The Movie Sets Of Venice And Florence

Back from Venice, and walking again in the streets of Florence, I realize how thoroughly my mind is saturated with movie images. When I first saw the barber-shop striped poles in front of the Doges’ Palace on the Grand Canal, I thought at once of “Death in Venice” and of the death-colored man dressed in white who moons over the beautiful boy in the sailor suit.

During my first ride on the traghetto, I remembered the Daphne Du Maurier thriller-movie, “Don’t Look Now,” in which Donald Sutherland tries to reclaim his grief-stricken wife from the thrall of the weird and ominous twin sisters, one of them blind and psychic. As the miasmic fog rose from the canal, I saw not only what passed before my eyes on that drizzly, damp day, but added the remembered scenes from the movie: the dark and narrow streets, the sulfuric steaming canals—and always the flashing image of the dead child appearing and disappearing under the myriad, mysterious bridges.

Later, when Joe and I had lost our bearings somewhere near San Marco, I remembered “The Comfort of Strangers”—the movie from the novel by Ian McEwan—in which the honeymooning couple get lost in Venice and are seduced by the charismatic older man who finally—after terrorizing them and stealing their clothes—murders the young husband.

When we stopped to buy the mediocre pizza at the sidewalk cafe, I watched the passing hordes and recalled the sunlit scenes from “Brideshead Revisited”—the days when Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte go to Venice to visit Sebastian’s father (played by Laurence Olivier) and his mistress. No conversation I had with my husband that day (about how much we were overcharged for our pizza) could ever be remembered as thrillingly as I still recall the significant glances and innuendo that passed between Charles and Sebastian.

On a school day when Joe is on his way to teach his class at the school, I accompany him into “il centro” and part with him at the piazza of Santa Croce. As soon as I come into the airy piazza, I think of E. M. Forster’s characters, Lucy Honeychurch and Miss Lavish, in “A Room With A View,” just as they come into a “piazza, large and dusty, on the further side of which rose a black-and-white facade of surpassing ugliness.”

On the contrary, I find (when I enter this same piazza from a maze of dark narrow streets) a space full of light and wonder, and its treasure, Santa Croce, one of the most beautiful churches in Florence. In the square, a dog runs after the milling pigeons and the birds swoop away in fluttering hordes against the sun. When they come down to earth again, several battle for a foothold on the head of the statue of Dante.

This morning I see that great crowds of tourists have the same idea as I do. Busload after busload march across the square, each group following its tourguide, one holding up a red umbrella, one a rolled white poster, one hoisting an Italian flag above his head. Posted on the entrance to the church is a sign that pickpockets are a danger, and to be on guard. An old gypsy woman seems to be sleeping beneath the sign, a white plate with a few coins in it at her side.

Inside, I take the opportunity to attach myself to a tour group whose guide is speaking English. She holds forth in that clipped, artificial way that guides use to address their groups, ready at every moment, in a perky and chipper tone, to tell a cute historical anecdote. This woman, in her practical low heels, is standing before the monument to Michelangelo, who is buried in Santa Croce.

She tells us that the three sad ladies moping at his casket are the muses of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting. We must be sure to note the cherubs flying above his carved bust. Michelangelo, the guide tells us, was first buried in Rome, but one of his students (or perhaps his nephew) spirited his body back to Florence. (At this juncture I recall Charlton Heston, in “The Agony and The Ecstasy,” lying on his back on flimsy scaffolding as he paints the Sistine Chapel ceiling.) However, the guide admits that no one really knows where the sculptor’s body is, in which of the crypts beneath the church, since, in the Great Flood of l966, all the bodies were tumbled from their crypts by the raging waters and were mixed up, bones and skulls, in a great mish-mash. In fact, she adds, since the remains of Rossini and Galileo are also buried below, “we can think of them as a kind of Genius Combo mixed together down there.”

The guide waits for a laugh. Her charges are already tired, listing and leaning against pillars where they can, shifting the weight of their guidebooks, backpacks, cameras. They are as restless as beasts of burden whose journey is summarily halted.

I take my leave of the tour group and stand to watch two American boys begging their mother to give them money to light candles. For a moment, as the boys hold the long white tapers in their hands, then light them by touching their wicks to another burning candle, their faces are illuminated, their fair pale skin shines as if lit from within like the skin of cherubim in the great paintings. Though I have no video camera, I feel that if I had one, I could frame a scene as beautiful as any by Fellini. Everything I see in Italy passes by me as if on a movie screen.

I move along toward the frescos by Giotto. A soon as I reach the Peruzzi Chapel I flash to my memory of it from the movie of “A Room With A View.” Why—I wonder—do the movies hold so powerful a place in my memory that they often affect me more than the reality of the moment I am living in? Whenever I walk through the Piazza della Signoria and see the magnificent Neptune rising out of the water, I think of Helena-Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch witnessing the fight between the two Italian men at the fountain, fainting at the sight of the bleeding man, and dropping her post cards in a pool of blood. When she swoons, she is caught in the arms of the beautiful George Emerson who is falling in love with her. Their kiss in a field of flowers in Fiesole rates as one of the great romantic love scenes in cinema. However, whenever I wander in the Piazza della Signoria, nothing so dramatic happens to me. (Once I saw the driver of a covered carriage give his horse a bag of feed there.) So as I stand, in person, in Santa Croce, looking, in person, at the art of Giotto on the walls, I cannot see what is before me so much as I see what I once saw in the movies.