The Pillars of Hercules

The first thing I saw the following day, as I walked down my side street to the lagoon, was a great flotilla of boats. Decked with pennants and banners, they were high-sterned wooden watercraft, larger and more elaborate than gondolas, with gold trim and bright paint, the lead boat with a tall crucifix instead of a mast and others carrying statues of saints, all of them manned by crews of oarsmen who were rowing them across the lagoon from Venice to the Lido. They bobbed busily in the early-morning sunshine.

I had arrived at a good time, the Feast of the Ascension (the Festa della ’Sensa in Venetian slang), the day of the annual ceremony of marriage with the sea, Ceremonia dello Sposalizio del Mare. In former times, the Doge threw his ring into the lagoon and a young fisherman dived into the water and grabbed it. These days it was a regatta, followed by a mass at the Chiesa San Nicolo al Lido (“Here the Emperor Barbarossa stayed before his meeting with Pope Alexander III in San Marco in 1177”—but perhaps we knew that already).

The ceremony was a ritualized blessing, the pretty boats with their bunting and flags and ribbons all fluttering in the wind, drawn alongside the embankment; the muscular oarsmen still panting from the effort of the long row, their eyes lowered, standing in their splashed costumes, their caps doffed. A mass followed this, just like the sort of happy mass that followed a wedding ceremony. I associated this amount of piety and time with the sort of weddings I had preferred in my days as an altar boy: there was usually a tip afterward from the harassed father of the bride. Tips and tokens were passing to the oarsmen who were like acolytes at this ceremony. The so-called marriage of the sea “commemorated the Conquest of Dalmatia in A.D. 1000,” my guidebook said: oars and pennants and blessings on this shore for almost a thousand years.

I took a water-bus from the Lido to Venice proper, and approaching this city in the sea, glittering in brilliant sunshine, I began to goggle, trembling a little, feeling a physical thrill and unease, in the presence of such beauty, an exaltation amounting almost to fear.

Venice is magic, the loveliest city in the world, because it has entirely displaced its islands with palaces and villas and churches. It is man-made, but a work of genius, sparkling in its own lagoon, floating on its dreamy reflection, with the shapeliest bridges and the last perfect skyline on earth: just domes and spires and tiled roofs. It is one color, the mellowest stone. There is no sign of land, no earth at all, only water traffic and canals. Everyone knows this, and yet no one is prepared for it, and so the enchantment is overwhelming. The fear you feel is the fear of being bewitched and helpless. Its visitors gape at it, speechless with admiration, hardly believing such splendor can shine forth from such slimy stones.

Language cannot do justice to Venice and nothing can detract from its beauty. It floods regularly; its marble is damaged and decayed, its paintings rot, it has stinking corners. Its canals are green, some of it looks poisonous, it is littered, it teems with rats which not even the masses of Venetian cats can cope with. The graffiti on ancient walls and on church pillars—I noted Berlusconi is Doing Harm and Berlusconi is the Assassin of Democracy—is almost incidental. People still live in Venice, children play in its backstreets, where families turn the cranks of pasta machines, men congregate to smoke, women scorch tomatoes. In the alleys beggar women cradle their children and hold signs: Please Help My Family—Ex-Yugoslavia. Even the fact that Venice is actually sinking, and might one day be destroyed if not disappear altogether, gives it an air of fragility and drama, a passionate mortality.

The outdoor pleasures of Venice—walking, traveling on the water-buses, gloating over the architecture—are as intense as the indoor pleasures of browsing among the masterpieces of painting and sculpture. Both are hopeless too, because there is not enough time to see everything you want. To use my time, because I was just passing through, I made a project for myself. I looked for paintings in churches and galleries where the sea was specifically shown—the sea battles, the blessing of fleets, the sight of canals and gondolas in the background of religious pictures, the mythology of the sea. The best by far was in the Ducal Palace in St. Mark’s, Tiepolo’s “Venice receiving the Homage of Neptune”—the lovely woman personifying the city, La Serenissima, reclining while the ancient grizzled god empties a great hornlike shell of its treasure of gold coins and jewels.