Ever since I first stepped off the train some 15 years ago and saw the pink light twinkling on the grand canal, I have unabashedly and irrevocably loved Venice. Strangely, most people don’t share my enthusiasm. Too many tourists, I’m told. Also: isn’t Venice smelly in the summer? Umm, no, it’s not. Venice is unlike any other place in the world, and I could happily spend months wandering around the bridges and canals of its medieval buildings and not get bored. One of the reasons I keep going back to the city is that it is self-aware enough to know it’s a museum frozen in time and uses that fact as a backdrop to a plethora of modern events, the most famous of which is the Venice Biennale of Art.
You’ll recall I have been to the Architecture biennale a few years running, but this was the first time I was going to see the one for art (they are held on alternative years). The theme for this year was Artist’s Process, which I suppose is another way of saying there wasn’t really a theme. Each participating country had its own pavilion as always, and it was instructive ot see how countries that excelled during the architectural projects floundered when it came to contemporary art. South Korea had a room filled with clocks right up to the ceiling, each of them with a name, country and profession of a person and each moving at a rate decided by how much that person had to work for a meal. The clock hands for Kimberly, a stay-at-home mom from Georgia, sped along in smooth circles next to the near-static clock of Arun, a teacher from Bangalore. The Israeli pavilion had an artist who made sculpture out of mold (I didn’t go inside, obvs) while the French had turned their pavilion into a DJ booth, which was fun but didn’t make any sense. The Russians are always good, and this time it was all about theatrical fascist shadow puppets.
Villa Borghese, Rome
The sheer overload of contemporary art leaves you rather numb to actually considering what you’re looking at and, unlike with architecture, you’re not always given a reason for the piece by which you can measure its success. But when art is good, it is life-affirming, which was the case with a giant rolling video piece in the New Zealand pavilion by the artist Lisa Reihana titled In Pursuit of Venice. The best way I can describe it is as a projected moving painting that unfolds into a story that deals with colonization, migration, community and more. It was, in my opinion, the best piece of I art I’d seen in years, and I highly recommend you look it up on Google and YouTube (but half the fun was seeing it as a 100-foot-long, 20-foot-high projection).
The rest of my time in Venice was spent trying not to eat pasta. Relent, you may say, you’re on holiday. The problem with traveling for a whole month, alas, is that you want to reward yourself every day with good food and, thirty days on, that can add up real good. Even now I can see my waistline expand like the weight of my suitcase. I saw a scale the other day in a shop and had a full-blown panic attack. But I digress. Before I knew it, my time in Venice was at an end and I was brooding on a four-hour train-ride to Rome. It’s not until you come to a big city after being in the provinces that you appreciate what bustling capitals are like. It was my first time in Rome since seeing Athens, and I found myself looking at the city differently. Although two thousands years old, it looked newer, even “borrowed” in strange aesthetic ways, which I suppose it was, historically speaking.
By the time you enter the Sistine Chapel, you're so delirious you can only revert to a pre-verbal state of awe and despair
My first stop in Rome was the Villa Borghese, which you have to book tickets for before you go. I recommend you do. Since they only let in people in two-hour shifts, you’re not surrounded by pressing bodies as you see some of the most perfect Bernini sculptures. I spent an hour and forty-five minutes just on the ground floor before I realised there was a whole other floor devoted to painting. I felt that panic that you do in an exam where you think you have done well until you turn the page and realize there are 12 questions you didn’t see until the last minute. Still, it was worth it.
The crowds are sadly not something you can avoid when you go to the Vatican, but if you do a tour you can at least avoid the lines. The Vatican leaves you dazed and confused; there is simply too much to see. Room after room, courtyard after courtyard, hall after great hall, you are shepherded through like salmon in a stream until you are thrown up into the Sistine Chapel, by which time you’re so delirious with the monumentality of decoration and votive prestige that you can only revert to a pre-verbal state of awe and despair. By the time I was in St Peters Basilica, I looked like all the people around me: mouth open and eyes wide, sitting silently in the corner, looking like I’d been slapped across the face by six thousand oil paintings, which is in essence what happens at the Vatican. The ceilings are nice enough, though.
