Venice

Venice 8th October

We've been here 24 fun-packed hours, the city is banging, charged up by the huge cruise ships which loom over the skyline towards the west and disgorge thousands of tourists every day, mostly American. It's a VERY long time since I was here (1962 I think) and it's cleaned up a bit but now must offer the most concentrated selection of shops selling decorated masks in the world. The nicest bits (apart from the stupendous palazzi, the cheerful boats on the shimmering water, the tiered footbridges and the carved stone) are the dead-end alleys and domestic courtyards. It is all stunningly beautiful and impossible to see more than a tiny fraction of things in any given amount of time. This is a great time of year to come, with damp foggy mornings (mesmerisingly beautiful to look at), and then warm sunny afternoons and musky hot evenings where eating out on the street is very attractive.
One great innovation is the liberal display of street names or arrow-based route guides, some of which are (amusingly) hijacked by shop owners who want to divert you past their windows, so you think you are going to (say) Piazza San Marco but you end up somewhere else instead.
During supper last night we struck up (as the saying goes) a conversation with two Londoners, David and Albert, who've been coming here for a week every spring and autumn since the early 1970s, always staying in the same hotel, eating every meal in the same resto, outliving the management of both hotel and cafe in fact, several times, because it suits them. Very constant.
Our camping is small and quiet-ish, very near a bus route into the city, and also near the conference centre which I'll be at for the next 2 days. Access to the site is precarious due to horrendous roadworks, all carried out with great Italian verve and completeness so that pavements, road, signs, fences, everything has been torn down and jumbled together in a sort of local chaos. Even the campsite management are unable to fully describe how we should reach the bus stop. We take our life in our hands when we walk out to the road.
We went into the Guggenheim museum this afternoon, what a treat, full of works she mostly had bought from the artists directly – the Futurists, Dali, Man Ray, Leger, Klee, Picasso naturally, Picabia, Antoine Pevsner, Miro, Mondrian, Malevich, Magritte, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Chagall, all, all the great names of the 20th century and then they've added a few more. We absolutely LOVED the Anish Kapoor in the garden, a big slab of black granite with two dish shaped polished out of one side, equal in size and slightly overlapping. These dents are like mirrors and give you a terrifying experience of seeing yourself magnified as you approach the stone, so that at one point you are forced to stop as your reflection apparently leaps out to meet you. A trio of young and happy German women sat on a bench beside this, watching the sequence of people like ourselves, all reacting in different ways...they understood this behaviour was as much a part of the art work as the stone itself. Wonderful.
Then a vaporetto (no 1) grinding its way back to the Roma (where we catch our bus back to Mestre and the camping)....in full glorious light, the boat crowded with schoolkids and commuters and tourists and grumpy old people, and on the water dozens of gondolas and water-taxis and boats carrying workmen and their stuff... all bobbing about and jostling for clear water.
Impossible to describe it all (and really you should come and see for yourself).
I just want to add a word about Como where we stayed on Tuesday night – a centre for luxury and brilliant design, not cheap but a feast for the eyes everywhere you look. We ate a light supper in a tulip shop – what they described as a pre-dinner snack but exquisitely presented in an antique building roughly and thoughtfully revealed and restored, with white painted walls and timbers, casually arranged bucket and bouquets everywhere, loads of things available to buy.... they neglected no chance to offer a spending opportunity to visitors and all so artless and subtle and accessible. Fantastic.
I'm sitting here now under the poplars with huge leaves falling to ground every few moments, and soft dusk light filling in the spaces between the trees. We're waiting for a friend who's flying in from London...her plane is delayed 45 mins so we have some extra time. Not sure whether to arrange to eat here or take her straight to the city. I can hear the end of the works outside on the road, and a factory hooter, and some dogs barking somewhere... It's very peaceful and calm.
The holiday has gone v fast...we've done about 1000 miles so far and have to race back the minute the conference is over, to make our crossing from Dunkerque on Monday evening. Texting friends in England has been fun, too, a sort of pepper-and-salt for the daily experience. I wish, sometimes, I could have all my friends with me on trips like this. When I am a multizillionaire I think I'll start buying ludicrously difficult modern art, put it all in a fab building in a faraway place, and then open the doors to see who comes. S Beckett told Peggy Guggenheim to only buy living artists' work. Our friend Alex in Lausanne would probably not agree with this, as he has a fantastic collection of art mostly created before 1750, but I think I can't afford that sort of thing. Yet.