly dramatic, that's opera, but I would have known little of it without a synopsis we were given for class, and knowing the story definitely added to my experience. Without knowing what exactly the characters were doing on stage, I think I would have been lost, and probably bored frequently by constant confusion and the singular activity of feeling the dramatic, and sometimes wearisome, emotions. (photo above: Moulin Rouge.)

Knowing the words to an opera could make opera more interesting, more dimensional. Obviously the stories of some operas have been worthy enough for remakes (La Traviata inspired Moulin Rouge; La Bohème seems to have inspired the musical RENT, although I truthfully have never seen either the opera or the show/film). With words and musical commentary on human emotions, their strengths, depths, logic, and all their other mysterious qualities, I think opera could shine in a way most people never imagine. Whenever I finally learn to speak Italian well enough to follow an opera, or I see one in English (I don't know whether supertitles count, it depends on whether I can read them and be certain I know exactly where the singer is putting emphasis), I will probably enjoy it as much as a "wordless" opera. Like an opera I don't understand, one I do will take me through an extreme emotional experience that I will come away from feeling refreshed by the power of the voices and enlightened through an insight into the thoughts and the emotions connected with the experiences of the characters. But even if I don't enjoy operas I can understand, I will always have the option of seeing operas in unknown languages, so I have no fears about trying to understand, or ruining, opera for myself. Not seeing operas again is probably not an option though, I must say. I enjoyed La Traviata immensely, never feeling tired or hungry as I had predicted, and only feeling slightly bored throughout. The emotional ride of La Traviata was soothing, illuminating, and invigorating; it was the sort of release that Venice has offered the world for years through other ventures, so it is no surprise to me that Venice and opera seem to go hand in hand. Freedom, life, and passion all are words fitting to both ideas: Venice and opera, and in a way I feel each has probably inspired the other to greater and lesser degrees. Because I now have a greater interest in opera as well as an appreciation for it as a Venetian expression, I am super excited for our class's final show, an opera in La Fenice, Venice's one true opera house. This show is going to be amazing, just look at the venue (photo above, source unknown). (And I'm just going to end my blog like this ---> because there is no need to elaborate when Linsay's already read the unfinished version of this blog that ended like this.) Linsay would enjoy, maybe? If she still likes opera?

FORMAL ESSAY: THE WORLD'S COURTESAN

A beautiful woman steeped in mystery and available to the world at the price of mere coinage, Venice is a city of longing akin to her once profuse population of famed and desired courtesans. Having passed through the hands of emperors and kings in years past and today through the hands of thousands of tourists, Venice has both a long history and a modern persona that align the city’s identity with the collective identity of the courtesans that once ruled its calli and canals. Wanted, desired, longed for, paid for, Venice has been and is something of a modern courtesan for whom tourists pine, dreaming of the promises that Venice makes them as a goddess of their deepest desires, and for whom longing is in return her only means of sustenance. Through this resemblance of Venice to a courtesan, we can understand the city as a place that has become dependent on people who long for what it offers and we can make sense of the powers that have driven the world crazy in the city's pursuit. What we find in scrutiny is that longing, just as for a courtesan, is for Venice a way of making a living, and for Venice's clients, longing is an outlet for their emotions of desire that they will never tire of.

