What Do Women Want?

It is like no other place on earth. You arrive from Tokyo, New York, Paris, Delhi, Rio, Rome, and the first thing you notice, descending from whatever earthbound vehicle has brought you—train, plane, automobile—is that your equilibrium rocks a little with your first step onto the shimmering liquid surface. For this is the lagoon city (or rather it is two cities: one above and seemingly solid; one below and reflected in the waters), and that slight wobble tells you everything about its essence. It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone. The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise. Many noted artists, after all, died here: Wagner, Browning, Diaghilev—though some, like Dante, merely died of maladies contracted on their last visit. These illustrious deaths have given the city a certain spooky patina and a faintly macabre reputation—like New Orleans, only more so. Or maybe it is the time-stopped nature of the place, the fact that so many vistas still look exactly as they do in Carpaccio or Bellini paintings (except for the television antennas, of course), which gives you the sense that you can turn a corner and stroll into the past.

The first time I came to Venice I was a student of la bella lingua in Florence. I came alone, by second-class railway carriage, a small spiral notebook in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other, for I already knew that Venice existed in part for English-speaking writers to write about. Shakespeare, Byron, Browning, Ruskin, James, all had succumbed to its spell.

I came down the steps of the railroad station and was at once elated by the gleaming band of water I saw before me. (I had yet to spot the dead cats floating, or the raw sewage, or the masses of detergent bubbles, or the plastic bottles.) I was besotted with the idea and the reality of Venice, and that besottedness has never quite left me—despite the fact that I now know La Serenissima far too well to be a rhapsodist merely of her beauties. Still, on my many return visits, I have never failed to reexperience that first burst of elation, that Aha! of recognition, part physical, part literary.

I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
A palace and a prison on each hand;
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O’er the far times, when many a subject land
Looked to the winged Lion’s marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

He was a tourist, too, a Chinese doctor from Australia, and he was shy—not the sort of person who accosts American college girls with violets. As we spent the day touring the palaces, the works of art, I realized that only Venice could have released him from his shyness. Venice does that to people. Just as it releases their longings, it also allows unpredictable things to happen.

One summer night a few years ago, I was dining with friends at a little outdoor restaurant on a canal in Dorsoduro. Another acquaintance came by in his boat, a brightly colored Torcello fishing boat, stopped to join us for coffee, and then invited us for a ride along the canals at midnight. One of our party was a violinist from the Fenice Theater, and he took out his fiddle, sat cross-legged on the prow of the boat, and played Mozart for us. As we rowed through the maze of little canals, the oars dipping and splashing in the inky water, the music filling the air, Venetians opened their windows and came out on their balconies to shout “Bravo!”

The mythical Venice may be hard to grasp on a steamy day in midsummer when this city of 338,000 seems to swell to twice that number, with the tourists milling about the Piazza San Marco, dutifully feeding scruffy pigeons, having their pockets picked, and listening to wheezy bands playing “New York, New York” (for reasons that will never be explained). But come back in November or December, in February or March, when la nebbia settles upon the city like a marginless monster, and you will have little trouble believing that things can appear and disappear in this labyrinthine city, or that time here could easily slip in its sprockets and take you, willingly or unwillingly, back.

Most of the summer tourists make a predictable forty-eight-hour pilgrimage from the railroad station to Piazza San Marco, swarm there briefly between the two columns (not realizing it was here that criminals were strung up and that Venetians believe it brings bad luck to walk between them), see Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace over the heads of thousands of others of their kind, take a gondola ride, for which they pay about one dollar a minute and during which they have the curious pleasure of seeing the ubiquitous Japanese tourists rowing six abreast down the Grand Canal to the strains of Neapolitan music (“Come Back to Sorrento” is played for the same reason as “New York, New York,” I guess).

I have a friend in Venice whose family has been historically prominent for the last thousand years, whose palazzo looks down upon one of the main serenade routes of the gondolas. Last summer, a merry family of Americans with four boys rented the piano nobile of this palazzo, and it was the younger boys’ great joy (and my daughter’s as well) to watch for gondolas and as they went by to throw things down to them: not bucketfuls of water (as sometimes happens in Venice) but trinkets, sweets, paper gliders. Such largesse suggests another of Venice’s sly realities: the age-old pecking order of tourists.

There are the yachts that dock for a week or two, discharging mysterious international billionaires and setting all the gossips in Venice abuzz about who has been invited to cocktails, who to dinner, and who to set sail for Yugoslavia and Greece. There are the movie stars, who go to the Hotel Cipriani to toast and tryst, or to rest up after toasting and trysting. There are the affluent Americans, who schlepp from the Cipriani pool to Harry’s Bar and back again, buying gold jewelry en route at inflated prices.

