He Said:
A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him. -Arthur Symons
The Grand Canal from the Ponte dell' Accademia
How narrow is the line between authenticity and cliché? I was having just that conversation with a friend of mine recently as we discussed the Mardi Gras Indians. Once the bright lights of the world are upon you and you are ‘discovered,’ he reasoned, there is great, perhaps inevitable, temptation to play to the camera, to caricature yourself one step at a time. Eventually you risk becoming a product of your audience’s feedback, rather than a collaboration with your own muse.
Venice (Italy, not Louisiana) has been accused of all of this. A tiny jewel box of a destination, it’s been a required stop on the Grand Tour of wealthy Europeans for centuries and on the bucket list for the rest of the globe as well. The result: an often horrifically crowded, always astronomically expensive destination where the tourists outnumber the ancient locals by a huge margin.
But Venice is more than this. I’ve been twice, most recently a bit more than a year ago as part of a trip to celebrate my wife’s very significant birthday (29th,of course. What were you thinking?) I’ve been wanting to share a bit about it ever since and finally made the time to do so.
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Posted in He Said, Travel
Tagged Venice
