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 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.
Before the Venice Biennale crowds and heat arrive, one early riser crosses from Mestre to Dorsoduro at first light, finding empty canals, leaning campaniles and a Grand Canal all to himself.
An artist crossing Italy by train skips the Duomo and Last Supper entirely, and instead finds Milan’s real spectacle in Milano Centrale, Ulisse Stacchini’s 1931 station of arched glass, iron ribs and backlit crowds.
A rest-day ride on the UNESCO-listed Bernina Express leads to Morteratsch Glacier, where year markers since 1878 trace two and a half kilometres of retreat, and to Alp Gruem’s donkeys, stone barns, and Segantini’s Alpine light.
Off the Bernina train and up the valley to the Morteratsch glacier, which has been walking backwards for a hundred and seventy years. Bare moraine, flowers moving in behind it, and two mules on the way home.
A sketching day in Varenna on Lake Como. Train up, walking trail through the olive trees to Castello di Vezio, eagle owls at close range, then gesture studies on the ferry pier as the lake week wraps up.
Up the hill above Varenna to a thousand year old watchtower, where they cast a new set of ghosts every year, fly owls over your head, and leave raku ceramics out in the grass.
A business day in Como and Cantù, where silk built a city and lace built its neighbour. Talks with a silk printing house about printing ink work on fabric, plus 62 reference photos for the studio year ahead.
I said the camera did the heavy lifting in Como and then showed you none of it. Here it is: one iron bracket, one painted ceiling, a cathedral that took nearly four hundred years, a sleeping dog, and a price tag.
