HERE AND NOT

Yesterday morning I took a photo of the Campanile di San Marco and its older brother the Campanile San Giorgio Maggiore from the 20 vaporetto on my way to San Zaccaria. The bell towers can be seen seemingly far in the distance on the left side of the photo, a trick of angle and the presence of lines exaggerating their remoteness to the boat, but they are relatively close to me considering I normally live thousands of miles around the world from Venice. The whole "Wonders of Venice" class was on its way to the main "island" to take a tour of il Palazzo Ducale, which means "the Doge's Palace" in Italian if you need a translation, when I caught a glimpse of i campanili out my window. The number 20, our favorite little vaporetto line, stops more than hourly at San Servolo's main dock to drop off and pick up scant numbers of passengers, twenty at most of the one hundred or so people associated with the island per week. Churning the water as its motors rumble to push the boat against the dock, the vaporetto causes the landing to rise and fall in waves and the people waiting on the boat and on the landing lose their balance when the boat hits the dock with a bang. Swiftly, the man at the ropes (ours usually wears a cool pair of black shades) tosses a loop of thick rope around the rusted, iron docking post, ties a loose knot to form a line, then slides the vaporetto gate open. While people move across a momentarily narrow boundary between stationary and mobile space, the sturdy rope around the docking post moans as it holds the vaporetto in place beside the landing. "Ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Attenzione," is normally the rope-thrower's greeting as we board and immediately head for standing places outside where the view is amazing or turn right or left to go down into the boat where we can sit shielded from the weather behind windows of plastic or in a cove of metal. Yesterday, we all sat inside (as Sara, Maria, and Elyse demonstrate on the right), except the few who wandered to the boat's back porch to feel the crisp air on their faces and to see the world without having to see it through a window. Though I normally step out, I was content to sit in with my camera; I snapped the photo of i campanili as the vaporetto turned towards Venice proper, and I now title it, "It has been a week, by Audrey Jenkins."

Technically, it has been a week and a half since my initial landing on la isola di San Servolo, which is the event I am reflecting in the title of this photo; yet, I feel that "It has been a week, by Audrey Jenkins" accurately illustrates that well-known, symbolic period of the first seven days, in this case, my seven day experience of life from San Servolo. Thus, for the sake of this spectacular piece of art (not actually), I am taking an artistic liberty. Venice in the distance of my everyday experiences is something to be noticed and reflected on. Here is it, as I see it most often, Venice, forming the backdrop of my classes and decorating my vaporetto trips to and from the city and to and from Italian class like a large photograph hanging over my academic activities. Venice up close, as my class has discussed, is a complicated space which demands time in order to absorb it or even to see it accurately. The dramatized distance in "It has been a week" reflects the span of time during which I have developed a relationship with myself as a temporary resident of the Venetian waters. I am temporary, I am an observer, I am on a brief vacation from my normal scholastic environment; perhaps I will only ever get this close to dissecting Venice, solely because of what I am. When we walk into the city, hurried because we have only three months, we glimpse images of a unique jumble of objects and actions that lodge themselves in the "Venice" files of our memories, waiting for use. We collect scraps of the city on each journey in, to the Doge's Palace, to the Jewish Ghetto, to a library, to the Billa, and it requires us to sew back together with long threads each piece of the unknown place. We figure out the maze in ways that it seems to us we understand it, but the surprise of new discoveries can easily lose us. Those islands of images and thought, made certain to us because they are connected by threads of ideas with which we pull them together, can easily float free due to a lack of tending to their fabric, or, in other words, due to a lack of time spent gathering solid ground on which to build.

This is all we have collected so far, ideas and brief images, and perhaps this is all we will get, a crude collection; distance stands between ourselves and knowing. I see it directly outside my window where the water stretches out in all directions, washing the steps of Venice and the side of Building 14, my residence, with reaching arms. I see it every time I wait for the vaporetto, then wait for the vaporetto to drop me off on Venice's sagging stone shore. I see distance when I rush from historical point to historical point without stopping to meet the city in the present, because speed, and lack of time, in a slow-paced city is a barrier equal to distance. Finally, I see distance in numbers. In the past week [and a half] a herd of students just like me, and in which I am included, have been crowding each other out of seeing Venice for what it is as itself. We are a permanent type of character in Venice, matter of fact we are tourists very much like those our Italian teacher compares to zanzare, the Italian word for "mosquitos;" yet to understand the concept of a city overrun by tourists, we do not need to constantly add to that chaos by always including our prominent figures in our own and each other's experiences. To truly see and study things, we need to be close enough to see them as a detached participant, or, even better, as mock participants in the most permanent of Venetian scenes. We need to cover the distances between us and Venice, including our very identities, in order to see it. Such a multitude of large distances to cross in three months time, though, means students may end up running. If I run to reach the Venice I came to see, who will I end up as, I have been wondering. A new character in Venice? A unique explorer who only sees their own type of Venice? Once I put Venice together in my head and call it complete at the end of these weeks, what will I know of it? Will I only know the famous facades I study and their purposes? Or will I know Venice's function and its inhabitants? Will I know its present and its future? I think these questions are in some ways necessary for coming to grips with what I want out of my semester here. After a week in Venice, during which I have been very busy, I have thought through my current state and have decided that, for my purposes, I am not yet in Venice. To be in Venice I need to immerse myself in a large variety of its aspects, and most importantly, I need to do it well, which means I need to spend a great deal of time in the city not as a student from San Servolo, but as its inhabitant. (First image above: a corner of Saint Mark's basilica; Second: Casanova's house from the canal on our night-time gondola ride; Third: a Holocaust memorial in the Jewish ghetto)