The feminized city of Venice has been a heterotopic place representative of people's desires for centuries, representative of ideas that speak to the desires of those who travel to Venice as clients of its persona. Margaret F. Rosenthal writes in her book The Honest Courtesan that “the Venetian courtesan has long captured people's imagination(s) as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and social unruli-ness.” Although it may seem from this extracted quote that Rosenthal is describing Venice itself, what Rosenthal is really writing of are Venice's actual courtesans who, as early as the sixteenth-century, were symbols of freedom, risk, and excitement that helped to make Venice an international space for quenching possibly guilty desires such as "social unruli-ness." Desires like freedom, risk, and excitement, that were also symbolized by Venetian Carnivale, art, music, government, and architecture, sparked a flow of tourism to Venice during a time when Venice still had purpose beyond tourism, yet just as that purpose, as port and merchant town, was declining. Artists in particular flocked to Venice, a dying, feminine city, to be inspired by its unique position as declining empire beautiful in its decay, or as "a thing of yesterday," as John Ruskin once wrote (The Genius of John Ruskin). Desire to visit Venice was also created in its uniqueness. I think Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s quote, “Venice can only be compared with itself,” from his travel journal The Italian Journey gives perfect insight into why people desire Venice. When tourists go to Venice, the main things they imagine themselves doing are most likely riding in a gondola, walking the bridges, wandering the narrow alleyways, and sitting in famous locations such as Saint Marc's Square for a leisurely lunch or coffee. The uniqueness of Venice is exactly what draws people to its shores, to see something so different from the everyday that they can remove themselves from their old rigid worlds and relax in a place where the old rules, or even their old identities, do not matter and life is free. As a result of Venice's appeal, tourists furthermore desire to associate themselves with it simply because of its desirable quality. Romantic allure of freedom and inspiration as well as fame make Venice desirable and special; this is where the longing that Venice relies on finds root.

Longing, the wanting of something that cannot easily be obtained, is by far the most important aspect of Venice’s courtesan persona. People long to see Venice with their own eyes and they long to take Venice home. Unlike the concept of “desire” discussed earlier, “longing” is when tourists must wait a long time to finally behold Venice, the object of their desires. Courtesans thrive on longing because it makes them more cherished or expensive. If a courtesan’s basic purpose, as prostitute, were all she gave for the price she charged, her value would quickly diminish. For Venice, the same goes. Venice does not deliver openly to its “clients,” it does not franchise itself across the world (luckily it could never) or lower its prices, because the very expense of a vacation in Venice is a part of the longing, the saving up, and "once in a lifetime experience." Tourists pay dearly for their vacations to Venice mainly because Venice is unique, “one of a kind,” and its demand is high. Longing, therefore, is a useful tool that Venice can use to make money and to preserve itself the way it is today as a tourists' city. Just as the Venetian courtesan survived by enhancing the masturbatory fantasies surrounding her by making herself scarce and by writing poetry or developing skill in prose, as Veronica Franco, Venice's most famous courtesan, once did, Venice relies on its persona as a place people long to experience and associate themselves with in order to remain a city. Without the longing of tourists that leads to large fiscal influx from the tourism industry, the Venetian economy would have a difficult time supporting itself as a city. Longing helps Venice to continue by bringing in tourists and therefore money to nourish its economy. When people come to Venice with a sense of longing they tend to spend a lot of money, splurging because they know that their trip may be their one chance to remember through expensive memorabilia, through the enjoyment of a gondola ride, or even a fancy dinner. Longing makes Venice important to people, makes it an accomplishment to celebrate at high costs, and Venice lives off this longing by providing easy access to the desires of its clientele.

Venice is the world’s courtesan, a place of desire for which people pay dearly simply to pretend that they are where they wish they were or what they wish they were. It is a place of desires and, most importantly to Venice, a place of longing. Essentially, the creation of lust, or longing, is the job of the city and the trade by which its inhabitants exist. Like a courtesan of the old Venice, Venice can be nothing else than what it is for the world; Venice can only be longed for, desired, because it functionally cannot participate in other economical society. Like a courtesan, Venice must create a sense of longing to survive.

FORMAL ESSAY: MORE THAN A MARKETPLACE

In the stereotyping of cultures, food has been associated with Italian culture as the most distinct part of Italian social life. I cannot say whether or not the cooking and sharing of large, delicious meals truly marks the most important act of social life in Italy, but after spending a month and half in Venice I feel I can avow that the basic notion that food holds a special place in Italian culture is at least accurate. First off, I can see it. In Venice, the relationship between food and social life is everywhere; osterie, trattorie, and bars, where residents of the city gather to chat noisily, can be found along most calli and in most campi. Also, I have been told that people buy a lot of fresh foods to take home for cooking. In the mornings I have walked through and shopped at the open produce markets of Venice, where Venetians come to choose ingredients for the meals they cook at home. Whether cooking food in the home or eating it out, Italians seem to use food as a strong infrastructure in their society. In Venice, though, this tradition is taken a step further. Buying the ingredients for home cooked meals is just as much a part of the social aspect of food as the cooking and eating parts. The purchasing of food at the Venetian vendors brings a social aspect to the meal even before the food is cooked and it is a tradition that has lasted for centuries. History and society have shaped the behaviors of people in the produce marketplaces to become a telling part of Venetian life.

