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.