TRAVEL|Venice, 2009
Prima Visita a Venezia, 2009
How easily do you adjust to a city without roads, cars, trucks, buses, traffic lights, crossings and everything else you associate with ‘normal’ city centres?
Very easily and with pleasure. The straight answer is that you have no choice. You just get on with what you find. The waterbus (vaporetto) at the airport launches you immediately onto the lagoon and from that point, it’s water all the way. As the travel-minded community knows well, on his first visit to Venice the American writer and humourist Robert Benchley sent this cable to his New Yorker editor Harold Ross: STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE. Annoying really, as once some clever dick has done something like that, so brilliantly and wittily original and fitting, the job’s been done. It can be for ever quoted but never equalled, certainly not imitated. But he was quite right, though a number of the watery lanes he saw earlier in the 20th century have since been reclaimed and converted into even more narrow alleyways than he was able to use on foot. Even so, this is a city whose main and secondary thoroughfares are made of water, where you board and dismount from the floating bus at the floating bus stop.
So it’s a case of ‘forget roads and think canals’?
Exactly. In fact, you do it without much thinking. The trip from Marco Polo airport into the centre takes about half an hour bouncing along a wide expanse of choppy water, made choppier by the thrashing wakes of passing water taxis, the fastest zooming and most expensive transport around. Then everything we are used to in terms of road transport is translated to water. You cross the main street, the Grand Canal, not by zebra crossing but by traghetto, a basic gondola poled across by a man and a boy, for half a euro. Small bridges with steps allow you to cross the many dozens of lesser waterways leading on and off the main one. Daily supplies for shops, hotels and restaurants arrive by water, offloaded from barges piled with cardboard boxes onto smaller boats and brought to shore with their own sack trolley for wheeling down the narrow alleys. The dustman collects the bags of rubbish from the alleys and squares and slings them in his boat.
So how does the public transport work?
The waterbuses come in different sizes depending on how busy the route is, and they run on time (there’s no equivalent here of an unscheduled 25 minute traffic jam in Oxford Street), up and down the Grand Canal, over from the northern shore to San Michele, all round the whole watery city, and from the southern side to the islands of La Guidecca where two great (and one lesser) Palladio churches stand, right at the water’s edge. It’s five euros for a single trip regardless of distance, so very much more economical to get a period season ticket, hopping on and off them when you need a rest from walking or simply fancy a long ride to gawp at the glittering palazzi and the canal traffic. The easily avoided privately run luxury trip is the gondola conducted by a man in striped jersey and straw boater, costing at least eighty euros depending on how much you want. That’s nearly eighty quid but there’s no shortage of takers. The gondoliers call out “Gondolaaaa” as you approach, just as the African traders call out “Ombrellaaa” on rainy days in Manhattan. On All Saints’ Day, while we’re here, the bus over to the cemetery of San Michele is free of charge, enabling well-dressed folk clutching bunches of flowers bought from the stall beside the pier to go across and pay their annual respects. Ezra Pound is among those buried here, though today a body is only allowed to remain buried for ten years, then it’s dug up and the bones deposited in the ossuary to make room for more dead people in the earth.
What was your hotel like?
It’s small, red-fronted, called San Cassiano Ca’ Favretto, once the home of a painter, right on the Grand Canal, obliquely opposite the famous Ca’ D’Oro (Home of Gold), in its day one of the finest and grandest of the canal-side palazzi. On arrival by our quite fast boat, we and our stuff are handed ashore at the small but exclusive landing stage where it’s immediately picked up by a small uniformed character who doubles as porter and barman and doubtless as general duties person. While the hotel has perfectly modern systems, including digital television in the room, its period feel has been splendidly retained, with heavy gold framed mirrors, old landscape paintings, heavy drapes, elaborate repro-period furniture – some of it perhaps not so repro - original stone stairs, long windows with shutters, all contributing to a comfortable, timeless fin-de-siècle ambience.
The tall men on reception, working in shifts, all wear severe suits and, between them, have a variety of first languages, so you’re never quite sure whether to try a bit of your very limited Italian, attempt a spot of French or just plough on in English. Whichever you decide, it tends to achieve the result you want. It’s hardly the first time they’ve dealt with visitors from abroad, whose needs will be pretty well identical, wherever they come from. After a few days on the streets, we conclude that French is probably the most heard non-native language in Venice, and are certainly not aware of too much American. Apart from Europeans of many kinds, there are the now ubiquitous gaggles of Orientals, some Japanese women wearing long silk dresses with that strange cushion thing on their backs, posing endlessly for group photographs, sometimes with other people, complete strangers, photographing them doing it.
