10/11 Friday
We’re having fun with the boat-buses
in Venice. They come running right up to the floating docks with no finesse
whatsoever, bashing into the pier as a way of stopping, sending the boat and
the dock swaying roughly. The handlers throw a rope over the pylon, pull the
boat up close enough and hustle everyone off, then everyone on. The engines rev
up with a growling, last-legs grumble that makes the whole boat
shudder and vibrate with the effort of moving. Then we barrel off, woe betide
any little gondola caught in our path.
One does not trifle with the ticket
police, either. We’ve seen them come on the bus or boat, dressed so casually
that you’d never suspect them. They shout an official pronouncement: TICKETS
EVERYONE! And move through the crowd checking your ticket. They catch someone
every time, and everybody’s got a story of course. One poor guy gets led off
the bus, whining “Mi hermano, mi hermano.” Another man, with his wife and kid
and parents from Japan, we guess, starts shouting on the boat “WE ARE TOURISTS!
NOBODY TOLD US TO PUNCH THE TICKETS! WE ARE TOURISTS!!!” The Ticket Officer
says “Sorry, that is not my problem,” and takes his credit card for the 200
Euro fine.
We have something different for today,
the Ca' Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art. The collection is
interesting, 19th and 20th century works, set in a grand
palace on the canal. Of interest is a plaster sculpture of Rodin’s Thinker, created as part of a plan for a
pantheon of figures, and later cast as the independent figure that’s ubiquitous
today.
On the second floor of the palace,
we have works from the Sonnabend Collection of Pop Art. Ileana Sonnabend was an
early collector and promoter of Warhol, Koons, Lichtenstein, Dine, and so many
others; she practically invented the notion of pop art as a serious
consideration. It’s equally fun to see people confronting Warhol’s Brillo
boxes, thinking “What the…???”
Once we’re through the modern
collection, we return to the center stairway and enter the other side of the
building, where there is an Oriental Museum, who knows why, which has a
dramatic collection of ancient Japanese weaponry and armor, collected by one of
the Bourbon princes. The collection of netsuke is absolutely my favorite part.
It seems we have time for one more,
so we head to the Museum of Natural History. This is a departure from the
typical rooms full of dusty cabinets, as this museum has recently reopened
after a great refurbishing project. The exhibits are beautifully done, with
creative lighting and an art installation sensibility. The birds are suspended
from the ceiling in flight. The seals and penguins are each shown in a huge
bubble, as if swimming in the sea. We’re very surprised that in this touristy
city, there is no information in English, not even one hand-out. We can follow
along, of course, but it would be interesting to learn some of the science too.
One full dinosaur skeleton is
presented with a video story of its discovery, fairly recently, in the deserts
of North Africa. The Touareg nomads were familiar with these monstrous bones,
incorporating the creatures into their legends. A chance meeting, more or less,
brought a scientist, Paul Sereno, together with a Touareg chieftain, who led
him to it, just lying there intact, half buried in the dune, where the winds
had blown the centuries of cover from it. It turned out to be an amazing new
site for fossils, called Gadoufaoua, Touareg for “the place where camels fear
to go.” No, really.
On our way home, we pass the Thai Pavilion,
an installation site that’s part of the Venice Biennial, which is going on
through the rest of the month. All around the city, we’ve been seeing pavilions
and installations set in the permanent museums. We only have ten minutes to see
the show, but we pop in. One room is filled with objects wrapped in colorful
string! The second room is the Golden Teardrop, an exquisite construction of
small bronze teardrops suspended in a matrix to create a huge sphere. This is
paired with a video telling a simple story of a Thai woman learning to prepare
the “teardrops,” a Portuguese egg dessert. The story of the intertwining
cultures is the theme of the video.
1 Video Included
Venice Sunny Day
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