Venexia

During Carnival, I played a game with the city: to cross every district of the city (sestiere) only once, walking from the railway station to St Mark’s Basilica.¹ I arrived at Santa Lucia station in sestiere Cannareggio [1] by an early train and started walking towards the Ponte delle Guglie. [2] I crossed the Ghetto [3] and followed the fondamenta to the Scuola della Misericordia [4] then, I got lost. I went back to the Misericordia and made a detour to join the familiar Fondamente Nove [5] then turned at the hospital and followed the Fondamenta dei Medicanti [6] to Campo San Zanipolo. [7] I had a brioche e capuccino near Colleoni’s monument, then entered the Corte Veriera and crossed the bridge into sestiere Castello towards Santa Maria Formosa [9] and San Zaccaria. [9]

On the Riva degli Schiavoni, I boarded the vaporetto linea 2 and alighted at Zitelle, the second stop across the basin of San Marco. [10] La Giudecca is an island formed by eight islands connected by bridges (fourteen, including the artificial Sacca Fisola and San Biagio) and though historically part of sestiere Dorsoduro, it is commonly considered a separate district. From the Zitelle, I walked along the fondamenta in front of the Redentore [11] and at Palanca, [12] boarded the linea 2 to the Zattere, on the other side of the Canale della Giudecca. [13]

Past San Trovaso and the boatyard (squero), [14] I continued towards the Carmini [15] and crossed the Tre Ponti bridge [16] into sestiere Santa Croce. From the Tolentini [17] through Campo San Giacomo² [18] and San Cassan in sestiere San Polo, [19] I got to Rialto market. It had already closed but I found a stall open to buy some fruit in front of the Pescaria [20]—swooshing besoms, seagulls quarrelling, foul smell of fish and chlorine (freschìn)— and ate an apple in Campo San Giacometo, [21] where according to legend, Venice was founded at the stroke of noon on Friday 25 March 421, Feast of the Annunciation.³ I crossed the Rialto Bridge [22] quickly, staying on the middle path to avoid the crowds, and opposite the Teatro Goldoni in sestiere San Marco, [23] I turned into the long Calle dei Fabbri that over a bridge and through a passageway (sottoportego),opensinto the Piazza. [24] I had walked all over the city as if the lagoon wasn’t there and won the game, though I may have cheated a little. “Every trick is fair at Carnival” (a Carnevale ogni scherzo vale), the saying goes.

“But let that trick be witty” (ma che sia uno scherzo che sa di sale), the saying continues. So, what is that game about? It is neither a puzzle, as the Seven Bridges of Königsberg⁴ nor a photographic treasure hunt, rather a labyrinth. Already Petrarch called Venice “another world” (alter mundus),⁵ and its amphibian and antimodern logic makes the city look even more a-mazing.⁶ Yet, Venice is indeed a living labyrinth,⁷ an assemblage of its transitional environment (tides, sea currents, river flows, etc.), built structures (canals, embankments, diversions, etc.) and power-knowledge (engineers, experts, landowners, shipowners, the magistratura alle acque, etc.) that have been in constant interaction with one another since its beginning.

Every labyrinth also needs a thread. On the advice of Daedalus, Ariadne gave Theseus a woollen thread so that after slaying the Minotaur, he may find his way out of king Minos’ labyrinth and take her with him to Athens. Venice too has its thread but this too is different. It is the thread Arachne⁸ used to weave the fantastic tapestry that defied Athena, to nearly hang herself driven to dispair by Athena’s wrath, and to make her labyrinth ever since Athena transformed her into a spider. She spans the lagoon with a strong silk bridge, adds several braces on each side, and lays down between them a radial frame. For the capture spiral, she spins sticky silk from her abdomen and secures the thread to the frame with the hind legs, moving in spiral towards the centre of the web. There she waits still for her prey, trapped in her own labyrinth as was Daedalus, punished by Minos for his betrayal.⁹

“What a pity— writes the pioneer of special education Fernand Deligny— that on this planisphere we find no Arachnean islands, neither islands nor mountain ranges. Besides spiders, nothing else is Arachnean; sometimes perhaps there is a fleeting allusion to an architectural detail or a piece of embroidery, whereas it is obvious that a language that would be Arachnean ought to exist, and at least one people if not a civilization. My project is a little clearer, now: to give this word Arachnean, which I find astonishing, a meaning worthy of its harmony and scope.”¹⁰ Venice is that Arachnean island and here, to some extent, Deligny’s project becomes my own.