Whatever possessed anyone to decide to build a city on a bunch of mud flats on the edge of the Adriatic?
They established it here in the mid-6th century for defensive purposes to frustrate likely harassment from Attila the Hun, a local unpleasant person. Over the next couple of centuries it became more permanent, using the long cluster of central islands, then called Rivoalto, later known as Venezia. Over the following centuries all sorts of people have had a go at it, invading it, occupying it, colonising it, and suppressing its religious worship. In parallel, the Venetian Republic itself, essentially an import-export trading corporation, had its own periodic programme of overseas acquisition, whose grand remnants can be seen, for example, in Crete. It was absorbed into the Kingdom of United Italy in 1866, since then becoming a city whose most significant source of income is tourism, with no more than 70,000 people actually living here, a third of its former heyday population when its empire stretched from the Dolomites to Cyprus. Once Europe’s main trading post between East and West, as much as 70% of its income is now generated from tourism, with some 15 million visitors every year. July 15th 1989 is known as ‘Black Sunday’ when 150,000 people came in for that single day.
The big mystery is: how do those buildings stay up?
Indeed, and we probably find it a mystery because we automatically tend to think in terms of our own conventional construction techniques. It was explained very clearly to me only recently – excellent timing, this - by one Kevin McCloud in his recent Channel 4 TV programme ‘Grand Tours’. It seems they sunk long, thick wooden poles deep into the mud where, starved of oxygen, they gradually turn, more or less, into stone, providing secure foundations. A stone platform is placed on top of the poles, and the building is constructed on that. So, although we can’t see beneath the water and the mud, they are really buildings on legs or stilts, a common feature of riverine dwellings in tropical regions such as Bangladesh, the Amazon basin and the great rivers of south-east Asia. McCloud also said that, because of the likelihood of movement caused by the water rising, falling and occasionally surging a bit, the external walls we see are not firmly attached to each other so do not bear any real load, but stand almost independently of one another, slightly leaning onto the interior wall structures. It’s those interior walls that take all the strain and do all the work, supporting the floors and the roof, very similar to the way the steel box framework functions inside a skyscraper.
You’re known to enjoy Italian cuisine. How was the food?
Good to extremely good on every occasion. On our first evening, being a bit tired after the journey, we wanted ‘comfort food’ rather than two or three strenuous courses. Our hotel was less than ten minutes’ walk from the Rialto Bridge, always a scene of great buzz and restaurant activity, though very deliberately directed at those tourists who are reluctant to leave the most beaten of tracks, rather like the Rue des Bouchers that leads into the Gran’ Place in Brussels, with touts on the pavement waving their menus as you walk past. Before even reaching the Rialto we found a small, ordinary trattoria on a corner and plumped for it. It was exactly what we needed and were comforted by risotto and, of all things, a superb spaghetti Bolognese, preceded by Parma ham and melon and helped down by vino blanco della casa, their house white. Apart from café-bars and pizzeria, the places to look for if you want proper food with a knife and fork are the trattoria, osteria or actual ristorante. They vary in price and levels of sophistication but, except for the obviously more up-market place, the trattoria, often family-run, is the place where locals as well as visitors tend to go, and so did we.
Any specific recommendations?
Oh yes. We marked the Trattoria della Madonna for later use if necessary. It’s a large, busy, crowded place, under the same family management for more than forty years, three large noisy rooms, tables seating you almost shoulder to shoulder about six inches away from the neighbouring people. Amazingly, the acoustics are such that you can’t hear what they’re saying over the general buzz and bustle, though you could easily reach over and fork away a few of their chips. Unlike many French restaurants where a few waiters work themselves silly, this place is staffed with dozens of waiters, all in white jackets, zipping about at high speed, always on the ball, never even writing down your order. Although they have the hand-held credit card machine to use at your table, there is no electronic till. When you ask the waiter for the bill, he goes up to the boss, a tall man in his fifties, probably the son of the now dead founder whose large portrait we see up on the wall near our table, and recites what we’ve had. All the pricing is done on a very simple model so the boss writes out the bill, tears it off his pad and gives it to the waiter. If you’re paying in cash, the waiter takes the money to the boss who supplies him with the change. The boss has total control: a quaint arrangement but it works extremely well.
