Saturday, and Venice knows it before I do. This is Redentore day, the feast marking the plague finally letting go of the city in the 1570s, close to sixty thousand people gone before it lifted. Tonight half the population will be crammed onto boats for the fireworks. I was not thinking about that yet. I was back on the Accademia bridge before six, the Grand Canal empty end to end, the dome of the Salute catching the first pink of the day, nobody between me and the water but one moored boat.
From there I just walked, no plan beyond following the shade while it lasted. Deep into Castello I came out into a quiet campo, orange columns holding up a portico, plaster gone soft with age, one man with a broom having the square to himself. He worked without hurrying, the way people do when nobody is watching and nobody is paying by the hour. I stood under the colonnade a good while, more the stillness he was making than the man himself.
Further on a boatman came sculling out from under a low bridge, standing the way they all do here, one long oar against the current, no motor, no fuss. The water was that flat green it goes when nothing has disturbed it, and he came apart in his own reflection, wobbling with every stroke. This is working Venice, not the postcard one. Boats here are utes and delivery vans, their drivers not slowing for a woman with a camera.
A little further I found what the itinerary would call Venice as subject: water, crowds, reflections, except there were no crowds yet, just me under an arched bridge with blue and white mooring poles standing in the canal like sentries. A white motorboat sat tied off below, doubled in the water so precisely I had to look twice to find where the real one ended. Stone above, stone below, the city arguing with its own reflection all day. I very nearly stood there an hour.
By nine I had wandered as far as the Fondamenta San Giovanni Laterano and set my camera on the tripod beside a squat little church I did not recognise. It turned out to be the Ospedaletto, its Baroque front loaded with muscular stone giants carved by Giusto Le Court and finished by Baldassare Longhena. For two hundred years the hospice next door trained orphan girls as musicians, their choir drawing audiences from across Europe. I had no idea any of that sat behind me while I fiddled with my lens cap.
While the camera rolled a water taxi came round the corner far too fast for the canal, and the wake hit the wall behind my tripod hard enough that I flinched before the water did. Tripod rocking, the whole quiet morning turned to white noise for four seconds. I kept filming out of sheer stubbornness. Movement without a subject was the brief I set myself for this trip. A boat wake against three hundred year old stone will do nicely.
Somewhere past midday, tired and hot, I stopped for a dog. A big black greyhound, elegant as a pencil line, curled on a cushion in the bow of a moored boat while somebody pottered on the fondamenta above. I did not bother with the person, only the dog. Give me a dog in a boat over another church facade any day of the week.
Back at the flat in Mestre by mid afternoon, feet finished, I did what I always do with a full camera and no energy for drawing from life. I worked from the week’s photographs instead, a hatted figure walking away down some unnamed lane, a gull hunched into its own feathers on a railing between islands. Outside, Venice was filling up for tonight, the votive bridge to the Redeemer’s church open since last night for anyone who wants to walk it. I will let the fireworks go this year. Early start again tomorrow. More soon.
My last Venice morning, and the famous rooftop everyone climbs for the view has been shut for a year. No matter. I had the Rialto at dawn, an empty St Mark’s, and then the rain turned every lane into a mirror.
The list said Murano, glass factories, back streets. My legs said something else entirely. So I stayed on the mainland with the actual Venetians and drew all day instead.
Before dawn, Venice belongs to nobody. A solo walk from the Grand Canal to colour-drenched Burano, caught between a sudden lagoon shower and a single white brushstroke that said everything the photographer had been chasing all week.
