English
Once upon a time, a group of Italian journalists was astonished when a distinguished art critic in town for the Venice Biennale and known for her affection for the city did not include it amongst her favorites, something they all took for granted. The writer replied that she did not consider Venice a city but rather, a dream.
I remember when I heard this story at the Cafe Florian, my eyes were looking for some evidence of reality on the other side of the glass window overlooking the Piazza San Marco. I recall the glimmering facade of Canaletto Doge´s Palace, shimmering in the mirror of the water. Glancing back at my marble table and thinking that, although he had never paid so much money for a cappuccino, it was perhaps the cheapest cup of coffee I would drink in my life..
There is a sense of living a lucid dream every time you rent apartments in Venice. That same almost nomadic quality of resting in the liminal territory between two planes of existence seems to scent much of the literature and life inspired by the city, ever since Marco Polo. His cellmate surely felt the sense of being penetrated in a dream when he first spoke, feverish, about his travels. Unless, as suggested by the historian Frances Wood, his dream was another, a mere reflection, and Marco Polo never even made it to China (why would he mention paper money but leave out other key details of Chinese life like chopsticks and foot binding?). Perhaps his tale was simply a cooperative dream tinged with elements of stories heard of the Far East on the road, enhanced by the imagination of his cellmate, a poet and writer of romances. To escape the confines of their cell, he created a Chinese dream for Marco Polo and Venice, to inspire all of us.
Another case of a noble Venetian walker of the tightrope of reality and fiction can be found in the figure of Casanova. He toed this thin, permeable boundary throughout his life as an alchemist, mathematician, chemist, musician, inventor, scientist, mathematician, politician, doctor, chemist, economist, and of course seducer of women…. And above all, as he preferred to present himself as a man of letters. Just as Marco Polo, who though he was not a literary man, went down in history for a journey that he may not have even made and a book that he didn’t write, Casanova, who considered himself a writer above all things, has passed into history not because of its extraordinary history of my life, but for his adventures, most of which are of course, apocryphal, fictitious, legendary, so much so that a good number of people have always had doubts about whether any of them even happened at all. Who exactly was this wizard, ghost, devil, avatar, and purveyor of fiction? His accounts are fascinating in any case.
So it is with Venice. More than a dream, it is fascinating, breathtakingly beautiful, more of another world than another city.
Paul Oilzum
Translated by: salome antigone
