After the initial test shoot, I get to pick up even more Albarran noise from a stylist in London. Back for further mining experiments…
and he likes my photos, thank blazes, so after a long tote of armor back from barcelona, I get to heave christiane and lily into a couple of pieces, for luck.
December is largely spent back in Clapham, back in the studio or hunkered down avoiding vast drifts of soggy snow. Did manage one day out to capture it, before continued hibernation.
these beautiful labyrinthes beckoning, the erasure of the hovering fog obliterates the sky, and I feel like a revenant floating along the canals, over bridges and against the crumbling brick edifices and shuttered windows. We become purposeful in our mapless abandon, wandering the alleys and arches until, after more than a single circle, we arrive on the hallowed st marks square. The basilica is monumental, a marble pastiche of venices forgotten glory, littered with pigeons that will acrobatically land on your shoulders should you proffer a crust. The florian coffee house, more than 350 years old, is a baroque masterpiece out of la traviata, which regrettably charges 8 euros for a latte, so I hearken to the shabbier shop nearby for a standing 2 euro capucchino. And here loiters the one drawback to this gilded city; the prices. Everthing is expensive, museum entries, coffee and pasta, and much as the masks and murano glass. There was a time in the city’s history that saw her cater to the poetic whims of the European aristocracy, beginning their grand tours of Italy, and it often seems the place has yet to escape from that decayed romance, to realistically grip the reality of dreadlocked American and canadian backpackers. Granted I’m somewhere betwixt, but I still don’t want to part with a tenner for a coffee the size of my cupped hand. Otherwise this city can be summed thus; it is a place more like an idyllic film set than an actuality but it is in fact, actualized. Tourists, students, gondoliers, fishermen and roving tat sellers rub against the frayed skirts of methuselan women leaning heavily on their canes, a patiose of every language echoes off the narrow alleys, and ocassionally,opera music seeps from brick sodden, baritone corners, and I forget my position in time, shuffling within an anachronism. And no cars! Just shouts and heavy footfalls, the rare propellored boat like a tempest along the quiescent canal. And yes, I stuffed my face full of dripping pizza yet again, for the 6th straight day.24th- the day spent wandering more canals, getting lost and found again, spying a cathedral in the mist lolling dangerously to the side. The exact same women we saw in Rome, have followed us here with their tin cups, crying alms in their scarves. Are you forced into penury here if you are female, abstractly Saracen and a wearer of head scarves? We eat a stunning meal of noble Venetian risotto doused liberally in seafood, and wash it into our canals with cool white wine. The room is cold when we return, and we draw a great curtain around the bed as whispers from the alley populate the air with ghosts.
I have a difficult time getting a fix on reaching the via appia; there is a different suggestion for every landmark, be it the catacombs, metulla’s tomb or aquaducts. I realize after 3 hours worth of walking on the jutting tufa that there is a good reason. That being, thanks to this highly informative metal plaque and map, that the road in question stretches along 3500 hectares of land, Asshole. We managed around 1000 before giving our feet up as lost. But made it to the old bit in the brochure before succumbing…. And then we walked all the way back, being unable to blag our way onto a bussload of Dutch invalids, and nowhere even near a metro. We join a later than usual train to Venice at 11pm, discovering our seats taken by an enormous Italian man reclining porpoise-likeover the entire row, spilling injudiciuosly out of his narrow shirt. A complaint to the conductor turns into a request for upgrade, and we land softly into our first class sleeper compartment, where christiane attempts actual use of the bedding, while I contemplate how best to straddle her face using the two parrallel bunks as a bolster. She thankfully recognizes the the unavoidable force Eros exerts over jungle gymnasium escapades, and the cost of the compartment is duly offset many orders of magnitude. We arrive in Venice just before 6, well rested for once, and worm our way through the labyrinth to the domus of an archeologist, a dear man named Diego who has agreed to host our brief invasion.
The sun broke from over the Vatican walls as though guided by a masons plumb line, a razor of light opaque enough to steer the focus of my lense. Natural artifice, smog, or the sheer gravity of gods greatest edifice, never have I seen sun so visual. When it falls without impediment, it drowns the roman spaces in a luminous sheet that works against the dimension of the city, flattening it’s hills and domes. I don’t need to throw money into the trevi fountain to return here, because the Sistine chapel is inexplicably closed today, and as tomorrow is sunday and our final one here in Rome, I will have missed the biggest tourist attraction in Italy. Oops. The pantheon is next, a thorougly stunning cylindrical occulus in the best state of repair in all Rome, because of course, it was converted to a church thereby preserving the stone in the wake of the churches many building projects throughout history. The niches are occupied with holy figures of course, and the sense of them not belonging is palpable. I see in my minds eye, towering phidian apollos and Dioscuri. And greeted by diminutive, languid apostles, even painting pushed into the naves, beneath the smaller arches for lesser godlings, now empty above catholic requilaries like the gouged sockets of an unrepentant Anglican. Is that a mcdonalds I see before me? I drown my desire to behold striding pagan deities in a big mac. A long meandering walk in the neighborhood later in the evening increases my girth some by further adventures in pizza. My stomach is beginning to look distinctly..fertilized. I hope I remain spry enough to dodge the copious coils of dog shit, lying like landmines beneath the umber leaves.
no amount of coffee enough to throttle the moist, ragged breath of sleep that shadows me. How long that shadow stretches, measured in men or minutes. The smell of mouldering bricks rouses me but into a dream state, and I keep closing my eyes to reconstruct the grandeur of the old republic out of the bones the church left behind. The ruined expanse is vast, scattered, the maw of an ancient hound, marble fragments like broken teeth scattered in corners. I wonder how much the Vatican saved in transportation costs with a ready cut stone quarry in the neighborhood. Am I the only one who has to fight to not leap around on the remaining structures? Or wondering how mich trouble I’d really fall into by hopping fences into the catacombs and temples that deny me. Too many fences, a concentration camp for malformed decrepit monuments. We spend almost as much time in termini station buying our tickets to Venice as we do on the palantine.
