Italy is on my mind, center of a still unfolding European tragedy, although it looks like they are finally seeing a flattened curve of new infections after strict lock-down measures. Today I will return to the beauty of Venice, as experienced alone some years ago before meeting up with friends in Tuscany, the focus of tomorrow’s blog.

My room under the roof held a bed, a microwave, a shower and a view ….. stairs up to the 5th floor only helped to control pasta calories….

Downstairs exit to the Grand Canal

I stayed in an attic room with a view, in an old, run-down Palazzo at the Grand Canal, a stone’s throw away from where Richard Wager lived and died during his Italian sojourns. That building is now a casino, but there is a small museum where people can explore Wagner’s past. All closed now, of course. Here is a cool documentary, using his own words from collected writings with clips filmed in the city, set to his music. It is languid and slow, and a perfect window into the vanity and self-preoccupation of that man, but also his powers of observation. Never mind his genius for composing.

Every day I explored the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, taking my main meal at the middle of the day in restaurants that were quite accommodating to a solo woman traveler (something that I cannot say for Paris, for example, where they always try to stash you in the back next to the kitchen….)

At night I would go home, climb the 100000 stairs, feast on bread and cheese and Pinot Grigio, watch the sunset, upload the photo harvest of the day and soak in gratitude for the richness of my life.

Boat trips to the cemetery island and Burano (not shown today, and all the churches I visited neither) alternated with my ambling through Venice proper. I was as interested in taking in the history and sights of the city as all the art I’d come to see at the Venice Biennale. Photographs today are the touristy kind, unavoidable even if you wanted to.

Rich public buildings, churches and private palazzos displaying the wealth of Venice

They certainly also convey the dilapidated charm of the place and the fact that it is a working city using the canals for traffic.

For more boats (and music history of Venice) you can re-read an earlier blog here.)

(These days, photos of dolphins frolicking in the suddenly clean canals, the city emptied of the hordes of tourists, can be found on the web – beware, they are fake! Just an expression of our eagerness to hear good news.)

Plenty of quiet corners to be found when I was there that September.

The reading list below has a fun cross section of types of work – besides the classics I can recommend the Dyer book – it opens different worlds.

10 Books About the Paradox & Mystery of Venice

Music, how can I not, is the Rhinemaidens’ lament from Das Rheingold. Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde, the three water nymphs, beseech the immortals to give back the gold stolen from them, to no avail. Doesn’t end well for the latter…. Fitting for our times where gold rules and disaster- inducing greed is celebrated until it’s too late, no?

Wagner is supposed to have played this on the piano the night before he died of a heart attack, a warped man, rabid anti-Semite, ingenious composer. Here is the full opera in a very traditional version.

And here a more modern iteration (sarcastically skewering American oil culture) which had the Bayreuth booing brigades on their feet by all reports, but sounds intensely beautiful to me.