For dinners the following evening we find another busy trattoria called Muro where we get in just before they start turning late arrivers away. That’s a feature of many such places, they rarely accept advance reservations, so queuing is always a possibility, especially in the 7.30 to 8.30 pm slot. You can be deceived about the situation as you approach, finding what looks like a queue but which turns out to be one of these groups of six or eight people who have bunched up on the street, all trying to read the menu on the wall at the same time. It’s at the Muro that I experience the portion problem. The trouble is caused initially by my beef carpaccio starter which is much larger than I expect, with the result that a beautiful medium fillet steak with gorgeous chips completely defeats me, managing no more than a third of it. Here I also begin an amoxicillin course of tablets to treat a tooth swelling – no real pain but this one will need extraction when we get home, having been a potential loser for a couple of years now.
Did you ever get into the more up-market dining experience?
Not at the most serious level, but near our hotel, on a corner only a few alleyways away, we’d noticed a rather chic and superior-looking place called Osteria Antico Giardinetto (roughly, probably, Inn of the Old Small Garden). We had tried it on Saturday evening to find it fully booked, but on Sunday there were places available. The style is smooth and quiet, with two main rooms, mostly already reserved. Music plays just above the inaudible level and conversation is muted - none of the exciting trattoria commotional buzz and clatter here. The young woman serving operates in a way that precisely fits the environment they have created, attentive but not fussy, very quietly spoken, clearly as fluent as she needs to be in, at least, French and English, to answer questions about the different dishes or to advise on your selections.
It’s another brilliant example of how to create an atmosphere of comfort and harmony for the users of a restaurant. It’s not simply a question of putting down some tables and chairs in a space, which so many people in Britain still seem to think is all that’s required. We are getting much better at this now, particularly with the advent of gastropubs, but there is still no shortage of places where they haven’t got it right because no one with sufficient understanding was involved with the design in the first place. My adult life’s companion is a fish lover and Venice is known, above all, for fish cuisine from a vast range of the shell-based and the shell-less. Many menus comprise probably as much as 85% fish dishes. Although I don’t recall what she had here, it was certainly a product of the surrounding waters, while I had four very tasty, thin grilled lamb chops with impeccable roast potatoes. A French man at the adjacent table has a steak which looks about twice the size of the one that left me beaten the previous evening.
That takes care of your evenings, and presumably you walked yourselves silly during the daytime. Where did you go and what did you see?
Venice is small enough to cross from side to side in an hour and, as Iain Sinclair would tell anyone who wanted to listen, there’s only one real way to find out about anywhere, and that’s by walking the territory. Even after our first dinners on the day of arrival, we were off, down through narrow streets and alleys, up and down steps and across little bridges, to our first sighting of Rialto Market and Bridge. (And I could see that it was just round here, with the canal water lapping the edge of the pavement by the arches, that Al Pacino was abused in Michael Radford’s 2004 film version of The Merchant of Venice.) The quaysides here have a large floating water bus station on one side with the tourist-attracting waterside restaurants opposite, with their outdoor heaters and uniformed flunkeys. The huge covered fish market has been hosed down, though its odours remain strong. Disappointingly, hardly any of the buildings on the Grand Canal have anything in the way of exterior lighting effects at night, though there’s subdued lighting making the Ca’ D’Oro glow slightly. The evening ends murkily, with light mist.
We eat breakfast the following morning at a window table over looking the Grand Canal on a brilliant sunny day, which remains like this right through until dusk. The tall windows give onto a small balcony where we can gaze at the buildings opposite, all splendidly side-lit by the sun to our right. Here the first of about a hundred and fifty photographs are taken. We make our initial exploration without specific destinations, by following our noses to St Mark’s Square. Now the Rialto Market, open every day, is bustling in a big way, with masses of fish, many of whose faces we don’t recognise, plus piles of fruit and veg. At this time of day, small, mainly aged Venetians with shopping bags poke around among the produce, picking up a few squid here, a bundle of skinned eels there, prawns, flatfish, anchovies and cod, while the colourful profusion of the huge fruit stalls is being photographed by the tourists.
