hellovenezia

A visit bound up with the senses that allows us to see some historical Venetian places. Only one objective, which can be combined with the others if desired.

La Fenice, the San Trovaso gondola yard, the Accademia Galleries and the typical places for taste, smell, hearing, sight and touch.

The best thing for those who have little time to see Venice is to tackle it on foot.
Otherwise, take a waterbus and go for a mini-cruise: a single ticket is valid for an hour, just the time it takes to get to Lido from Piazzale Roma; another possibility would be to wander around without any particular destination in mind, getting off at any stop meaning to get lost in the most out-of-the-way alleyways, always full of unexpected surprises.
Sensations, sounds or silences, scents or odours should be savoured to the full; be as leisurely as possible because, among other reasons, there’s never time to see everything and leisureliness is one of the peculiar, age-old features of the city, which its inhabitants would like to retain.
So, with the theme of the 2008 Venice Carnival in mind, “Sensation”, that is to say the five senses, we have decided to suggest an itinerary associated with the senses: five routes to enjoy as calmly as possible, five micro-tours that we should undertake with the conviction that we are granting ourselves a short magic moment of intimacy with the city, naming a main goal and accompanying it with other supporting objectives that can also be looked upon as self-standing, if not alternatives.
We’ll begin with the sense of hearing. It goes without saying that the place above all others for hearing in Venice is the Gran Teatro La Fenice (we can walk there in five minutes from the Actv stops at Rialto or Sant’Angelo). The history of this theatre is as dramatic as it is wonderful, and is closely linked to the name that the founders chose for it, the phoenix, the mythological bird with splendidly coloured plumage that dies every five hundred years on a bed of scented twigs and is reborn from its ashes, stronger and finer than before.

The theatre has literally come to new life from its ashes twice after two devastating fires. Building started on it in 1755 to a design by Giannantonio Selva and it was completed in a year and a half. When the foundations were laid, an enormous tree trunk and a vine from Roman times came to light, which was considered a good omen. But this was not enough to avert the first fire in 1836, due to a stove carelessly left alight, or the second fire in 1966, from which only the Neo-Classical façade on Campo San Fantin was saved. The motto was to rebuild the theatre “where it was and as it was”, and this was achieved, even if in the midst of a host of trials and tribulations, controversies and judicial investigations.
On 14 December 2003, the reconstructed theatre was inaugurated with a concert conducted by Maestro Riccardo Muti, who began the evening with a piece that was considered auspicious, the Consecration of the House by Ludwig van Beethoven, followed by a programme prepared in accordance with the great tradition of Venetian musical civilisation (a guided tour to the theatre and its rooms can be booked through Hellovenezia, telephone +39 041 24 24).

Let Venetian music accompany us to some other destinations, chosen from among many others, associated with the sense of hearing. We move to the immediate neighbourhood of the La Fenice Theatre to look at the stone commemorating the visit to Venice of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then fifteen years old, who stayed at San Marco 1830, near the Ponte dei Barcaroli e Cuoridoro.
Another suggestion is the baptismal font of Antonio Vivaldi inside the Church of Bragora (Arsenale Actv stop), and finally a visit to the tomb of the great composer, Igor Stravinsky, in the cemetery on the island of San Michele (services 41-42).
All three of these reserve journeys can be completely independent: we suggest them so that they may also be included in a journey whose sole purpose is to acquire pure sensations and the atmosphere of the places concerned, without going into the details of their history, which can be very complex at times.
The second journey we propose takes us in pursuit of the sense of smell. We could head for any of the many art collections or museums and breathe in the smell of the artists’ pigments, but we would like to give you the chance of discovering the smell of the intellectual effort involved in technical drawing paper and modelling glue. In fact we will go to the studio and shop of a scholar of lagoon seamanship, a keen model boat constructor, an archivist and analyst of Venetian naval documents and a writer of interesting essays and books.
We are near San Tomà (Actv 1 and 2 services) and go to San Polo 2681, in Corte Seconda dei Saoneri, to call at Gilberto Penzo’s studio, crammed with drawings, plans and old photographs where we will sniff the odour of wood and iron and the boats of Venice and the Upper Adriatic, from Greek wrecks to waterbuses, the title of his website.

