[ilds] Venice

[Denise Tart & David Green]

Robert Dessaix on Venice

 

 

Venice, 13th April

 

I caught the vaporetto down to the Accademia meaning to spend the morning looking at great paintings, but when I got there I found all desire to look at art had vanished. For a while I just stood on the bridge that crosses in front of the gallery and stared back up the sweep of the Grand Canal the way I had come; all those sinking palaces, lined up like a bevy of venal, decrepit duchesses at a ball; a geriatric harlequinade, that's what it looked like in the clear light of day.

 

Venice, 19th April

 

This morning for the first time in some weeks, I was suddenly conscious of feeling tired of.. of not Europe exactly, but the accumulation of stories, battles, treaties, families, duchies, paintings, churches, palaces - all the things that the antipodean finds so exciting on arrival. And tired is the wrong word as well. Perhaps saturated is a better word, the sort of feeling that comes over you at the end of an evening looking at your Grandparents photo albums and listening to their half remembered stories. Going to Europe is always like visiting grandparents to me: fascinating, heart warming (sometimes) but you know they haven't the faintest idea about, let alone respect for, the things that move you and they are never going to change. I did feel a pull this morning - back to a place where I think I can live more diversely than here. Where I can be 'civilised' in more enriching and dangerous ways and where, I have to say, I do think that on the whole, all things considered, and allowing for a multitude of exceptions, people are a little kinder to one another - a very second rate, suburban sort of virtue, I suppose. Well, I think it is undervalued.

 

Robert Dessaix

Night Letters

c) 1996

Denise Tart
designing ceremonies
Civil Celebrant - A8807
16 William Street
Marrickville NSW 2204
+ 61 2 9564 6`65
0412 707 625
www.denisetart.com.au
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