A Dearth in Venice

"Didn't we eat at Ristorante Antico Martini?" "We did.' replied the Celt. "It's an institution. Mind you, everything in Venice is a fucking institution." Lying on the bed, as I was, reading City of Falling Angels, I'd caught him at a critical moment in his morning decisions about what to wear and his reply,  atypically cynical, made me say that despite leaving Venice in dudgeon and rain, feeling we'd seen all there was to see and there wasn't any need to go back, I would like to return, but not to the same hotel. Answer came there none, as the decision about apricot socks with oxblood brogues was taking precedence.

A few chapters later, a choice of gilet and a broken shoelace notwithstanding, I began to find the book's Vanity Fair-esque tone irritating and ignoring "you've not read Vanity Fair since waddyacaller took it over" I closed City of Falling Angels and picked the next in the piles of books on the bedside table. Bringing Home the Birkin: My Life in Hot Pursuit of the World's Most Coveted Handbag not being entirely to my mood this morning, I rummaged further and found Nancy McClelland's The Practical Book of Decorative Wall Treatments. Before I continue, let me say in explanation that I have literary friends and they lend me books and I've rarely felt it polite to refuse. Consequently, the pile as of today includes the above-mentioned three plus John Lloyd Wright's My Father Who is On Earth; Treasure Hunt and The Age of Doubt by Andrea Camilleri; Lisa Hilton's Athénais; Kate Simon's A Renaissance Tapestry; The Dragon's Trail by Joanna Pitman and, finally, David McCullough's The Greater Journey. I can offer critique of none to them but can say I have, as it were, mental heartburn thinking of the riches yet to be digested.

Old books, a bit like old people if they've lived or been on the shelf long enough have likely seen it all and are prepared to say so – "that's your inner voice, Grumbleweed"– and a book about walls and their treatments, published in 1926, has much to express in ways that, in modern times, are not untainted by trend-spotters and tastemakers.

A plaster wall treated with orange shellac and panelled with lacquer red moldings. Old Chinese wall-paper is set in red frames to complete the scheme.

The blue dining-room decorated by Basil Ionides

In the introduction to The Practical Book of Decorative Wall-Treatments, Nancy McClelland writes:

"By the canons of art a wall is required to be either a background or a decoration. At the outset it must make its choice. It must be one or the other – it can rarely be a successful combination of the two ....

".... Unquestionably the decorated wall creates problems that do not exist in the presence of the plain background. Where there is colour and design or architectural relief on the wall, a room is largely furnished before any movable pieces are placed in it. Whatever else is added must be a foil and a complement to the mural decoration. This is exactly the reverse of the treatment employed with a background wall, where the movable things in the room are the objects of chief importance.

"Colour and pattern, however, are by no means barred from the adjuncts of the room that contains a decorated wall. On the contrary, such a wall usually demands richness of hue and texture in the hangings, the floor coverings, and the upholsteries, to give it proper balance, but these furnishings must be selected discreetly and used intelligently, to be either subordinate notes or complementary accents in the general schemes."

The walls of Venice and Rome – some palatial, some decrepit, all colorful (no dearth there) – have rendered me dissatisfied with our own plain background – whites from gray to cream – and, occasionally, I've wondered what it might be like to live with walls upon which nothing is hung. Risible, I know, such an idea and, certainly, arguing that thirteen 17th-century framed engravings of Rome, a framed 1940s wallpaper mural, a multi-framed copy of a map of Paris, an 8'x4' abstract on metal, and a Gustavian mirror might be stored, would be nigh impossible to justify.  Also, a wall of fuchsia linen in the living room is not so much a pop as a thump of color and it takes a lot of living up to (as does the orange linen in the dining room). But on a cold winter's night, coming home to a jubilance of color is bliss. 

 

There are two solutions, as far as I can see, to balance the room: de-cream the furniture by introducing a judicious amount of subtle pattern to two chairs, (one of which is visible above); and treat the walls to lotsa shine. One of the more interesting developments of late is an alluring variation on the plain wall – high-gloss lacquer. Mirrored walls are too problematical (of which more in another post) yet reflections in lacquered walls seems to me to be both fascinating and enchanting – enough almost to deny the hanging of any artwork. I see much discussion – mediation, even – in my future.