For the sake of having a proper understanding of the subject, I will describe the vendors themselves. The produce vendors in Venice are wide, sloping tables, usually complete with an awning to protect the fresh goods from the sun or rain, stacked with fruits and vegetables that customers can easily browse with their eyes, checking in one glance both quality by color of the produce and origin and price by large white signs stuck into the piles of produce. When a customer approaches the vendor, it is a known rule that they cannot touch the produce, even when they want to buy it. Vendors always take their customers' orders ("three large tomatoes, please"), choose the produce, then present it to the customer for inspection; this is a custom that probably originated from the days of plagues in Venice during which touching of the fruit was even regulated by the state (Francesca Furlanis, personal interview). Today, when buying from vendors, they will often come out around their stalls to pick out produce side by side with their customers, which gives the process of buying a more interactive and verbal spirit. The location of vendors is also particular. Located throughout the city in all of its different sestieri, vendors can choose where to set up shop. Some vendors set up spots in the main marketplaces to which Venetians flock in the mornings and on Saturdays when prices drop, while others set up in the calli where vendors encounter less competition. Location can affect both the price of goods and the type of customers. In the marketplaces, the vendors are setup side to side and back to back and as shoppers wander through the market they check for better prices, making competition tougher. In the calli, vendors may have less customers, but they often attract customers such as the elderly who are willing to pay higher prices for fresh produce closer to home.

Price and convenience, though, are by far not the only considerations of Venetian vendor customers. I spoke with Francesca Furlanis, from the Venice International University, about the customs and cultural purposes of the produce markets in Venice in order to gain better insight into their societal importance. At the time I knew nothing about Venice’s vendors, and I was interested in understanding whether the markets served simply an economical purpose or whether they added to Venice’s social circles. As it turned out, as I have said, the vendors are places of social interaction upon which Venice relies as sort of nodes of social contact. Francesca herself is a regular patron of the produce vendors and she offered some very interesting insight into market life in particular. People who buy from vendors in Venice tend to care more about their personal experience while shopping and their experience after shopping, or while cooking and eating, than about either price or convenience. According to Francesca, one priority is the relationship customers have with their vendors on levels of trust and privacy. Customers usually find a vendor they can rely on for quality produce who will keep a semi-formal or business relationship with them to become “regulars." When I visited the market, I even saw customers hurry to their regular vendor, hand them a list of needed items and wait while the vendor picked out and bagged their produce. During two of those visit, I also bought fresh figs and learned the importance of having a fresh fruit vendor one can trust. The first time I bought four delicious figs for under a euro, but the second time I bought a kilo of figs from another vendor that I soon discovered were nearly all rotten, and simultaneously discovered that I probably should not trust that vendor. Freshness, Francesca said, is also one of the main reasons for buying produce from a vendor. The produce at the vendor is usually fresher, sometimes having been picked on one of the islands next to Venice, and fresher ingredients means better home cooked food. I asked whether the sign of an independent new family might be their presence in the produce markets or at the vendors and Francesca agreed. If a wife, for instance, had a regular vendor she bought from, her extended family would probably show slightly more respect to their independence because of her effort made to cook quality food.

The vendor culture in Venice demonstrates the Venetian appreciation for home life and for their community because they combine the two when they bring their private life into the public space of the market. As Francesca noted more than once, the produce markets heavily serve as meeting places for friends and for people living in different parts of the city that would otherwise never get the chance to interact. Sometimes friends who do not even intend to purchase produce will stop by the market to chat, and especially to gossip, with each other because the market is the only place they can rely on as a meeting spot. Everyone has to eat, everyone values fresh produce, and therefore everyone will be there to chat and gossip. This communal aspect of the marketplaces is what Francesca said she likes most about shopping at the vendors, over shopping at a grocery for instance. The social side of the vendors, with all its various purposes, is another example of how Italians mix food and social life to continue the popular concept that food is the most important part of Italian social culture. From what I can tell, it seems like a pretty sweet tradition, especially when you can buy, from the right vendor, fresh figs for under one euro; and, if you are a Venetian resident, that also means shopping with friends.