The name of the city in Medieval Latin was in the plural, Venetiae “because they are more cities in one,” explains a 15th century pilgrim to Jerusalem.¹¹ The multipli-city is further multiplied by the arachnean visitor who weaving his own city within the city, inadvertently gets caught, over and over again. Even during the Renaissance, when its mythical plurality was already lost, “some say that the word Venetia, means Vene etiam, that is ‘come again and again,’ because for as many times as you return, you will always see new things and beauties.”¹² Returning often to Venice over the years, I find that improbable etymology to be true.

The series Venexia, as the city is called in Venetian and I call it in my memory, combines many returns to the labyrinth and errant lines.¹³ The spiral thread across the sestieri—seven as in the iron f at the bow of the gondola¹⁴ (fero da prova)—connects places together, and traps old memories and new experiences. The city “walls of water”¹⁵ correspond to the thick flanged glasses (goti) still used in local taverns (bacari) to drink “wine shadows” (ombre) that have Vittore Carpaccio’s colour palette—ivory black, azurite blue, verdigris, red lake, orpiment yellow, lead white, and vermilion red. In the sprawling symbolism of the late Middle Ages,¹⁶ Aristotle’s seven basic colours¹⁷ signify the seven virtues—the four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, and the three theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity—which are reflected by the excellence of Venice in the seven mechanical arts (including glass-making), the seven liberal arts (including painting), and the seven political virtues, according to a minor Venetian humanist.¹⁸

Before leaving, I stopped for a minute on the Scalzi bridge looking towards Santa Lucia: “I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop."¹⁹

Notes

¹ The construction of the Ponte della Libertà railway bridge (1841-6) and Santa Lucia terminus station (1861), the Nuova Stazione Marittima commercial harbour (1869-80) and the road bridge to Piazzale Roma (1931-3) mark the polarity flip of the city from San Marco (SW) to Santa Lucia (NE). Santa Lucia became the main access point to the city, accounting for 56 percent of entrances (Giovanni Santoro, “Venezia: Porte di accesso. Stima della popolazione turistica in città antica 2008.” Doc. n. 1104.0, Venezia: COSES 2009. Accessed 25.4.2024. http://coses.comune.venezia.it/news/m_porte.html), whereas Venice historical harbour in the Bacino di San Marco was moved to the Stazione Marittima at end of the Canale della Giudecca. This determined the growth of the Giudecca and the specialisation of San Marco in tourist attraction, reacheable by vaporetto or on foot from the new access points.

² The following 1.6 km stretch from San Giacomo [18] to Piazza San Marco [24] through San Cassan and Rialto may be the daily commute to work that Marino Sanudo mentions in his diary (Marino Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto. Vol. 23, 8 December 1516, ed. by Federico Stefani, Guglielmo Berchet, and Nicolò Barozzi, Venezia: Federico Visentini 1888, 343).

³ Marino Sanudo describing the fire that destroyed the market and wooden bridge of Rialto in 1514 “. . . solum restò in piedi la chiesa di San Giacomo di Rialto coperta di piombo qual era in mezo dil fogo, e ita Deo volente si preservò. La qual fu la prima chiexia edificata in Venetia del 421 a dì 25 Marzo, come in le nostre croniche si leze; sichè Idio non volse tanta ruina che la prima chiexia si brusasse, . . .” (Marino Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, Vol. 17, 10 January 1514, ed. by Federico Stefani, Guglielmo Berchet, and Nicolò Barozzi, Venezia: Federico Visentini, 1886, 461). Edward Muir concludes that “The Annunciation Day procession and high mass in San Marco permanently bound the destiny of Venice to the veiled will of God, the harmony of nature, and the imperial authority of Rome.” (Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. Princeton and Chicester: Princeton University Press, 1981, 72).

⁴ In 1736, Leonard Euler became interested in a mathematical puzzle known as the Königsberg Bridge Problem and his solution is considered the beginning of network science and graph theory. The city of Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia) was built on the banks of the Pregel (Pregolya) River on two islands that lie in midstream and were connected with each other and the banks by seven bridges. A popular brain-teaser of the time asked, whether there exist any single path that crosses all seven bridges exactly once each? Euler proved the impossibility of its existence (“Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis.” [The solution of a problem relating to the geometry of position.] Commentarii academiae scientiarum Petropolitanae, Volume 8 (1741), pp. 128-140. Repr. in Opera Omnia, Series Prima, Vol. 7, 1766, 1-10; repr. in James Newman, “Leonhard Euler and the Königsberg Bridges.” Scientific American no. 189, 1953, 66-70).