On our trip to the Doge's Palace, we traversed the same waterfront as always and ran into the same tourists (metaphorically of course). Walking off the vaporetto stop, which is something of an extension to our little San Servolo homeland, we saw the Doge's Palace to the left, souvenir kiosks lined along the water, and pigeons. We know this location pretty well because we are always here. I was excitedly anticipating getting to see the inside of the Palace, which I have held in high regard for unknown reasons, if not only for its grandeur and slight mystery. I wanted to know who or what Venetians used to look to as their leader and form of power, and possibly I wanted to revisit the "Bridge of Sighs" to see whether it seems as haunting as it sounds. We stood beside the vaporetto stop, ghosts of the aqua alta silently foreshadowing our eventual, unavoidable experience with the famous Venetian flooding, and we waited for the tour to begin.


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Here are some photos (above and below) of our customary entrance to the city: the vaporetto pulling in, the stop as it looks from the land, and some stacked aqua alta sidewalks in front of the Doge's Palace. Below on the right is a photo of the Doge's Palace that I took when Momma was here. At 6 a.m. the Saturday before last, Momma and I took a walk through a silent Venice in which shop owners on their way to work flowed through the streets like the water through the canals. Upon reaching Piazza San Marco, we admired Venice on the brink of dawn, and created amazing memorabilia. That was an unforgettable morning.



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When my class goes to Venice, we see these familiar sights and have enough time to take them in. We are always on the move when we are here though, and when I think about Venice I think about walking and rushing. Yesterday, rushing was not bad at all, I wanted to see the Doge's Palace; I was not disappointed. Our ever amazing VIU (Venice International University) event coordinator, Francesca, introduced us to our Palace guide out in the Piazza, then we headed in to see the courtyard within, a beautiful white space sided by the grand Scala dei Giganti, the stairscase where the Doges were crowned. Here you can see the backs of the statues, Mars and Neptune, overlooking the stairs. These giants were meant to remind the Doge and the whole of Venice that no Doge is all-powerful. I loved how this theme was represented throughout the palace, although I have no photographs to show it. Looking up, above the stairs, you can see San Marc's basilica from the back. The domes are gigantic and fantastic. When we take a tour like this one, we notice the architecture and we notice how it speaks to the people of the past. Who were the Venetians of the past? What does this mean to the Venetians of today (a.k.a. the tourists)? I love these concepts, and I love being able to see them in action with my own eyes. We walked up a stairwell, leafed in Egyptian gold, to reach the elaborate rooms of law where Doges presided over court sessions, voting, and war arrangements. Sculptures and paintings everywhere talked of the Venetian political system and symbolism. For instance, our guide taught us about the book under the famous Venetian winged lion's paw: open for peace and closed for war. In other paintings we saw symbols of political system in which the winged lion receives a crown from angles while the Doge is merely a spectator or Venice is shown in expansion from a view on the mainland. Looking back on the past we see that Venice was a capitalist city not ruled by religion or monarchy as much as by the wealth of the republic.
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In the famous Venetian dungeons, that were built at the top of a building rather than below it, we saw the usual stones and bars of power. Notably remembered through Byron's poetic depiction of the bridge connecting the Doge's Palace to the prison as the "Bridge of Sighs," the dungeons were interesting in their history, especially with the idea of prisoners being held for execution in mind. Our guide told us that executions took place between the well known pillars by the lagoon and that less prisoners crossed the Bridge of Sighs for execution than we probably imagine. Here is picture I took in crossing the bridge.
Billboards cover the buildings on either side of the canal outside, the stone is being cleaned, but you can still see the water that prisoners looked out to. On the right, Caylen and I stand in front of the stairs at the Doge's Palace.

Right now, I am so close to the history in Venice. I slow down to see it in the walls (as I did in my last post), in the readings when I am on San Servolo studying for class, and even when I am walking beneath the gigantic billboards and modern installments in the city. Seeing amazing sights like the Doge's Palace is definitely worth spending time on; I am learning about Venice through the past and the past is what I am using to sew up what I glimpse when I am there. But, like I said, I am not here, I am there, in the past, trying to read the minds of Venetians (and the tourists). Once we finish with a tour like the one of the Palace, we must hurry back to our real home on San Servolo in order catch lunch in the mensa or to read and study. Our identity is more associated with this, I think, than with Venice; we are slightly stuck in the past, just like good Venetian tourists should be. In the coming weeks, I want to spend more time being a modern Venetian, even if it is temporary. I want to plan my days away from San Servolo and dive into the city without my student identity. I want to wake up and look across the water to see a city I know rather than one I still see shrouded in mystery and intrigue and most of all in history.

This is where I am.