HALLOWEEN

This Halloween I learned about vampires. Really it was quite frightening, I saw both Twilight (scary!) and Interview With a Vampire (gross!!) on the same night. I had watched a few episodes of Tru Blood, a well made, trashy-novel, HBO television show about vampires integrating into Louisiana small town society, with my roommate Caylen, but I can probably profess that before this Halloween I knew very little about vampires if I consider the two weeks before Halloween a part of the general holiday. What I knew about vampires before this Halloween's intense exposure consisted of mere commercial images of them. For instance, I remember this plastic Halloween cup that Linsay or I had that had Dracula skulking in front of a brick wall on it (the fake red and white one wearing a cape, not the Romanian dude) and for some reason I always associated it with marshmallows, as if I thought Dracula was the marshmallow missing from my Halloween candy... wow, that sounded almost sentimental and sweet. But the movies and t.v. show were not soft and sugary (minus Twilight which is all sparkles and heroin {you'd get it if you saw it... but it's fine if you haven't}). As it turns out, vampires are actually freaky, and, as I have gotten to know them, they have given me a new notion of Halloween that I had never considered: it can actually be a scary holiday. The idea of cannibalistic predators lurking in dark corners with their mouths watering for blood unnerves me. Watching in realistic detail the stories of undead humans with sharp, skin-piercing teeth that come to view the human species as subject-less prey with soft jugular arteries has brought the classical Halloween terrors of loneliness, bloody gore, suffering, screams of horror, and corpses to a new level for me. I loved Interview With a Vampire even when it was terribly disgusting, I don't recommend Twilight, and I'm still watching Tru Blood which isn't that bad. For this and other reasons, my Halloween in Italy was a fun night. The adventure did not start with vampires, though, and how it did begin was perfect for a holiday based on surprises. The first half of my Halloween was spent exploring three islands north of Venice: Burano, Torcello, and San Michele. (photos in order: Twilight, Interview With a Vampire, Tru Blood.)

Burano is an island of calm. As one of the original islands of the Veneti escape from the Huns over a thousand years ago and with a current population of only 3000 farmers, fishermen, and store owners, Burano probably finds this calm in its settled state of age and small size (http://www.isoladiburano.it). On Halloween, we didn't really know where we were heading, so finding this calm was a pleasant surprise. Our journey to Burano was a 40 minute ride north of Venice past Murano, the island famous for Venetian glass, and San Michele, the cemetery. We stood on the vaporetto the whole way, warming ourselves the best we could in the sunlight just to get a better look at the Venetian scenery we had not yet seen. A few tiny islands along the route looked abandoned and available for purchase, so I spent a little time dreaming about my future house in the middle of the lagoon. As someone pointed out, one of them would be a nice fixer-upper: there was a wall already around the outside of the island and two or three alcoves built into the wall as boat houses, yet the interior was barren save for weeds and maybe an old building or two. In the picture on the left you can see Maria, Natalie, and Caylen gazing upon these desolate wonders as we voyaged past in otherwise open water. Nearing Burano, things came back to life. The vaporetto churned through a wide canal along which buildings were lined and private boats were docked. Despite the signs of life, though, and even a few people moving about on the land, we could literally see the quiet peacefulness of the island, what, from my brief experience, I would call its dominant characteristic. Like a small country town an hour outside a big city, Burano seemed rightly passive and laid back like a true neighborhood of the Veneto islands where the commotion of the busy city luckily does not emanate. Without even stepping onto the land, I got a warm, peaceful feeling just by seeing the island's personality from our large and disruptively transient vaporetto. Once we arrived at the Burano boat stop, we immediately entered the distinctly secluded yet active habitat of Burano. To begin with, the island is sparsely visited in contrast to Venice. Right off the boat we walked through a wide, empty park with big trees and bare benches. Three cats wandered the grasses, keeping clear of the people with their small dogs on leashes and those trying to pet them (a.k.a. me and Caylen), and they added to a sense of calm that the entire island seemed to radiate, even in the "touristic" areas such as the main calle and the one true shopping stretch. If cats can stand to be in a place, any place, then it must be rather uneventful and leisurely. One of the cats even ran ahead of a line of tourists in the main calle like a common leash-less dog; he knew he would be able to escape to sunlight and tranquility a few paces down so that fleeting moment of adversity was hardly a bother. Adding to the Burano calm, another pleasant feature of the island is the color of the buildings. Like a tropical town, for me Bermuda, many of the buildings on the island were painted bright colors: red, white, blue, green, pink, purple, yellow, like rows of candy or fresh fruits. I enjoyed the quiet liveliness of it because it was happy, not to mention different. I was glad to be away from Venice, on a day trip, and what would "getting away" mean if I got away to a place that looked just like the place I had left. In certain areas we saw glass shops and lace shops, Burano is apparently known for its lace. Tablecloths and frilly clothing such as dresses and gloves were everywhere, and even this slight change from the normal Venetian landscape was refreshing. I did not like the shops with lace because the products didn't interest me, but I liked to see something different. Although we did look in various glass shops, giving in to price hunting and actually enjoying a change in scenery behind this common exploit, I did not care to focus on glass and spent time wondering in the lace stores as an alternative. Both in such appearances and atmosphere Burano surprised me. I never would have imagined that a quiet and refreshing island like this existed near Venice. Like any stereotype, the common vision of Venice as purely romantic and decorated in stone extended to the entire region of the area for me.

