Tamarisk trees are blooming along the canals of Torcello. Their dusty-white plumes, hazy in the still June air, blur even more in the water’s reflections. At the Torcello stop, we’re let off the vaporetto and there’s nothing, just a path along a canal. Most people come to see the two ancient churches. They pause for a drink or lunch, then catch the boat again. By late afternoon, the island falls into somnolence. We’ll stay for two nights in this old light and summer torpor, this odd spot where a Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene character might wash up.
I was here twenty years ago. Little has changed. The path was sandy, now it’s bricked. Wild purple allium spikes the weedy fields. A few souvenir concessions and places to stop for a bite have arrived. Otherwise, the island remains trapped in time—a time before a place such as Venice could even be imagined.
On the voyage out, I took a photo. I caught a flat expanse of glittering water, a milky sky with high wispy clouds, and between water and sky, the low horizon line of a distant island, so thin it looks like a green brushstroke on a field of blue. This watery realm—so different from Venice, where winding canals are alive with working boats, and everywhere the waters shimmer with lights, colorful palace façades, striped mooring poles, and black silhouettes of gondolas. But way out in the lagoon: silence, a soft palette of tawny grasses, sand, and water turning from pewter to the old green of a celadon cup. Among islands barely emerging from the water, I’m back at the beginning. The city of Venice was once like these, just an idea of land. How bizarre to think of building on ground where the water table rises to about a tablespoon under the surface.
TORCELLO, YOU MIGHT say, is the mother of Venice.
The bishop of Altino, a town that had endured invasion after invasion not far away on the mainland, moved his followers to the then-desolate Roman island in A.D. 638. Some say the low and marshy settlement called to the bishop in a vision. There, his people would be less vulnerable. In the shallow waters around Torcello, channels had to be cut, and when attacked, the people of Altino pulled up bricole, deep-water markers, leaving enemies to founder in mud. After eight centuries of a thriving civilization, malaria and silt ruined life on the island. People migrated onto equally undependable strands that gradually became Venice. Thereafter, the island’s five towns, and its many churches and palaces, were raided for building materials, reducing the place to the few remaining structures. Today, Torcello claims only ten residents.
I MUST HAVE been in a thousand churches during my years in Italy. Torcello’s haunting basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, a crude relic with a powerful force, may be the most arresting one I’ve ever seen. Built in 639, rebuilt in 1008, altered again and again, it’s barny and beamed, squared off and interrupted by rood screens. High windows, shafts of gray light, traces of fresco, shutters made of stone slabs. I was not prepared for the stunning mosaics. At the west end, a depiction of the Harrowing of Hell, the seven deadly sins, and the Last Judgment in gory detail. Serpents weave in and out of the skulls of the envious near dismembered parts belonging to the slothful; the gluttons eat their own hands. The messages are complex. Beware! A small child is actually the Antichrist in disguise. This is as alarming now as it was to worshipers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The east wall mosaic is startlingly different. In a glittering, tessellated, and very tall apse rises the simple elongated Madonna holding her Baby. If you have binoculars, you see that she is weeping. Her right hand gestures toward the infant, as if to say this way. In her left hand she holds a small white cloth, which early viewers would have recognized as a foreshadowing of the shroud. Jan Morris, in her seminal book Venice, quotes a child of her acquaintance who described the mosaic as “a thin young lady, holding God.”
The whole complex collapses time. What moves me most is the spolia, all the surviving stone and marble bits from across the centuries incorporated into the still-living building: exposed sections of mosaic from the original 639 floor, seventh-century altar, eleventh-century marble panels, fourth-century Roman sarcophagus, fragments of a thirteenth-century fresco, ninth-century font for holy water—this has been sacred ground as far back as memory goes.
Santa Fosca, the adjacent brick church, is a compact Greek-cross base topped by a round structure. Stripped inside, except for Byzantine marble columns, the space is still mesmerizing. Nearby, the two small archaeological museums with their cunningly cast bronze probes, tweezers, keys, spoons, and cups open to us intimate glimpses of life on Torcello. From many islands in the lagoon you can see the campanile, the exclamation point of Torcello. It was even taller before 1640, when lightning lopped off the top. Too bad it’s closed today. I would like to have seen the brick-ramped interior, which must make it easier to climb up for the view.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY SECLUDED himself on Torcello to write Across the River and into the Trees. We, too, checked into Locanda Cipriani. You can sit under a pergola, sipping a Negroni and plotting the next year of your life. You can read by the window with the scent of roses and jasmine wafting through the curtains, or meander along paths lined with pomegranates and hydrangeas. The bare floors of our room are waxed and the simple curtain lifts in a slight breeze. Pristine, with austere twin beds, a marble fireplace, and reading chair: Emily Dickinson could feel at home here. In the bookcase, I find one of my favorites, Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy by David Mayernik.
The inn is, by now, a large part of the recent history of the island. Here’s Kim Novak on the wall, chomping down on a big bite of pasta. All the British royals come and go in faded black-and-white photographs. How young and slender Princess Diana was. There’s Elton John! The waiters love to chat, the food is fresh from the sea, and the deep quiet makes my tense shoulders relax.
