Barbaro - Venice Revealed

To everyone who asks me about Venice, everywhere in the world:

if it still exists, if its sinking,

if shes alive, if shes dead.

Whether its truly a city

or whether the other ones are.

To all who attempt or who dream,

in whatever way,

of returning

to her.

CONTENTS

PART ONE

1

We are approaching our landing in Venice, they repeat, Venezia, Venise, Venice, Venedig. In fact, what immediately appears, instead of Venice, is Marghera. Oil tanks, hangars, cranes, loading docks, power plants.

Seen from above, the powerful industrial zone stretches endlessly alongside the fragile and imperiled water. Concentrated, spreading, grandiose, a vision of hell rises up from the slender strand where earth meets lagoon, a hell with its own eager and sinister beauty.

I recognize the enormous factory gliding beneath the descending plane, and follow the shadows of wings over its warehouses and towers. For years I have worked, all over the world, in great industrial centers like this one: Marghera has been their model. How much human labor, effort, money, thought. And now worries, anger, and problems: so many more than we had ever thought possible in the waters, on the earth, among peoples. The shadow of the plane passes swiftly away, as do the factory, the power plants, the plane itself. As do the years.

I glimpse an oil tanker in the lagoon slow, almost motionless arriving from the Canale dei Petroli. It plows stolidly into red and yellow waters spitting out effluents-discharges-arabesques, a profound and seasoned pollution. And who will ever wash it clean now? Soon the tanker will moor itself to one of those white wharves. Like a toy! they shout in the airplane, laughing. Maybe; but for me, remembering what this expanse of earth-water-world was like only a few years ago, its no toy; its no joke. Instead, its a deadly trap between shoals and sandbars, a few inches of water I can see it clearly from here. And its all so close to the waiting houses, the tiny gardens to Marghera, to Venice. And yet it all continues, as if the years werent going by: the protests against the oil in the lagoon, the agonizing over red pollution or yellow waste, visible or invisible, are words in the wind, useless.

Early evening and were already on the runway, or maybe still over the water; but Venice is there, in the fog on the other side of the plane. I glimpse the puffs of distant cupolas or clouds, perhaps and the spires of bell towers like the masts of ships: the other part of the world. In the pale winter light, more moon than sun, we begin to invent Venice.

2

And yet today, as the family comes back home to stay, were in luck: theres traffic between sky and earth, so the plane is making a slow descent. A minute or so more, they repeatedly assure us, a moment or so more to wait. We wheel in the air, over islands, coasts, and tracts of ocean. They are giving us a small gift of time right here, in the airplane, one of the great time-destroyers. But how can I get this across to the kids, who are ever more impatient? They want to arrive.

Thomas Mann was right, Venice should be approached from the sea. But now theres the sky; millions of beings drop down every day from the clouds. Today were arriving at sunset, sliding through tremendous rents of light over the waters, from one horizon to the other. The kids crowd together on the other side of the airplane, piled up on top of the Japanese, the Brazilians, the Americans

But here it is, at last, appearing suddenly and in its entirety: the long, rose-colored island in the perfect form of a fish, immersed and emerging, born in this moment for us. What is it? asks a little boy, sprouting up out of the front seats, seeing and not seeing.

A city I dont know, I should tell him. I dont know what to call it, since Venice, by now, is a thing that gleams on the glossy backs of a million postcards.

What is it? he insists, what fish is it?

Its the Venice-Fish, I say. Dont you see it? He seems happy enough.

I look down on it again myself: Venice, mysteriously interrogatory and enchanted, tranquil and troubled. Pathetic, motionless, delicate sailing, maybe. But who put it together, this living event at once minuscule and enormous, this impeccable shape built of infinite, shapeless scales? Is it a miracle of human life? A random act of nature?

Island upon island, dusky molecules, houses great and small, compact, solid, dreaming, waiting; rare the empty spaces, the piazzas, the gardens. Canals, banks, mirrors and more mirrors: clear or opaque, reflections of reflections, dazzling. And the great blue-green expanse that reassembles, recomposes everything. There is a moment of silence in the airplane, our fraction of eternity. Japanese, Brazilians, Venetians who are we, really, in here, but a group of individuals, big and little, young and old, spying on the flower of stone in the sea from on high?

An instant later, its there, in the center of the island: a black hole, a square piazza Piazza San Marco, hollowed out from the heaped-up cluster of houses, brushed ever so lightly by the lagoon, which now has begun to rise and fall like the plane in the gusts of wind, in the heart of the Venice-Fish. The nearest surrounding islands tilt and press toward the center for safety; the farthest begin to cast off their moorings, to depart even as we arrive. The plane drops and wheels, the lagoon changes color with every turn: green-lagoon among the curls of white foam, green-yellow-blue, green-rose-lagoon. The sunset intensifies, streaking the sky with violet and orange.

Weve arrived at low tide, thats easy to see now. How many possible Fish, how many versions of Venice, are under us here? They are being born and reborn in the water and mud, ready to replace ours, now that its starting to vanish appearing perhaps one time only in the history of the world.

At almost the same moment on the islands, in the water, on each smallest scale the streetlamps come on, doubling the reflections, the season, the hour, the evening, the strangeness of this beauty. In reality, we realize, thinking back for a moment to the metropoli weve lived in, Venice is small, Venice is very little. Its tiny and fragile, this flower of stone. In contrast the lagoon is so big; the sea is so big; and the cities weve loved in our life disappear, are destroyed.

By now we can hardly see anymore, can just barely feel, barely perceive a reflection within us. Our sliver of metal gets ready to land: the city reappears, returns, vanishes, seeks a place on the horizon in the last, suspended light.