hellovenezia

The loveliest bookshop, the craziest boutique and the most creative “America Strasse”.
A journey into beauty: whether absolute, relative, creative, desperate, and which perhaps smells slightly, perhaps of cats, drains or old things.
A journey into the memory of smells that is now disappearing from Venice.

“It is not the rough smell of the ocean, of mixed seabed, mud and drowning, a threatening smell of a hostile element for man, but a different smell – on fine days of course – that is softened, light and female, as if Venice were making a gift of it from its pores like a beautiful and healthy creature. The intimacy of Venice makes this smell[...]
(Mario Praz, Odour of Venice, the World I have seen).

 
                                                                (Mario Praz,Odour of Venice, the World I have seen).

Floods, pigeons and cats, like “Sarti, Burnich, Facchetti”, or “Aldo, Giovani, Giacomo”, an inseparable triad in the Venice of the past.
However, the floods will soon (?) disappear behind the mobile bulkheads of the Mose, when this colossal engineering work is finished, while the pigeons were getting hungry and left the city a while ago, seemingly back to where they came from a hundred years ago – Trieste in the post-Austro-Hungarian period, where there is definitely more wheat and crumbs.
The cats are hardly ever seen in the streets nowadays, except for a rare example in a hidden courtyard or on the edge of an abandoned garden.
Where have they gone? The latest joke is in the pans of the Chinese restaurants, but perhaps they have finished off well in the welcoming homes of the Venetians, or perhaps they have been decimated by mass chemical castration methods.
While these times of crisis could bring them back to the streets, if nothing else they help to liven what is considered, with natural local bias “the loveliest bookshop in the world.
If it is not the loveliest, it is certainly the most disorderly and crazy, with floating shelves, because a gondola, a number of kayaks, various types of boats and even a bath, are part of the furnishings, with hundreds of different books on their shelves, leaning towards the artistic and photographic styles.

After the vast lobby with a gondola, the bookshop occupies a second, Spartan room, again with doors onto the water, where there are thousands of unfindable comic books, series “B” books or others that have changed hands numerous times.
The bookshop takes its name from the way the canal water invades the inside, and here, among the boats, the cats run among the shelves or curl up among the books, all in a tribute to Venetian culture, books, cats and the smells of a Venice, in its romanticism, which have now almost disappeared.
This is the comment made in an internet blog: “As I really love Venice… I have just “re-emerged” from inside its amazing magic, and this bookshop is a true jewel! The cat was waiting for me, curled up and fast asleep and inside .. the entire world shone forth! Books everywhere, second-hand books … full of the feelings of those who have read and enjoyed them, handled and consulted them, and remembered them! A perfume of ancient Venice, that could not get more ancient or special! A fascinating bookshop like Mary Poppins’ bag, where the most amazing things can be found! The magic piper is “its” owner, a multi-faceted player in all of the stories that are told in all the works surrounding him in his mysterious setting! Dedicated to anyone who wants to forget they are living in the present and wants to go back in time, to anyone who enters wearing jeans and a t-shirt and comes out wearing an 18th century golden mask and gown!.
The “Acqua Alta” Bookshop is in Campiello del Tintor, near Campo S. Maria Formosa, the closest ACTV water bus stops are Rialto and Fondamenta Nove.
As the smells accompany us ideally on our walk through the town, from Campiello del Tintor we continue towards Barbaria de le Tole to the Palladian church of S. Francesco della Vigna, where we reach Campo di S.Giustina called, de Barbaria.
Here at number 6549 B there is a small second-hand clothes shop. Nothing unusual in that, except for the fact that this shop has been open since the mythical 70s, and has beaten all the passing fashions.
The Venetians have a strange way of defining this sort of shop, calling them “American Strasse”.
A sort of linguistic “gramelot” that would make the Noble prize winner Dario Fo happy: in dialect strasse means rags, or also street in German (the American street, full of gifts, sweets, cigarettes and clothes) as happened immediately after the war.
You are invited inside, to smell the slightly mouldy perfume that this sort of shop always has, and then look through the clothes and through the mine of dreams, wishes and memories they evoke.
Last stop after a long walk through Campo SS. Giovanni and Paolo, Rialto, Campo S. Luca and Campo S. Stefano, is the loveliest and strangest boutique, belonging to the designer-artist Fiorella Mancini.

The shop windows recall Pop art and likening the shop, clothes and ideas to Andy Warhol’s factory is not as far-fetched as it may seem,
Born in Ferrara, Fiorella Mancini is a performer designer able to create situations, events and, of course, clothes that are truly unusual.
Her parades are unforgettable with the models dressed as rats, Carnival masks mounted on stuffed pigeons (made famous in the photos of Fulvio Roiter), the transsexual doges peeping out in their dazzling jackets from the shop windows, in a unique mix of sensuality and fetishism, the neon lights, leopard print underwear, t-shirts, jeans, sparkling water, rats and sewers.
Fiorella Mancini reminds us of the smells of Venice with her illuminated imagination, and also the delicate perfume of ...