Those who rent a palazzo on the Grand Canal look down upon those who merely stay at the Cipriani or Gritti for a week, who in turn look down on those who come to the railroad station, stay for two days in a fleabag near the Piazza San Marco, and go away, sure that they’ve seen Venice and that it is ruinously expensive, dangerous, full of tourists and pickpockets.

All these things it surely can be, in any season, but it is also true that there are parts of Venice—the Giudecca, Dorsoduro—where you can live in midsummer and rarely see another American, and that many of Venice’s most faithful recidivists never go near the Piazza San Marco in season and wouldn’t, if caught there by mistake, dream of buying a gelato there. Not only is a San Marco gelato four times the price of a gelato in a true Venetian neighborhood, but there is no place to stroll and eat it in peace.

Venice has always attracted artists from abroad. Some, like Turner, found in her their true subject; others, like Corot, admitted that Venice defeated them. Venice still attracts artists. Arbit Blatas, the Lithuanian artist who first visited Venice in 1934, when Black-shirts were marching on the Riva degli Schiavoni, now lives and works on the Giudecca (one of the largest islands of Venice) with his wife, Regina Resnik, the retired opera singer.

Arbit Blatas explains that Venice attracts him as a painter because its surface “is constantly metamorphosing. Painting Venice is almost like being a restorer, peeling off the layers to find the picture after picture underneath. Venice is inexhaustible because the shifting light and the drifting fog keep changing her face. In the winter, Venice is like an abandoned theater. The play is finished, but the echoes remain. When you walk in the winter fog, there seems to be no division between water and embankment. You feel that you can walk through walls, through sky, through time.”

Regina Resnik reminded me that “the Giudecchini say that the Venetians see only the Giudecca, while the people on the Giudecca look always at Venice.” This is true. From her kitchen window, La Resnik sees the Dogana, the Doge’s Palace, the campanile in the Piazza San Marco. “There are times when the fog is so thick, you can’t see out,” she said. “But when the fog lifts, the Serenissima is always there. She’s the anchor of my life.”

When the Austrians built the railroad bridge connecting the mainland to Venice in 1846, they ended the city’s island status. But it is still almost as hard to get to as if it were an island. (Venice, built on one hundred eighteen small islands, is crisscrossed by about one hundred fifty canals and spanned by about four hundred bridges.) Even the most aristocratic Venetian, with the grandest family palazzo, must carry his own bags out of the railroad station to the vaporetto or through the maze of little streets that surround the large parking area at Piazzale Roma and wend his way through the labyrinth of Venice on foot in order to get home again. Of course, there are motoscafi, water taxis, but they are wildly expensive and their drivers often are querulous about taking passengers to the smaller canals when the tide is low. As one friend says, “Venice seems to take delight in humbling us all, reducing us to footsore pilgrims dependent on our strong legs and comfortable shoes.” If you are lucky enough to have a friend who meets you with a boat, then you sail into Venice in glory, feeling for all the world like Marco Polo come home. Otherwise everyone walks.

What was I searching for on all my trips to Venice? At first I thought it was Venetian art—painting, sculpture, architecture, music—all of which Venice has in glorious abundance. Of course, I loved Palladio, Longhi, Vivaldi, Albinoni, Bellini, Carpaccio, Veronese, Tintoretto, but as a writer I was also drawn to the gentle style of life that creation requires, a style far easier to achieve in Venice than in a city like New York.

I began spending summers in Venice with my family, renting apartments or houses there, and I grew to love the easy pace of the days, the way one activity flows into the next, the quiet, the light that glimmers inside as well as outside the houses. Venice may be the only city on earth where you can see the shimmer of canal water on a ceiling. So uniquely Venetian is this phenomenon that there is even a phrase for it in the Venetian dialect: fa la vecia, which translated literally, means “to do as the old woman does,” or “squint.” If your bedroom faces a canal, you wake up to this delicious shimmer on the ceiling, provided you do that very American thing—sleep with your shutters open. You also awaken to the joyous sounds of water lapping on stone and to bells pealing from the city’s many campaniles. Even the sounds of Venice are kind to the ears—compared, say with the sounds of New York.

But Florence also has bells, if not lapping water, and Rome has grander fountains. And not every Venetian bedroom is situated on a canal. What, then, makes Venice so special? I think it finally has to do with its being a moated city, cut off from time. Not only do many places in Venice look exactly as they did four or five hundred years ago, but the ghosts of decades and centuries past seem trapped within the ancient stones, trapped by the water that moats the city. For certain susceptible souls, Venice seems to cast a spell, making them return again and again until, somehow, they unwork the spell or succumb to it. “I want to die in Venice,” said a beautiful Brazilian lady I met once at a garden party. “And so I know I want to live in Venice.”