So, the title. A Dearth in Venice refers to the feeling the Celt and I had as we left the hotel – something had been lacking. That morning, early, had been acqua alta which, combined with a strong wind from the south, had flooded parts of the city including the stretch of the Grand Canal where our hotel stood. Even the novelty of that didn't lessen the conviction – and this is a first for us – that the hotel, five-star, though luxurious, was not somewhere we care to stay again. To be sure, the rooms were beautiful, the bathrooms spaciously functional, the public spaces handsome (if mildly implausible), and the staff from the back office, reception, the bar to the restaurant, attentive.

Not a dearth of service, thus, not even an unwillingness to oblige in any way, but an oddly disconnected demeanor. As if we were just passing through their world – which indeed, we were. Perhaps it was a degree of formality to which we are unaccustomed, but which their jet-set guests expect. In fact, they were aloof, as if their attention was elsewhere. Perhaps I'm being ungenerous – it was after all the time of year when everyone wishes to be with family, a time of year perhaps when guests are few, hours long, and the journey back across the lagoon tiresome. Nevertheless, like the acqua alta, we passed through; but unlike the water, we shall not return.

Acqua Alta, St Stephen's Day

All photos by the Celt and me, except for the fourth which is by Erik Kwalsvik and from Fortuny Interiors by Brian D Coleman. A feast for the eyes.

The photograph the red lacquered room is from Luminous Interiors by Brian J McCarthy. An excellent book illustrating the work of a decorator at his mature best. I cannot recommend it too highly. 

Ensplendour'd

It is difficult to take the measure of a man through someone else's eyes and experience. After all, we don't actually meet them, except, perhaps, in the pages of diaries, magazine articles, even cookery books - as is the case, in my experience, with Norman Douglas. Over the years, I haven't bothered to read any of his books, and the other day I remembered why. I shall read them now - I discover that the university library has some - South Wind, Old Calabria and even a collection of limericks entitled Some Limericks, Collected for the Use of Students, Ensplendour'd with Introduction, Geographical Index, and with Notes Explanatory and Critical. Anyone who can write such a title deserves to be read, however bawdy the contents of his book.

I was put off Douglas years ago because of what I read or, rather, read into the quotation below, another from Elizabeth David's An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. The young man referred to, it seems to me,was simply being inexperienced, adulatory and looking for what we nowadays call validation for expressing what was, in post-war Europe, and could be still, a valid socialist point of view about the haves and the haves-not. Looking back, I wonder if I, young as I was, took Douglas, and the victim (as I considered him), and myself far too seriously. I wonder also, as I write the last sentence, if a reproof ever really needs be annihilating.

"In the summer of of 1951 there was much talk on Capri, and elsewhere in Italy, of a great fancy-dress ball to be given in a Venetian palace by a South American millionaire. The entertainment was to be on a scale and of a splendour unheard of since the great days of the Serene Republic. One evening, Norman, a group of young men and I myself were sitting late at Georgio's cafe in the Piazza. Criticism of the Palazzo Labia ball and the squandered thousands was being freely expressed. Norman was bored. He appeared to be asleep. At a pause in the chatter he opened his eyes. 'Don't you agree, Mr Douglas?' asked one of the eager young men. 'All that money.' He floundered on. 'I mean, so many more important things to spend it on ....'

" 'Oh I don't know.' Norman sounded very far away. Then, gently: 'I like to see things done in style.'

"And he stomped off. Evaporated, as he used to put it. The reproof had been as annihilating as any I ever heard administered."

Charles de Beistegui's fancy-dress ball took place sixty years ago and is as far distant in memory and relevance as the Ball of the Yew Trees given at Versailles in the Galerie de Glaces. Either ball could be called legendary - the one attended by royalty, aristocrats and artistic riff-raff, snobs and panderers, a group of loose associations and equally loose living – now collectively described as cafe society – and the other ball where Jeanne Antoinette Poisson tangled with the King's hunting horn, went on to become royal mistress, great patron of arts and literature, and lend her name to a hairstyle much beloved by tele-evangelists. However, legendary isn't an adjective I'm disposed to use and I wonder, perhaps, if there might not be a description less travelled-by, as it were.