Königsberg, once known as “Venice of the North” because of its canals and bridges, (Robert Albinus, “Insel Venedig,” s.v. in Lexikon der Stadt Königsberg Pr. und Umgebung. Leer: Verlag Gerhard Rautenberg, 1985, 138) inspired the “game” across the sestieri, connecting the two doors to the city, the modern Santa Lucia station and the ancient molo of San Marco. Applying Euler’s reasoning to Venice, there is no walk traversing all 118 islands that crosses each of its 435 bridges exactly once. Every island that isn’t the start or finish of the walk, must have an even number of bridges, so that one can get in and out of it without using the same bridge twice. Thus, it is sufficient to find at least three island with an odd number of bridges (there are more than that). The “game” reduces the number of vertices in the diagram to seven and does not require to visit every bridge on the map. Thus, several walks are possible from Santa Lucia station to Piazza San Marco but all walks traverse the sestieri following a spiral, either a right-handed as described in the text (Cannareggio, Castello, Giudecca, Dorsoduro, Santa Croce, San Polo, San Marco) or left-handed (Cannareggio, Santa Croce, San Polo, Dorsoduro, Giudecca, Castello, San Marco).

⁵ Francesco Petrarca, “To Jan, Chancellor, personally, that you must not forgo what you are capable of doing, even though you cannot do what you would like,” (XXIII, 16), in Letters on Familiar Matters. Rerum familiarium libri XVII-XXIV, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, 294-5, (294). “. . . a me ipso mundus alter Venetia dicta est.” Francesco Petrarca, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca. Vol. 13, Le familiari. Libri XX - XXIV e indici. Ed. by Umberto Bosco. Firenze: G. C. Sansoni, 1926, 199.

⁶ At least in part, the “tourist maze” is an effect of the way in which visitors usually experience the city: on foot, crammed in few signposted routes from Ferrovia / Piazzale Roma (the railway and bus station) to the triangle Rialto / San Marco / Accademia. (Robert C. Davis and Garry R. Marvin, Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World's Most Touristed City. Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press 2004). The effect is quite different if the city is experienced from the water (see introduction and photographs in Daniel Savoy, Venice from the Water: Architecture and Myth in an Early Modern City. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2012) or as the “game” tried to show, by giving oneself up to the labyrinth. The city is generally regarded as a model for a pedestrian city (for instance, see Le Corbusier, La Maison des hommes. With François de Pierrefeu, Paris: Éditions Plon, 1942, 155; more recently, see Jan Gehl, Cities for People. Washington: Island Press 2013, 12). In this model, walkways connect any two places on the main island of Venice and bridges cross the canals below that “substitute for streets” travelled by public vaporetti and private powerboats (Kevin Lynch, A Theory of Good City Form. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1981, 387). At the same time, this model adresses issues in modern cities and refers to Venice after it was reshaped by modern mobility in the mid 19th century. Venice historical characterisation as “water city” not only describes its morphogenesis and urban structure, but also better serve its future (Nico Ventura, “L'acqua come opportunità.” Rassegna, vol. 7, n. 22, special issue “Venezia città del moderno/ Venice: City of the Modern,” 1985, 62-5). The network of walkways and that of canals had different characteristics (users wealth, purpose of travel, destination, etc.) but were well integrated with frequent exchanges between modes of transportation. In 1493, Marino Sanudo the Elder explained that “in Venice one can go, and does go, in two ways: by foot on land, or by boat” (Marin Sanudo il Vecchio, De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae ovvero La città di Venetia (1493-1530). Ed. by Angela Caracdolo Arico, Venezia: Centro Cicogna, 2011, 21) indicating that canals connected the city together as much as they separated its islands. For instance, Rialto remained the only bridge over the Canal Grande, until the Ponte della Carità (1854, now Ponte dell’Accademia) and the Ponte degli Scalzi (1858) were built by the Austrians. Instead, fifteen public ferry services ensured a constant and frequent connection between the two sides along its entire length (Guglielmo Zanelli, Traghetti veneziani La gondola al servizio della città. Venezia: Cicero, 2004).