My favorite waiter says he has not been to Venice—only a half-hour trip—in five years. When I hear that, my perspective suddenly shifts. To those who live on the less-traveled islands, it’s a world. Leaving Torcello, I’m ready to explore as much as possible of the 210-square-mile lagoon, only 8 percent of which is land. We’ll hop on and off the vaporetti for a few days. They are working crafts—the metro and bus routes of the lagoon. Once off the busy Venice, Burano, and Murano routes, residents of the scattered islands are taking trips to the market, to the cemetery, to visit relatives, to school. Their days are lived on water, and their dreams must be of water.
AT SANT’ERASMO, WE step off for a bucolic walk along fields where the coveted castraure artichokes are grown. Castrated because the prized first buds are cut off, encouraging fuller growth for the plant. Those early two or three violet-tinged little prizes are tender enough to sliver, sprinkle with olive oil, and eat raw. The second wave is almost as delectable, and the third growth is the normal carciofo but still special for the large heart and particular taste that comes from saline dirt.
Others who disembarked jumped onto their waiting bicycles and sped off to the scattered farms that grow much of Venice’s produce. There is a small hotel on the island with bikes for rent. Next time!
A STOP CLOSE to Venice, San Michele with its dark cypresses is the cemetery island. Extensive, well-tended mausoleums resembling immense marble chests of drawers give way at the wilder edge of the island to the Protestant plot, where many stones are broken, graves are in the ground, and the cypresses look especially moribund. This area seems cautionary for expats like me. Here are those who died far from home—the final stops of Great-Aunt Emily on the grand tour, seamen who caught fevers, and mysterious others like Archibald Campbell, died 1891, whose lonesome marker says: “The heart knoweth its own bitterness and the stranger intermeddleth not therewith.” This, a story we never will know. Ezra Pound lies neglected and weedy, in contrast to the only tended grave in the section, that of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, all covered in blooms. I can’t help but feel the contrast of the exiles’ abandoned stones with the elaborate private chapels of Italian families decorated with live flowers. Not lingering on such thoughts, I board the vaporetto again for the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, where another wandering expat found solace.
Lord Byron came here, possibly to escape his imbroglio of amours in the city. He rowed over from Venice to study Armenian with the monks, who were given political asylum and the island in 1717. By 1789, they’d started a printing enterprise known for producing works in many alphabets and languages, including Aramaic, Sanskrit, and Gaelic. They’ve been here ever since, in a monastery filled with curiosities and with art of varying quality. We arrive at a serene cloister and, with a few others, follow a copiously bearded monk around the complex. Since I have an aversion to tours, I break from the route and happily wander AWOL for a while, discovering mummies, marble busts, rose-water liqueur made by the monks, and a guest book where many visiting diasporic Armenians record their gratitude for this repository of their culture. What the monastery is most known for is its library of glass-fronted cases holding some of the monks’ 150,000 volumes, ranged around a room beneath frescoes of church elders who are reading books. There, you easily imagine Byron taking out volumes and trying to decipher various languages. I then find the dining room, with tables set for the monks’ silent supper, taken while overlooking, on the end wall, a huge painting of the Last Supper that must sober all their meals. San Lazzaro (Lazarus) previously was a refuge for sufferers of leprosy, as were other outposts in the lagoon. Paul Morand in his piercing memoir Venices credits the monks with importing Angora cats, but I do not see any sign of them.
WE SPEND A night at Venice Certosa Hotel, a simple inn on La Certosa. The island is under development as a park, but right now is only home to a sailing school, a kayaking center, and a boatyard for the repair of traditional small vessels. Kayaking in the lagoon looks fun and allows access to even smaller islands.
We’re the only guests in the inn’s restaurant, which serves excellent razor clams and pasta with shrimp.
The night should be as deeply quiet as Torcello. However, the loose rigging on a sailboat near the window dings all night. We depart early.
ACROSS OPEN WATER, the vaporetto speeds up en route to busy Burano, the island that explodes with color. What store offers house paint in magenta, ocher, grape purple, forest green? Why is no house painted the same color as the neighbor’s house on either side? Oh, you’re doing yellow? Well, I’m going for Greek blue. Burano—is there any place on earth with as playful a palette? We’re getting off at the stop before—Mazzorbo. A small bridge connects them.
When I’m traveling, I often look at places with the question, Could I live here? Mazzorbo sets me dreaming of restoring a particular oxblood-red house with white trim right on the canal. Or is the yellow one more appealing? I don’t understand why Mazzorbo is not a coveted residential area. Once it was, like Torcello, a prosperous ancient settlement. The Latin name was Maiurbium, large urban place. Also like Torcello, it succumbed to fevers and silt. It languishes now, but one family has staked a big claim to a positive future for Mazzorbo. The Bisols, known for their prosecco, have revived a plot of land where monks in earlier times made wines and farmed. By good fortune, the Bisols found the prized and rare dorona grape—only five vines—on nearby Torcello. A few dozen others were found elsewhere in the lagoon, and from cuttings they started a vineyard. The family converted quayside buildings into Venissa, a small inn with an osteria and an innovative restaurant.