Having crossed the southern stretch of the city, no real distance but by a meandering route, we reach Piazza San Marco where hundreds of people of all nationalities are milling around, doing all the usual touristical things, photographing everything, including one another in varied arrangements, against the obvious backgrounds. The Square is not a geometrical square but a long, broad rectangle edged with long arched colonnades. If Palladio had designed it, the relationship between the shorter and the longer sides would very probably have been the perfect harmony of 6:10. Outside one restaurant a small string orchestra plays (probably) Vivaldi. Inside S. Marco is a spectacular sight, with dome after dome opening above you, drawing your eye into the deeper parts of the interior, covered all over with paintings and gold. We’re about halfway through looking when the lighting goes off, presumably deliberately to protect the colours, which rather dulls the earlier very dramatic and magnificent effect. You don’t have to pay to go in, but there are special sections where they do charge, which presumably includes coming out onto the frontal balconies overlooking the Square. Outside again, the punters are queuing, as they will anywhere in the world, to go up to the top of the tall campanile, an experience they will certainly be paying for.
As the beer hour is approaching, we investigate the price of a single 33 cl. bottle in this hottest of hot spots in Venice. Nine euros or £8.90 appears to be the going rate which strikes one as much too heavy, so we walk along the canal-side ‘prom’, past one or two of the mightier hotels (Gabrieli, Danieli), towards the Arsenale, where we find beer at half that price. Even so it’s a lot for a glass of beer, but trying to find the cheapest glass of beer in Venice would take all day and be a rather pointless and mean-minded endeavour. In places like this, you have to bite the bullet, pay the going rate and swallow the beer. Afternoon proceeds gently, again wandering wherever the alleys and bridges take us. We encounter charming and unexpected squares, large and small, usually with a church, slightly away from the beaten track and its hordes of drifting gawpers. By around four we have walked ourselves almost to a standstill and return to the hotel bar for a Nastro Azurro beer for me and espresso for J at five euros the lot – complimentary dish of salted peanuts included. Much better, especially in a place you might easily have expected to charge its captive customers far more.
So after that first day of finding your way around and getting the feel of it all, did your expeditions become more focused?
They did, though not until the afternoon of Day Two. It’s beautifully sunny again, and there seem to be rather more people in the hotel this morning with two or three small children, causing the breakfast room to be overcrowded and occasionally noisier as these incomplete humans shovel stuff into their lumpy little faces. We poke around during the morning and buy the 36-hour travel card for 23 euros, a serious bargain if you intend to make frequent use of the waterbuses. You use the bus as often as you wish and fairly soon you’ve more than paid for the season ticket. It’s the weekend now when the city fills up with thousands of local day-trippers on top of all the regular tourists.
The main targets for the second day are on the southern islands, the smaller one where stands one of Venice’s most outstanding landmarks, the church of San Giorgio Maggiore and its neighbour La Guidecca where we’ll see Il Redentore. These are the two great and late works of Andrea Palladio, so late, in fact, that he had died before they were completed. We confidently board the vaporetto Number 2 but, on reaching Ferrovia, the grand railway station and land transport hub for the mainland, realise we’ve gone west where we should have gone east. So it’s back to S.Marco where we change to the Number 82 for the lagoon crossing. We’re dropped right outside the front steps and doors of S.Giorgio, where the entire island is covered by this great church and its monastic outbuildings – including the Library - which, regrettably, are not available to the public.
The grand façade itself needs some taking in, but the feel of the interior even more so, huge, tall and spacious, with light pouring down from the dome. The most striking effect, which worked on the early Grand Tourists as much as it does today, is the all-white stucco interior, the purity of white seen by Palladio as the most suitable for the building’s purpose. Tintoretto’s The Last Supper and The Fall of Manna, painted as a pair during the last two years of his life (1592-94), hang in the chancel. There is no charge to come in, but later, for 3 euros, you take the lift to the top of the campanile (18th century) for the most magnificent views around 360 degrees of Venice and the lagoon. From here you can at least see part of the monastery cloisters below, themselves said to be among the architectural treasures of Venice, with the refectory designed by Palladio.