To die in Venice may seem romantic, but alas, the final resting place may be shockingly impermanent. The Jews lie peacefully in the Antico Cimitero Israelitico out on the Lido, in sacred ground given them by the Venetian Republic in 1386, but the Christians who are buried on the island of San Michele have only a twelve-year lease, after which their bones are dug up and flung upon something the Venetians ominously refer to as “the bone island.” Only the famous dead of San Michele are exempt from this fate. Ezra Pound, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, will not be displaced so long as their fame lasts. This is another Venetian irony. Fame is important not only before but after death. Venice is in some ways like Hollywood. Even dead, one is only as good as one’s last reviews.

After many trips to Venice, a novel began to be born for me out of the stones. It started, like my historical novel, Fanny, with a sense of place. As Fanny was a sort of homage to eighteenth-century literature and the landscape of England, so my Venetian novel was born out of my love for Venice and my sense that the stones held a story for me.

The story took shape, little by little, like a mosaic. The overall picture was not clear to me at first. But as I came back, year after year, writing purely for my own pleasure in Venetian notebooks with marbleized covers, I discovered a heroine who was a Shakespearean actress, who had come to Venice to make a film of The Merchant of Venice, and who, through a series of strange incidences and coincidences, finds herself back in the past (with a sixteenth-century adventure to pursue before she can return to her own time). As I wrote my novel in Venice and its surroundings, and as I read every book about the city I could lay my hands on, I had the sense that Venice was using me as an amanuensis, as she had used many writers before me—and will use many more after me.

Since Venetians love to share the love of their city, my Venetian friends were wonderfully helpful with research. Marino Zorzi, the director of the Marciana Library, shared with me the volumes and volumes of handwritten diaries of Marin Sanudo, Venice’s great Renaissance voyager. Count Girolamo Marcello introduced me to the state archives of the Serenissima, housed in a library in his palazzo since the fall of the Venetian Republic, in 1797, and gathering dust there awaiting her resurrection (at which time the Marcellos must restore them to the state). Finally I was taken on a tour of the Arsenale by Maurizio Crovato, an expert on Venetian boats. Before I could be admitted, I had to endure a security check more suitable for the NASA space center than for an arsenal that has been virtually a museum for centuries. Venice may no longer be the terror of the tides, but she relinquishes her image as a great imperialist power slowly, if at all.

On a freezing afternoon a year ago, I wandered through the Arsenale trying to imagine it in its heyday, when a galley could be assembled and equipped in one day. Such traveling back and forth in time is somehow easier in Venice than in other places. In fact, that is one of the reasons writers love to work in Venice, whether they are writing about the city or not.

Some writers come to Venice to submerge themselves in their own pasts. “We have been coming to Venice for some twenty years,” the late Leo Lerman told me once, “and in these last years, I’ve been working on a long book of memoirs.” Then, as if quoting from the work-in-progress, he said: “Venice, seeming so remote from the Manhattan of my long, long ago childhood, is closer to that childhood than the Manhattan in which I live today. I hear the island sounds, I smell the sea and the salt air, and I am plunged into my remote past. Above me I see the skies of my early boyhood. I am transported. Then, too, in Venice there is also the stable, intricate Proustian social structure that I imagined as I rode high on the upper deck of the Fifth Avenue bus past the mansions of the powerful and great. . . . These mansions frequently derived from the Venetian palazzi I look out on every day from my windows on the Grand Canal.”

When I began my novel about Venice, I knew I was following in a venerable tradition, but at first I didn’t realize how venerable. The Italian scholar Marilla Battilana suggests that for English writers, “Venice itself has become almost an archetype.” It represents the distant Oriental city, a Xanadu reached by means of a perilous sea journey, a labyrinthine place to which one voyages in search of love but in which instead one encounters subterfuge, disguise, and betrayal. According to Battilana, writers through the ages created what might be considered a “composite myth of Venice”; they have also immortalized Venice as the city of justice, a city where a wise sovereign dispensed a higher justice than can be found elsewhere in the sublunary world.

Venice was apparently first mentioned in English literature in the fourteenth century, in a book called Mandeville’s Travels. At that time it was already seen as an exotic place, a sort of European Cathay to which one traveled en route to the Holy Land. But the city’s literary reputation for sin and depravity began with the Elizabethan Roger Ascham, who in his book The Schoolmaster (1570) so inveighed against the lechery and depravity of Venice that he made all Englishmen eager to visit the city. “I learned, when I was at Venice,” wrote Ascham, “that there it is counted good policy, when there be four or five brethren of one family, one only to marry, and all the rest to welter with as little shame in open lechery, as swine do here in the common mire.” If that wasn’t designed to lure lusty young Englishmen down from London, what was?

