The Arsenale: Where Looking Too Hard Used to Get You Killed

Before the Biennale crowds arrive, a dawn walk to the Arsenale, once the largest shipyard in pre-industrial Europe, where revealing a shipbuilding secret meant execution. Now filled with contemporary art instead of warships.
The Best Thing I Saw in Venice Today Was a Workbench

The walk to the Biennale, not the Biennale. A mask maker s bench with forty open pots of paint on it, a gondola holding perfectly still, and a calle you could touch both sides of.