La Guidecca is a long string of islands, joined by bridges and separated by narrow canals. The vaporetto takes us along to Il Redentore (The Redeemer), passing en route the much smaller church La Zitelle, another Palladio design, which appears to be thoroughly closed except on Mondays. Seemingly smaller, though still of very considerable size, Redentore is much less cluttered by plaques, memorials, busts etc. than S.Giorgio, making it easier to appreciate the overall design elements. Many features are repeated here including the white interior. It’s doubtless a function of the time of day and the building’s exact position related to the sun, but this great nave is much whiter and brighter than S.Giorgio’s which, you now realise, appeared more light grey than white. This church was commissioned by the Senate following the end of a two-year visitation by the plague in 1575-76 when over 50,000 people died. The new building would be a votive church to which an annual pilgrimage would be made across the lagoon to give thanks for the ending of the plague. The monks who already lived here said they would look after the new church free of charge as long as their vows of poverty were respected. This meant that none of the Venetian nobility would be buried here, as this would attract payments to the monks for offering prayers for the dead - hence the lack of memorials inside.
Guidecca was once Venice’s inner industrial suburb, among other things building vaporetti for the public transport system. There was an asphalt factory and a distillery but all that sort of activity has now ceased. Former industrial sites have become residential developments now gradually generating their own active social environments, including some serious hotels. We have lunchtime drinks at an ordinary little bar on the waterfront where we learn the very useful term spina meaning ‘draught’ as applied to beer. Locals are lunching in the rear dining room, others popping in for something short and sharp standing at the bar.
But you still had some afternoon remaining?
Yes. We return to S. Marco where even more bothersome hordes of drifters swarm all over the place, the vast majority dressed in black, definitely this year’s non-Palladian colour. We find the Fenice (Opera House), an understandably large building with appropriately large and imposing façade quite dwarfing everything else in the small square in front of it. We discover more little unexpected squares, which, when you come upon them, suddenly relieve the claustrophobic effect of tiny alleyways with no views except what’s immediately ahead of you. Venice is not only a visually stunning, architecturally dramatic and heavily historic city, it’s also a strange one. As you walk through its narrow alleys and across its bridges, you see other people, constantly appearing purposefully, popping out from an alley that crosses yours, and then disappearing again almost immediately. Look to left and right and you’ll see them crossing the next bridge across the small canal, quickly up and down the steps, and then gone again. You get rapid glimpses of other people, close to and in the distance, going in different directions, never visible for long. That applies to the Venetians, of course. The tourists walk necessarily with much less purpose, stopping on every bridge to take a photograph or just to have a look, peering round corners, hesitating, wondering which direction to take next.
The Venice Biennale is taking place while we’re here, modern art from countries all over the world, and we become aware of presentations in various major buildings, mostly churches, which are probably not normally open to the public. One large church contains the exhibits of the Moroccan entry, where we find a collection of mainly weird multi-media paintings and other objects, with the theme of death prominent (possibly). Later we see the sign for the New Zealand show entitled “Beer, Giraffes, Guns”, a title that more or less tells you what you might be going to see but by now we’re ready again for a Nastro and espresso back at Ca’ Favretto. You can’t do everything, and by late afternoon you tend to be experiencing a fair degree of stimulus overload, let alone aching messages from those bits at the bottom ends of your legs.
But, being serious devotees of this sort of thing, you persevere.
Most certainly we do, especially as Day Three breaks bright and blue into yet another gorgeous morning on the Grand Canal that Canaletto would have loved, except for the even more numerous day-tripper multitudes. The summer months here must be simply hell.
Crossing the Grand Canal by traghetto for only 50 cents each, steered by two blokes with poles, the least sophisticated of the waterborne vehicles of Venice, we reach Ca’ D’Oro, (from whose piano nobile balcony we can see our hotel just across the Canal) in its day when built one of the grandest, most luxurious palaces in the entire city. This ‘modest family house’ was built in the 1420s and 1430s, being nicknamed the Golden Home from the gilding of many of its carvings, now mainly painted white. As EU citizens over 65 we qualify for free entry, otherwise people have to pay 12 euros to see the objects, Renaissance paintings, Dutch and other Old Masters, portions of statuary and ecclesiastical remnants rescued by the palace’s owner from religious institutions during periods when religious practice was being suppressed here by the various invaders.