⁷ Late in the evening, the conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli (Venice 1946 - Berlin 2001) intends to visit a friend after the rehearsal of Wagner’s Parsifal at La Fenice, but gets lost. He spends the night walking the “Venetian labyrinth,” tracing a symbolic itinerary on the map that is analogue to Parsifal’s journey and necessarily, spiral-shaped (Giuseppe Sinopoli, Parsifal a Venezia, Venezia: Marsilio, 1990). Sublimation is another way Venice has of disappearing.

⁸ The source for Arachne’s tale is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (6.5-145) but owes its diffusion to Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus written 1361-2 and widely circulated in Latin and in French translation. First printed in Latin (Ulm 1473), the italian translation by Vincenzo Bagli was first printed in Venice (Giovanni Boccaccio, L'opera de misser Giouanni Boccaccio De mulieribus claris. Venetia: Maistro Zuanne de Trino, 1506). About half of chapter 18 “De Aragne femina de Cholofonia” presents her as an example of punished pride (superbia) to those aiming for primacy in their given areas of expertise.

The connection made in the text between Venice labyrinth and Arachne’s web elaborates upon a critique of Boccaccio’s tale by Christine de Pizan (born Cristina da Pizzano in Venice, 1364) in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405): “This Arachne also invented the art of making nets, snares, and traps for catching birds and fishes, and she invented the art of fishing and of trapping strong and cruel wild beasts with snares and nets, as well as rabbits and hares, and birds too; no one knew anything about these tech­niques before her.” (Christine De Pizan. The Book of the City of Ladies. Trans. by Earl Jeffrey Richards. New York: Persea Books 1982, 82). Daedalus’ labyrinth and Arachne’s web suggests the contrast between a Modernist city and a soft city like Venice (David Sim, Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life. Washington: Island Press, 2019).

⁹ Apollodorus’ less known sequel to the story fits Venice better, substituting a sea shell for Knossos labyrinth, and merging Ariadne and Arachne in the figure of the hard-working ant. After the evasion from the labyrinth with wax wings, in which his son Icarus died, Daedalus fled to Camicos, an unlocated city possibly north of Agrigento in Sicily. “Minos went in pursuit of Daidalos, and to every land that he visited on his search, he brought a spiral shell and proclaimed that he would give a large reward to the man who could draw a thread through it, thinking that by this means he would be able to discover Daidalos. Arriving at Camicos in Sicily, he visited the court of Cocalos, with whom Daidalos was hiding, and displayed the shell. Cocalos took the shell, promising that he would thread it, and gave it to Daidalos. Daidalos attached a thread to an ant, pierced a hole in the shell, and let the ant make its way through. When Minos received it back with the thread drawn through, he realized that Daidalos was staying with Cocalos and demanded at once that he be handed over. Cocalos promised to surrender him, and offered Minos his hospitality. But Minos was killed in his bath by the daughters of Cocalos; according to some, he died when boiling water was poured over him.” (Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mithology. Trans. by Robin Hard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 141).

¹⁰ Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts. Trans. by Drew S. Burk and Catherine Porter, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 39.

¹¹ Venice is the main harbour of pilgrimage to the Holy Land from 13 to the mid 16th century, see Nicole Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages.Trans. by W. Donald Wilson, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 26-46. The German monk Felix Faber describes his visit to Venice in 1483 in Fratris Felicis Fabri evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, (Stuttgart 1809), quoted in Sandra Toffolo, Describing the City, Describing the State: Representations of Venice and the Venetian Terraferma in the Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 98.

¹² “Onde però fu interpretato da alcuni, che questa voce VENETIA, voglia dire Veni etiam, cioè vieni ancora e ancora, perciocché quante volte verrai, sempre vedrai nuove cose, e nuove bellezze.” Francesco Sansovino, Venetia citta' nobilissima et singolare, descritta in XIIII libri . . . . Venetia: Iacomo Sansovino 1581, 4.

¹³ In 1968, Fernand Deligny created a support network for autistic children at Monoblet, a farm in the Cévennes region of France. Social workers were asked to track the children’s movements and gestures. For ten years, they drew maps of their own daily routines and using tracing paper, superimposed the “wander lines” (“lignes d’erre”) produced by the children as they circulated within the grounds of the farm, producing territories as they gravitate towards activities, presences or objects.

