Some places are so beautiful they make you dizzy. There is even a syndrome for it: Stendhal syndrome. The pulse of the 19th century French writer ( The Red and the Black ) went off the charts when he saw Santa Croce, the Franciscan church in Florence where Michelangelo is buried. But for me it is Venice and not Florence that does it — always. The first time was decades ago stepping out of the train station as a newly-wed, and coming face to face with the Grand Canal. This city-on-the-water was like a mirage, an apparition. I could not have dreamed it up.
An aside: when French writer Marcel Proust visited Venice with his mother, he experienced a happy sensation, something like the Florence/ Stendhal syndrome when he almost slipped while standing on the uneven floor of the baptistery of St. Mark’s.
Forget the tourist hordes, real people live and work here, hopping on and off vaporettos, crossing the little bridges over tiny canals to go to work or shop or school. Apart from the Venice biennale and the centrifugal point that is St. Mark’s Square (which Napoleon is said to have described as “the drawing room of Europe”), we had other niggling concerns and important decisions to make.
Where should we go for the post-breakfast-pre-lunch espresso and a tiny croissant, a done thing in Venice according to our more cosmopolitan friends with whom we shared an apartment, just off St. Mark’s Square? Which bar should be our hangout, where we could linger over an Aperol each evening? Aperol might sound like something you take for a headache, but it is a heady, sometimes crimson, aperitif particularly delicious when combined with Prosecco, a fizzy, white wine.
A hero for sure
I digress. The hero of this story is Romeo, our guide, a male Beatrice if you will, to the nether worlds (as you will realise further down) and above. I had never met a flesh and blood Romeo. I somehow presumed the name sprung from Shakespeare’s fertile imagination. This Romeo is a Venetian physicist, who divides his time between the city of his birth and Washington D.C.
Romeo’s late wife was an American artist. She used to make prints with the almost-ancient printing press of an Italian couple. Several American and Europeans come regularly to the studio of Lily and Silvano — anarchists from the 70s, now close friends of Romeo who took us there.
Island tales
Lily is enigmatic and an artist clearly inspired by Picasso; her husband is a fantastic chef whose creative anarchy in the kitchen one was privileged to experience. When Romeo’s wife died a couple of years ago, he wanted to bury her in Venice’s principal cemetery on the Isola di San Michele, a small island between North Venice and Murano. But the authorities of the picturesque Cimitero of San Michele refused. There wasn’t any room left on this little island fringed with towering Cyprus trees. The enterprising Romeo was not to be deterred. He took a small boat and circled close to the island, surreptitiously scattering his ‘Juliet’s’ ashes. Intrigued by our Venetian friend’s stories about the Cimitero we could not resist going there. There was another reason to step off the vaporetto on this island in the Venetian lagoon with beautiful red brick walls and the 15th century church.
It was a literary pilgrimage. We were told that poets Ezra Pound and Joseph Brodsky are buried here. The graves of several British and American expatriates of the 19th and early 20th centuries are also found here, as well as those of many more ‘heroes’ (though not too many heroines). The graves of Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of and impresario of impresarios, and Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer and amour of Coco Chanel, were in close proximity. Apparently, Stravinsky wanted to be in close proximity to Diaghilev because he was responsible for making him famous. Touchingly, on Diaghilev’s elaborate grave, there are many ballet shoes left by visitors.
There are distinct sections in the cimitero. Not only are there different areas for Catholics and Protestants (Pound is buried in the latter), nuns, priests, sailors, gondoliers and the military (amongst other professions) are also separated in the afterlife.
Who says graves don’t tell tales.
The author loves totting up experiences and writing about them, sometimes. She is also Editor of The Indian Quarterly.