The place is simply a huge gallery of articles of tremendous art-historical value, donated by their owner to the State of Venice. Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian (1506) has an alcove of its own, the big Venetian names are on the second floor, though we’re told that the Tintorettos and the Titians are ‘not among their best’. The sculptures are fewer in number than the paintings, but do contain some very fine specimens. Parallel with those exhibits there’s a contemporary exhibition on the different floors, multi-media pieces on the general theme ‘Aqua’. So you can mix your artistic experiences, have a spot of Renaissance, then nip into a section containing buckets of fake water with people’s faces looking up at you from the bottoms of buckets. Then back to Tintoretto or Tullio Lombardo’s sculpture Young Couple. You could look at all the contemporary stuff and ignore the historical art, or stay with the ancient and ignore the modern. Any way you cut it, it’s extremely good value for no euros at all.
On this side of the Canal we’re in the Cannaregio sestieri, the northern section of the main island conglomeration, reaching eventually to the railway station. This is different territory, no ‘theme-park’ palazzi but mostly buildings where actual people clearly live beside modest small canals with modest small boats moored outside and washing hanging on lines across the canals. One larger than usual street is crammed with trippers but elsewhere the ambience is quiet and simply very ordinary. We reach the geto (the first place in Europe where the word ‘ghetto’ was ever used), the old Jewish Quarter from where Italian Jews were dragged off to German concentration camps during the later years of the war. It’s a small square formed by very plain six-storied blocks of flats, with a Jewish restaurant, local shops and the Israeli Bank.
Do you manage any lunchtime drinks today, or is that a silly question?
Fairly silly. They are taken outside a small bar right on the northern waterfront near the waterbus stop for San Michele, the island of the famous cemetery. By now, with the beer ordering technique refined, I have in front of me what looks like a pint of draught beer in a glass that looks like a pint glass. Later we take the longer bus journey eastwards right round the top side of Venice, past the Lido to our left and back into the Guidecca Canal to alight at Arsenale for a walk along the prom, for J’s ice cream, and to see the lower sun creating silhouettes of people and buildings. Trying to alight at Arsenale, I get caught up with small kids under my feet on the stairs. Despite their mother’s efforts, I can’t get past without damaging them, so reach the exit from the boat just as the crowd of new passengers is swarming aboard. The conductor marshalling things at this point makes it clear that I’m thoroughly in the way, and he takes off for the next stop with J ashore and me still on board. At the next stop I disembark faultlessly and walk back along the lagoon to reconnect with herself. We discover accidentally that the famed Bridge of Sighs, attached to the Doges Palace and crossing one of the many small side canals, has escaped our notice, being surrounded though not concealed by blue hoardings with adverts on them, hiding the restoration work going on. This particular canal bridge attracts more snappers than anywhere else, and is also on the route of every gondola trip, one of the city’s very few watery places where there might be something of a traffic jam. You’d probably see one every day of the week, many times a day, during the height of the summer season. Out in the open air nearby, beside the lagoon, is the Biennale exhibit of the Republic of Macedonia, a large silver mirrored cube which creates fabulous swirly patterns in the coloured reflections of its surroundings. This makes for several very unexpected and interesting photographs, the image changing dramatically with only the slightest repositioning of the camera. It’s a beautiful late afternoon, with S. Giorgio across the water softly lit and the long shadows of the strollers across the pavement.
Were you sorry to have to leave?
Very sorry indeed. Three full days allow a good introduction to Venice, but, as with other places like Prague, Bruges or New York City, you need that minimum time to become reasonably comfortable about where important things are and how things work. It’s hard work, but the more you learn about it, the easier it becomes. Then comes the time when you can really relax and start going in deeper and at a more leisurely pace – except that you’re booked on an early flight home the following day. It’s a damp, misty morning and we have to be away from the hotel before breakfast. The first Orange Line waterbus to the aeroporto leaves the Rialto Bridge at 8.03 am but you can’t buy the tickets until five to eight when the special kiosk opens. Unlike the previous three mornings, this one disappoints by its overall and general greyness, making the leaving easier. At Zurich, our intermediate stop, with good time for some coffee, we find it absolutely pouring with rain, though the very new terminal building here is a serious study in cool design, including a long bar with very charming table service. Bottles of Duty Free pastis are obtained without problem.
And you’ll go to Venice again?
Is the Pope a Catholic?
NOTE: As it happens, the next visit occurred by surprise only 18 months later
when Tony Ellis invited us to Venice for a few days to have dinner with him,
celebrating his 69th birthday. There's an account of this trip at