¹⁴ Alessandro Marzo Magno maintains that symbolic meaning is attributed to the teeth of the fero only in the first half of the 20th century, when its shape is “definitively codified” (La carrozza di Venezia. Storia della gondola. Venezia: Mare di carta, 2008, 27). Although the story of the fero remains uncertain, it has the characteristics of an invented, coinciding with the transformation of the gondola into a tourist amusement and a symbol of Venice as tourist destination. The backward tooth representing the Giudecca, registers the growing demographic and economic importance of this district since the mid 19th century.

¹⁵ “I don't believe that anyone can be so obstinate as to deny the perpetuity of the lagoon and the freedom of this city of God. Although some say that everything that had a natural beginning must also end, and they draw this conclusion from their experience of so many great cities destroyed, and from seeing this lagoon failing, I strongly disagree, because that implies that mankind was the cause of their beginning. But the cause for the beginning of this divine city was neither nature nor mankind, but the divine majesty that, in order to install in it the seat of the Christian faith, placed it and built it in water, built for it walls of water, made its gates and roads of water, so that there is no need of stones, mortar, wood, or ironwork to maintain its walls, towers, streets, and gates, but only faith, prudence, and justice, which this divine city has never missed and never will.” [Non credo già che’l s’atrovi alcuno di tanta ostinazione, che voglia negar la perpetuità della laguna, insieme cum la libertà di questa città di Dio. E se bene alcuni dicono che naturalmente le cose, le qualli hano havuto principio, dieno ancora haver fine, e questo cavano dalla esperienza, che hano, di cotante grandissime cittadi disfatte e da il veder mancar questa laguna, come vegono, et io dico gagliardamente di no, perochè quello se intende delle cose, che li homeni sono stati causa delli principij loro. Ma la cagione di prencipiar questa divina città non è stata la natura nè gli homeni, ma egli è stata la maestà divina, la qualle, per colocar in ella la sede della fede cristiana, l’ha posta e fabbricata ne l’acqua, le ha fabricate le mura di acqua, le ha fatto le porte e le strade di acqua, che a mantener le mura, le torri, le strade e le porte non le bisogna pietre, calcina, legnami, nè ferramente, ma solamente fede, prudentia e giustitia, delie quali mai è mancata, nè è per mancar questa divina città.] Cristoforo Sabbadino, “Discorsi de il Sabbattino per la laguna di Venetia.” In Antichi scrittori di idraulica veneta. Vol. 2.1 I Discorsi sopra la laguna di Cristoforo Sabbadino. Ed. by Roberto Cessi, Venezia: C. Ferrari, 1930, 75.

¹⁶ Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Trans. By Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996, 240.

¹⁷ Aristotle arranged five chromatic colours on a line between white and black, with the lighter colours beginning with yellow close to white, and the darker colours beginning with blue close to black. See Rolf G. Kuehni and Andreas Schwarz, Color Ordered. A Survey of Color Order Systems from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 28

¹⁸ Giovanni Caldiera, De praestantia venetae politiae (Ms. Laud. Misc. 717, Bodleian Library, Oxford, dated 1473). An outline can be found in Margaret L. King, “Personal, Domestic, and Republican Values in the Moral Philosophy of Giovanni Caldiera,” Renaissance Quarterly 28, no. 4, Studies in the Renaissance Issue, Winter, 1975: 535-574. For Venice as “divine city” see Sabbadino’s passage quoted in note 15 above and the so called “Edict of Egnatius,” the always current epigraph composed for the Magistate of the Waters by Giovanni Battista Cipelli, better known as “Egnatius” (1478–1553): “The city of the Venetians, by will of Divine Providence founded on the waters and surrounded by a circle of waters, is protected by the waters instead of walls: therefore, anyone who in any way dares to cause damage to the public waters shall be condemned as enemy of the homeland and receive no less punishment than those who violated the holy walls of the homeland. The provisions of this edict are immutable and perpetual.” [Venetorum urbs divina disponente / providentia in aquis fundata, aquarum / ambitu circumsepta, aquis pro muro / munitur: quisque igitur quoquo modo / detrimentum publicis aquis inferre / ausus fuerit, et hostis patriae / iudicetur: nec minore plectatur paena / quam qui sanctos muros patriae violasset. / Huius edicti ius ratum perpetuumque / esto.] The black marble stone is preserved at Museo Correr, Venice (Inventory no. Cl. XXV n. 0522, https://www.archiviodellacomunicazione.it/sicap/OpereArte/280767/?WEB=museive).

¹⁹ Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. Trans. by Warren Weaver, London: Vintage, [1972] 1997, 164.

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