The square pond of brackish water where the monks kept fish still ripples in the shadow of the old campanile, last vestige of the religious complex. About 90 percent of the restaurant’s produce comes from the garden. This is a “km 0” restaurant, kilometer zero, an Italian designation signifying sustainable and homegrown. Dining at summer dusk on the edge of the vineyard in the quiet of the island is bliss. William is intrigued by all the unfamiliar ingredients on the menu. Geranium and rose dust are just the beginning. Artemisia marina, ambretta, alga nori, latte d’angelica, basilico artico, calamansi, radice di acetosella, houttuynia, stellina odorosa.
He surprises us and himself by ordering the tasting menu. Expensive, yes, but who cares? This is an adventure.
While we have a glass of spicy and cold prosecco, he looks up the strange words. Artemisia marina: not what I have in the garden but a marine version. Calamansi: Filippino lime. Alga nori: a brackish seaweed. Ambretta: a pink wildflower with fragrant seeds. Latte d’angelica: “milk” of wild celery with a white flower; kin also to fennel. Radice d’acetosella: wood sorrel root of an oxalis. Houttuynia: fish mint. (We have this weed in our fields; I never knew the name. If you step on it, your shoes smell like fish.) Also called chameleon plant and bishop’s weed. Basilico artico: a high-perfume basil resistant to cold. Stellina odorosa: a perennial little star, a highly scented plant whose sweet fragrance becomes stronger when dried.
I like a menu that makes you work a little.
WILLIAM ENTHUSIASTICALLY TRIES everything—granseola (spider crab), sgombro (mackerel) in its silver skin, oysters with green apple, the exotic local fish gò (goby), and roasted pigeon. The latter he enjoys especially.
“So glad you like the pigeon,” Ed says. We’re about to end the dinner with a lemon tart served with the exotic lime sorbet.
“Pigeon? I ate pigeon? Flying rat from Piazza San Marco?” In the dim light, he’d thought “squab” was something mostly squash.
“No, wild pigeon. Nothing better.”
“I ate pigeon,” he laments. “It was good.”
That golden wine! Maybe a bit of the setting sun melted into the glass.
I AM HAPPY not to leave but to climb the stairs to our sloping beamed suite with a view of the canal. I hope this lively project lures others to the island and a little utopia flourishes again. Mazzorbo, otherwise, lies quiet in the lagoon time warp. Early walks around Burano before tourists arrive, around the perimeter of Mazzorbo, chats with women carrying home groceries from an expedition to market, a few people cultivating plots of tomatoes, onions, and zucchini: a slow honey in this hive.
JUST ACROSS THE bridge to Burano, two bright wooden boats moor near the vaporetto station. At the inn, I was given the number of the skipper, who will take me over to San Francesco del Deserto, the ultimate peaceful island. Wanting downtime, Ed and William stay behind, in our appealing mansard suite, wrapped in the hotel robes and watching movies on their iPads.
Only four Franciscans take care of the church, cloister, and gardens. One of them guides me. I’m the only guest. His voice is so soothing that I want to curl under a cypress and nap. He doesn’t chatter, just lets me look at the silvery, glazed-water views all around, and watch a white egret that for a moment seems like Saint Francis returned. The monk relates that when his Francesco visited in 1220, he performed his miracle of the birds. In the dense cypress trees, throngs of them held forth with mighty song at the moment Francis wanted to pray. He told them to stop singing until he finished, which they did. It seems an easy miracle—I clap my hands and the cicadas always hush—but I hope it’s true. True or not, the story survives, threading together all the days since on this small world amid other scattered small worlds.
AS WE WAIT on the Mazzorbo quay for a water taxi, I remember that many people consider “cellar door” the most pleasing sound in English. To my ear “lagoon,” with its hint of the moon, sounds more melodious. Or maybe this thought comes to me because “lagoon” has now gathered to itself vibrant marshy salt scents, a vast reflected sky, lone seabirds, and the wavering and warp of time in secret places. The taxi speeds us to our hotel on the Grand Canal, back to the glorious, gaudy, fragile city I have loved for many years. Now I may pass that love to my grandson, who will, I hope, adore it all his life.
NOTES:
Navigating the Lagoon—Pick up an Actv vaporetto map. On it, the routes of the many vaporetti, the people ferries that ply the lagoon, are numbered and color-coded. At the train station, the airport, or anywhere there’s a vaporetto ticket kiosk, ask for this map called Linee di navigazione/Waterborne routes. Numbers on the boats correspond to the route numbers on the map. Note that the symbol N designates night routes.
Vaporetto stations are all along the Grand Canal and at Fondamente Nove. If you’re unsure of your route, check with the attendant to make sure the ferry is going where you want to go. Rather than purchasing single tickets, you can buy an economical pass for a day or for several days. A three-day unlimited pass, at this writing, is forty euros. Vaporetti are efficient. They arrive on time and the schedule is no harder to master than a subway’s.
Motoscafi, private water taxis, are plentiful. There’s usually a stand near a vaporetto stop. If you’re at a hotel or restaurant on the islands, the staff can call a taxi. Water taxis are expensive, but sometimes time is more valuable than money.