Bellini and the Winding Streets of Venice (Scavenger Hunt Blog Post)
-“In
this church of the vines, a beautiful painting you will find. Ask some local
cittadini to take a picture with Bellini.”
This quest was actually easy
to find. After remembering a “church of the vines” in Milan (it was actually
Leonardo’s vineyard next to the church with his last supper), I figured there
would probably only be one church with that name in Venice. Looking up “church
of the vines Venice” on Google gave me Chiesa di San Francesco della Vigna and
going to its Wikipedia page, I found a Bellini painting there. This was a great
start, but it would be important to ensure this was the right church with
locals once there. On our tour of Venice the first day, we passed by the church
and I noted the location. That night, me and Emily just randomly walked around
Venice for awhile and ended up at the church again, although it was closed.
Because this was random movement, we got somewhat lost in Venice (although I
always knew the relative direction). We ran into so many dead ends and
impassable canals, which turned us around. The streets were narrow and windy,
making it hard to keep track of what way you are going. It was peaceful walking
Venice at night though, especially in that area with its lack of tourists.
After these two encounters with the church, we decided to go complete the
scavenger hunt on Sunday. It was relatively easy to get there after becoming
more familiar with the streets from the past two times, and I didn’t really
need to reference Google Maps to get there. Upon arriving, we went into the
first entrance we saw, which did not take us into the main church but an annex
of it that housed Biennale art. We were able to ask the women manning the
exhibit about the church and confirmed that this was the church of the vines
with a Bellini exhibit. The church was closed at the time, so we had to explore
the Biennale exhibit and gardens nearby. Once we got in, we had to find
Bellini, which was hidden in a corner. Honestly the trickiest part was getting
the Bellini to be well lit. It was completely dark when we first entered, and
we took several photos of a painting covered completely in shadow. It wasn’t
until we asked some German tourists what to do that they pointed out a light
switch to turn on by paying 50 cents. Once the lights turned on- we had finally
found our Bellini.
Unlike the scavenger hunt in
Paderno that me and Arija engaged in, this scavenger hunt had noticeably less
interaction with locales. We never really had to speak Italian to find our way
or confirm how to do anything. We had to interact with the Germans and the
Biennale employee, but both of them spoke English. This honestly reflects
Venice’s nature as a heterotopia, a city linked “to slices of time” (Foucault
26). Venice has kept to its motto of “comera dovera” as it was where it was.
This means that Venice has kept itself relatively the same for the last 500
years, preserving its medieval structure. While this makes Venice like a living
museum and a fun place to explore and navigate- it has also made it less kind
to the changing ideals of our increasingly modern world. This makes Venice less
livable and more attractive to tourists. This has led to a city that is a
boiling pot of cultures, a town of tourists. The whole city acts a museum, with
a few attendants living inside, but the culture of the museum is overwhelmingly
associated with the visitors of the museum. I would argue that this was more
indicative of my experience in Venice than my experience in Paderno. In
Bassano, we were tourists surrounded by the locals and could integrate in the
culture. In Venice, the locals are surrounded in a sea of tourists.
Of course, this multi-cultural
experience is not bad, but it was interesting how we did not have to interact
with locales to achieve our goal, but had to interact with tourists or guides
for the tourists, even in a location well off the beaten path. This made me
realize that Venice is a city of foreigners, and even those who live there are
foreigners in their own land as the majority commute in from Mestre or live off
in the edges of the city in Castello or Cannaregio. This doesn’t mean that you
get an oblivious tourist like you would see in Piazza San Marco or by Rialto
Bridge, but that there are people of all kinds of backgrounds that make up the
fabric of the city.
The people in the city reflects
the street layout. A complex mixture that weaves and has no formal rules. A
twist and turn of dead ends. De Certeau talks about how the pedestrian in the
city has a from of “speech” to their walk, that “the act of walking is to the
urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered”
(97). Venice’s streets are full of dead ends and have thin, short alleyways that
often lead nowhere, making them very hard streets for the modern, fast paced
man to live in. This has led the Venetian to be one who enjoys the meandering
of life itself, while foreigners and mainlanders, who need a more modern way of
living and move fast and with logic, cannot fully appreciate getting lost in
Venice without worry. While not on the scavenger hunt, I have interacted with local
Venetians, and they were all either very old or young and would be best to
describe as the opposite of a New Yorker. The Venetians had nowhere to be while
New Yorkers are always on the move to a new location. New York is on a rigid
grid that makes it easy to move around, while it can be quite difficult to go
to any specific destination in Venice, but it can be quite easy to end up
anywhere. I would say that this best summarizes my Venice experience: a great
place to get lost and end up somewhere unexpected in the city that leads
nowhere because you’re always somewhere.
de Certeau, Michel. The
Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California
P, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. "Of
Other Spaces." Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.
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