Celebrated, fabled, notorious, out-of-sight, doozie, outrageous, rad, fantastic, fabled and stupendous are all adequate synonyms, depending on your point of view and age. I don't think there's anyone still alive who might say out-of-sight, man except perhaps ironically, though there are plenty of us who remember it. Rad is, well, no longer rad, fabled is such an advertorial phrase, notorious has long slipped into the porcine vocabulary of reality TV, and chic has lost its cachet in some quarters - though not in mine, as I quite like the word still. My style guru says that crispy is a word of the moment but the moment might have passed by the time I finish this sentence. I shall fall back on the old word, gratin to describe if not the ball, then the guests, and in that I am definitely not being original.

When the gratin - European royals and aristocrats, American and South American millionaires, Hollywood movie stars, politicians, artists and general hangers-on - moved on after the ball in the not-so-early hours of the morning, they left behind not a legacy of taste and style for the aspirational, as is occasionally supposed, but something of far more lasting value. That something, which for a few short hours, was merely a theatre for one of the silliest of human activities - striking attitudes, playing at tableaux, and seeing and being seen - that something was the glorious set of rooms at the Palazzo Labia.

The ballroom is the star, with its frescoes by Tiepolo of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, a tale from the ancient world, transposed to modern-day Venice. The pair, as with everyone else in the frescoes, was not clad in Roman or Egyptian fancy dress, as had been Besteigui's guests dancing in front of them, but in seventeenth-century aristocratic dress - the equivalent of being portrayed today in a tuxedo and a couture evening gown.

The conversation Elizabeth David recorded took place in 1951, three years after de Beistegui bought the house from a Labia widow, and only six years after the end of the Second World War - a war that had laid waste to Europe, the East, and to unimaginably vast numbers of people, in the Shoa, on battlefields and at sea, and which rewrote the manuals on Fascism for succeeding generations. Undoubtedly, in those early years of reparation and repair, an ostentatious event such as the Villa Labia ball could be viewed as a rich foreigner's attempt to buy his way into an old and hermetic society - much in the same way as did the Labia family centuries before - and, given the rawness of the early post-war years, perceived as spitting in the face of the still-suffering populations of Europe. That is how, I think, the young man in Elizabeth David's tale saw the situation. If I have taken his measure correctly, the young man, the anti-hero, saw the situation for what it was.

Photographs of Villa Labia rooms by Gianni Berengo-Gardin for an essay published in The World of Interiors, April 1987.

Painting of Palazzo Labia by John Singer Sargent from Wikipedia Commons.

Paintings by Tiepolo from Wikipedia Commons.

Antica formula

Perhaps I was tired after a long morning at the Uffizi Gallery and the train journey from Florence, but Venice did not immediately appeal - it seemed crowded and cold - both of which it was, of course, but in that not an exception. Rome had been cold, wet, incomparable but exhausting. Florence, colder than Rome, comfortably walkable and a delight. Venice, thus, had a lot to live up to and at first glance, candidly, it did not. Odd, though, considering we'd walked out of the Venezia Santa Lucia right onto the vaporetto and taxi dock and there spread out before us at the beginning of the Grand Canal was Venice in all its colorful, crumbling variety under a blue metalled sky.

However, after a taxi ride the length of the Grand Canal and, not an hour later, a shivery stroll from our hotel - a converted Gothic convent, next to the Santa Maria della Salute, that great Baroque thanksgiving for deliverance from the plague epidemic of 1630, standing sentinel at the mouth of the Grand Canal - past the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, towards the Accademia Bridge and over to St Marks Square, where the Basilica in all its Byzantine splendor, the brick and stone campanile, and the Doges' great gothic pink and white palace glowing in the westering sun lightened the mood as feet, nonetheless, got heavier and the wind off the water, sapping what strength remained, finally sent us to Caffè Florian where a pot of hot chocolate, a glass of wine, two tramezzini, and a few bemused glances outside to the frigid square were all it took to comfort both body and spirit - and bring the city of Venice into beautiful focus.