Keeping to this theme, we can then go to the Arsenale gateway (Arsenale Actv stop) to find the yard where Venetian navy ships were built, read the wall plaque that quotes the lines from Canto XXI of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and imagine the smell of tar and oakum used to make the vessels watertight.
Hard by we can also go and see the Historical Naval Museum, forty-two rooms created in a former 15th century granary, abounding in relics of the sea including the model of the Bucintoro, the Most Serene Republic’s famous ceremonial barge that was despoiled and destroyed by the French at the time of the fall of Venice.
Now we’ll go on to the sense of taste, one of those that go very much hand in hand with Venetian tradition, for which there are hosts of places and a vast choice. Famous first courses such as risi e bisi (risotto with peas), spaghetti with black ink-fish sauce or the typical fegato alla veneziana, liver Venetian style); then there is the joy of having a tit-bit, the cichetto, accompanied by a good glass of wine (ombra) to be enjoyed while chatting in friendly fashion standing in a small, crowded wine bar. There are lots and lots of these places; their numbers are increasing tumultuously and they are undergoing a process of transformation,so it is impossible to make a list of them so they have to be found out with a pinch of adventurous curiosity.
In this great ocean, however, we are going to name three, associating them with the quick consumption of one of their little specialities. At the same time we hope we are not slighting the others too much. We’ll start from the Patatina (“small potato”), a wine bar that takes its name from its characteristic offering, mere potatoes hand-cut and spiked on long toothpicks, to be salted and tasted boiled, an example of simple Venetian cuisine). La Patatina is on the Ponte di San Polo and the nearest Actv stops are San Silvestro and San Tomà.
The second call is at the mythical La Vedova wine bar in the Cannaregio district near the Cà d’Oro waterbus stop. Legions of hungry Venetians have been fed on its exquisite meat and bread balls. The milieu, too, is the typical one of an old Venetian osteria, preserved without straying into kitsch, and there is the possibility of a round of cards, whether briscola or scopa.

To finish in glory, our quick tour searching out tastes must not miss the wonderful creme cakes of the Tonolo pastry shop near the Church of San Pantalon, which is in the Piazzale Roma neighbourhood. So good as almost to touch the emotions, they inevitably powder our face with snow-white icing sugar, perhaps in homage to the characters of Rosalba Carriera, a Venetian painter that lived nearby.
And now we have come to our fourth tour, devoted to sight. Our suggestion is to go up the bell tower of St. Mark, nearly ninety metres high and with an incomparable view, or up its twin on the island of San Giorgio, a few metres lower but with just as fine a panorama. Both the present towers were rebuilt after they collapsed. The campanile of St. Mark came down in 1902 and was reconstructed in 1912, and that of San Giorgio was put up again in 1791 after it had fallen down in 1714. The view extends over the whole city and the islands as far as the edges of the Lagoon. On especially clear days the mountains of Veneto and Trentino look as if we could reach out and touch them.

The only sense that remains is that of touch. What can we touch in Venice? Everything and nothing, because everything is forbidden and everything is so near. Anyway, we will see the places where they have been building gondolas since the seventeenth century, in an old yard, the Squero of San Trovaso near the Accademia Galleries. “Squero”, Venetian for boatyard, comes fromsquara, square, the tool used in building. Here the typical lagoon vessels were built, as they continue to be built, only in wood: gondolas, sandoli, mascarete, sciòponi and pupparini. The yard building is by Rio San Trovaso and is the typical shape of houses in the mountains, because the shipwrights that worked there, and the wood they used, came from Cadore. Our visit to the San Trovaso gondola yard is a short introduction to the history of the gondola and the many curious things associated with it.

The gondola is a craft that is rowed on foot facing towards the prow so that the gondolier can weave through the canals confidently. It is decidedly asymmetrical because it is piloted by a single rower (as in the gondolas that can be hired), is composed of 228 assembled pieces and various kinds of wood, is 11 metres long and bears two ornamental pieces of iron that balance it, the ricciolo at the prow and the ferro da gondola at the stern, with all the symbolism involved. Gondolas are craft that develop constantly: while the variations in the last century have mainly concentrated on the rowlocks. A short walk to the nearby Accademia Galleries will show us the great Gentile Bellini or Vettor Carpaccio genre paintings and we can imagine we are touching the evolution of the queen of Venetian watercraft.

Alessandro Rizzardini (riproduzione riservata ©)