After enough time spent treading the few paths of Burano, because due to its small size we started to walk in circles, we decided to move on to an even more remote island, Torcello. Torcello was also an original "Venice" in its day, and for hundreds of years it remained an important trading center in the lagoon with more power and population than what then existed on the islands Venice itself (wikipedia.com). At that time, Torcello had a population of nearly 10,000; today about 20 people permanently reside there as farmers and restaurant and shop owners. Every thirty minutes a vaporetto crossed the narrow stretch of water between Burano and Torcello to carry tourists (or maybe some of the 20 Torcello residents) back and forth to the island. We took this trip in search of more surprises. If Burano was calm, Torcello was dead calm. We followed the only obvious paved path back through Torcello's weedy fields along its canal. Hardly any buildings existed in sight, except for a few relatively new ones, and we felt a sense of overwhelming age in the absence of any signs of the island's extensive human history. For a frequenter of Saint Marc's Square and of other crowded and animated areas, this dead calm and quiet gave me a queer feeling of inner peace. I felt almost alone simply knowing that not terribly far off people dominate and crawl about Venice like ants and yet I stood as one in maybe one hundred on a flat expanse of nothing. We passed a few shops and restaurants randomly in wait along the pathway, and we walked over Il Ponte del Diavolo (see photo above) to see a couple farm houses and rural walking paths out into the island's fields. The fact that the bridge has no protective railings adds to the ruined and weathered quality of Torcello as a former place, even though I do not know whether the bridge was ever meant to have railings. Where there are no people, life seems to grow more dangerous or in another sense casual; people are needed to make a community safe and friendly or perhaps without them the fancy extras are unnecessary because the respect of an offered protection is not required. What mattered to me was the feeling it gave me. At the end of our walk, we came to the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, a rather small and simple cathedral from the outside, that was built in 639 A.D. Before we walked around the premises, Natalie snapped this picture of Maria, me, Caylen, and Dane on "Attila’s Throne" (it was just a stone chair for the late bishop really, but it was worn and aged and seemingly void of its former meaning). Torcello felt as far away from Venice and its craziness as we could get, for free that is. Everything from the weather to the people was quite. No boats were rumbling by and the weeds sticking up from the wet marshes around the cathedral tilted in a light breeze. Wikipedia says that Ernest Hemingway lived on Torcello for a while in 1949. I'm not surprised that a writer would find it a perfect getaway from the crowds and the present. On Torcello, what mattered to the island happened in the past, so any length of time spent there almost seems irrelevant to one's temporal or chronological senses.