And down they came. Thomas Nashe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, not only was lured to Venice but left and wrote a book called The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), in which he took the Venetian myth even further along. Fornication and deception thrive in Nashe’s Venice, and another major element in the composite myth of Venice is introduced: master and servant exchange identities in order to savor the Venetian mysteries. Inevitably they encounter Venetian justice and find it both severe and Solomon-like.

It was Shakespeare, however, who established forever the Venetian connection between love and justice (The Merchant of Venice) and the Venetian connection between love and death (Othello). The inamorata and the judge are, in fact, fused in The Merchant of Venice—and disguise and hidden identities are important to the action. With Shakespeare, the myth of the lagoon city is complete and its two poles are established. In the comedies, love mates with justice (“The quality of mercy is not strain’d”); in the tragedies, love mates with death (“I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee”).

After Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Coryat, Sir Henry Wotton, Thomas Otway, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Oliver Goldsmith, Lord Chesterfield, all added to the myth of Venice. But it was with the Gothic novelists, the so-called pre-Romantics, that Venice truly came into her own for Anglo-Saxon writers. Ann Radcliffe set The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) in a Venice she had never seen. It was clear that if Venice had not existed, it would surely have been invented for the Gothic tales of virgins in jeopardy that have proved to be a durable literary genre even in our own time.

To the Romantic poets Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth (Keats never got to Venice), Venice meant something more: a place to reflect on the lapsed glories of ancient civilizations, to muse gloomily on the passing of all mortal things, and to ponder the eternity of the poetic spirit. The decadence of Venice was the focus, and Venice herself became a moral lesson for the English—showing how their country, too, could decay if they didn’t watch out.

To modern writers from Henry James to Thomas Mann, Venice has been the city of love and death, and this association has been echoed by contemporary filmmakers. Venice is the place where artists go to be reborn (but often die), the place where love yields to death, and the waters close, mercifully or indifferently, over all. Of the two poles of the mythical Venice shaped for us by Shakespeare, we have chosen the tragic pole. It is hard to imagine a contemporary novel or film set in Venice that is not Gothic, macabre, replete with ghosts and mirages.

It is also hard to tell how much of the city’s spell is life and how much is literature. The two are by now so intertwined that it is impossible to untangle them. Walking the streets of Venice in a writer’s fog, one can imagine Shakespeare coming to the ghetto to research The Merchant of Venice; Byron swimming home along the Grand Canal after a fete, with his servant rowing behind him, carrying his clothes; Browning staying on alone in the Ca’ Rezzonico after Elizabeth Barrett’s death; Henry James writing in the Palazzo Barbaro, then taking a stroll in the Campo Santo Stefano below. That Venice has so often sat for her literary portrait is, in fact, a part of her essence. She is like some grand decrepit prima donna surrounded by aging portraits of herself, or an old movie star showing you her yellowing clippings; she is the world’s dowager city.

What troubles the writer in Venice is the same thing that delights her: Everything that can be said about Venice has already been said by somebody. Henry James even exulted in this fact. “It would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to say,” he wrote. Gore Vidal quotes this with evident satisfaction in Vidal in Venice.

In our disposable twentieth-century society, Venice matters more than ever. Compared with a New York that compulsively rebuilds whole neighborhoods every three or four decades, Venice seems to be permanence itself. But she, too, is in peril—that has always been part of her allure. The water is rising (or the city sinking, depending on which expert you ask). Hydrocarbon pollution from Mestre, Venice’s industrial neighbor, has weakened the stones beyond redemption. The canals, no longer cleaned the way they used to be, are filled with muck to a height of several feet.

Whenever the perilous high tides hit, they reactivate the eternal discussion about saving the city from the ravages of twentieth-century industry. Many Venetians believe that the canal dug in the lagoon to accommodate large oil tankers has opened Venice to the fury of the tides in a way never before possible. The mythical Venice is imperishable, but the physical Venice is another story. Its survival may depend upon a decision to banish the large oil tankers, thus allowing the lagoon to resume its previous level. No such decision has yet been made, and the chronic dilatoriness of the Venetian authorities may well doom the city to the fate of Atlantis.

My Venice is the Venice of winter, the Venice of Dorsoduro, the Venice of fog. Walking down the Zattere in la nebbia, wearing rubber boots against the high water, one finds it hard to tell where terra firma leaves off and sky and water begin. The city seems to hang in the air like a mirage. Sounds bounce off the waters and deceive you with their closeness or farness. Figures appear and disappear around corners. The past beckons. It is quite possible to believe that it can take you and never give you back.