Light, by turns clear, shrouded, enveloping, transporting, mercurial, is one of the aspects of Venice that has made it a subject of paintings for centuries. A cliché, I know, but it's obvious the omniprescence of water that makes the light, even the lack of it, what it is. In twilight we walked back over the Accademia Bridge, to the hotel bar for a Manhattan, this time alas without the antica formula vermouth I'd been introduced to in Rome, and for the Celt, a Negroni. Hotel bars, like hotel lobbies and buses in New York City, are perfect places for sharing sometimes surprisingly personal anecdotes and experiences, practicing second or even third languages, tricking, comparing notes, taking advice, or just sitting by the window watching reflections dance on the water as the world sails by.

That evening, after sprucing up in our gold-leafed bathroom (floor, ceiling, walls and shower stall all covered in squares of gold leaf behind sheets of glass) we strolled alongside narrow canals, by empty market places, through cramped, ill-lit alleys and on over small squares, to dinner. Dramatic after dark, Venice is one pool of light after another, mostly given over to an amusingly noir chiaroscuro, yet the city is unthreatening and happily friendly. The crowds being mostly absent, walking is easier at night - wandering under a starry sky over the innumerable small narrow bridges, with the help of an iPhone, Google Maps, and the frequent hand-lettered signs pointing towards San Marco, Rialto, Accademia, and Santa Croce, is one of the best of things.

The Celt took the photographs mostly with his iPhone.

Vin chaud and white lights

It's three in the morning and here I sit, glass of hot vin chaud - the spiced and brandied red wine I made earlier this evening to have with leftover boeuf bourguignon, and it finally hits me that after a more than a week of visitors, Christmas parties, finals, grading, faculty meetings, and yet one more party to come, that it is only eleven days before we set off on our winter vacation. Normally, we would take the winter vacation in New York but this year we going to Rome, a city neither of us has been to. Florence is on the itinerary as is New Year in Venice. Of all the buildings I'm going to see, Bramante's Tempietto is the one I'm most most looking forward to.

Christmas, in its own way, a festival of lights, when in the short, dark days of the northern midwinter fires were lit not only against the cold, holly and mistletoe, the greenery of the old gods, hung above doors and windows, and trees ornamented with candles. One of my most clear memories of childhood Christmases is of a card printed with a snowy coaching scene that because of its metal foil surface and a shred of embossing glinted magically in the light of the fire. The magic of that glint, the glow of fire in a dark room, the blue shadows beyond the slab of light from a window thrown across snow, has never left me. Last night at our condo holiday party the major decorations were large glass vases filled white lights and white twigs from which hung many icicles - to me the most glamouring of combinations, frost and fire. It's good sometimes to snatch a few seconds, just to appreciate how light in the dark is so essential and elemental a condition.

When, last weekend, I asked the Celt what we might serve for his sister-in-law's last-night-with-us dinner with friends he immediately said boeuf bourguignon, gratin dauphinoise and roasted asparagus with a bought-in fruit tart to follow - suggesting he'd hitherto given it a tad more thought than had I. Boeuf bourguignon it was but the odd thing is I realized I'd never made it before. I'd made the Flemish version of beef in beer, slowly stewed beef with prunes and red wine, even stroganoffed filet (the "t" is not silent in this household) with sour cream and mushrooms - in fact over the years I'd stewed a lot of beef but had never done the classic, Julia Child popularized, blogged-about and movie-starred boeuf bourguignon. Well, I made it and I can tell you honestly it was a total disappointment - until, that is, on reheating two days later and with the last minute addition of buttered mushrooms and pearl onions, it had evolved into the most salubrious of casseroles. There's a morsel, perhaps not served well by a second and third reheating, left for lunch tomorrow.

As to gratin dauphinoise, and this is where I recognize the irony of taking anti-cholesterol medication, I like it simple - well-seasoned, thinly-sliced potatoes, layered with cream and lots of garlic (none of the rub the dish with garlic nonsense) and slowly, slowly baked. Simple, subtle, and salacious.


I shall resume posts about connections, circles within circles, next week.