Finally, we started back to Venice. In the spirit of Halloween, we made an effort to catch the vaporetto that would take us by San Michele, the cemetery island, hoping to find something truly unique in Venice's unique cemetery. We walked back down Torcello's path, passing two souvenir vendors selling glass on the way (not kidding, Venice tries to get tourists wherever they go), then caught boats to the cemetery to check it out. The ride took forever... Although I knew that the cemetery was only two hundred or so years old, and that it is still in use, I expected it to have some interesting, "European" looking sections that would speak to our idea of frightening old cemeteries once we got there. No, the cemetery looked modern, even more so than some American cemeteries, and brightly colored silk flowers were everywhere. This was a surprise for me. Other than the dramatically tall, straight lines of cypress trees along the four main paths, the only evident interest the cemetery offered to tourists like us was its novel island location, and perhaps for Venetians this is exactly the way it should be. Can you image having to fight crowds of tourists all day in your city, then having to do it when heading to the very private space of a family burial sight? The island is very small and square, as you can tell from the picture, and would not serve well as a tourist attraction even without issues of private space and time, so just imagine the frustrations tourism would cause regular visitors. Such private areas, which may also include parks, campi, and courtyards must be preserved for Venetian residents, otherwise the people would have no outlets to become a community and maintain the truth of the city. I once saw a group of children playing soccer in a tiny courtyard right off a busy, touristic calle and they were able to play undisturbed because tourists rarely intruded on that space. Such a convenience would not have been available to those kids if there had been a significant work of art or architecture in that area. But I can see that happening. As people strive for meaning in life, they often find prideful satisfaction in associating their everyday existences with a name or event that others will envy, and in this way areas like the cemetery on San Michele could become areas of public spectacle rather than function. If, say, the cemetery were to acquire the body of a famous person, tourists would suddenly gain more control over the island and the Venetians would loose a very important aspect of their personal lives. So, I hope that San Michele remains uninteresting for the the purpose of preserving the space for a Venetian real.

After returning to Venice, or home, we stopped on Garibaldi on our way back to San Servolo to pick up pastries for our vampire themed Halloween party. So far, the day had been almost unnaturally calm and quiet. Our day trip had given us a significant break from the busy, noisy, crowded lifestyle we have adopted in Venice, and as it grew dark we were excited to really break away from the strangeness of being abroad by celebrating an American holiday in an American way. We walked into the pastry shop surprised to see trick-or-treaters, some costumed inadequately by American standards. The shop owner was doling out huge handfuls of wrapped chocolates, and we waited impatiently to buy "bombe" (unsure how to spell it), donut-like pastries, and ghost and pumpkin shaped cookies. Halloween isn't huge in Venice, and it was odd to see the Venetian interpretation of this American holiday. People along Via Garibali were dressed up in rather unimaginative costumes, witches, grim reapers, ect, that mimicked the black caped outfits worn during Venetian Carnivale, and the osterie, or small cheap restaurants, around the city did have decorations and even Halloween parties. As we found out in our pastry shop, kids trick-or-treat at shops rather than at private homes and I'm sure not everyone in the city realized that October 31st was special at all, especially all the European and Asian tourists. In Venice Halloween probably makes sense because of its similarities to Carnivale, a period in the Spring when people, mostly adults, wear masks and dress up, and to Saint Martin's day (11/11), a holiday in which children collect money in pots that they bang with wooden spoons. Their celebration of Halloween was different, and less probably "needed" due to the existence of their holidays, yet it was surprisingly here and very fitting. Seeing Venice like this was interesting, but we were ready to retire to San Servolo for a night away from Venice and Europe in general. We first created a miniature trick-or-treating course for Lorenzo, Professors Allen and Felluga's five year old son, who brought us special Venetian cookies as a surprise, then we settled in for our movies. It was a great holiday full of adventure and I am glad that I now know Burano, Torcello, San Michele, Venice on Halloween, and vampires.