Week 13 blog
You have been treated to a glass of wonderful wine, and as it passes over your tongue it conjures memories and sensations that resonate with your very being. It is an entirely moving experience, and as you sip further into its wonders, another emotion approaches with the revealing of the bottom of the glass. The glass will soon be empty. The drink is being consumed by this process of enjoying. The experience will have to move from the physical, tied implacably to the singleness of the action where you can only consume it once, to the metaphysical memory of it, which is permanent and allows the wine to be consumed again and again. You could stop and leave the last small draught of this elixir, but to what avail? Such prolonging of the action will in fact make the experience less, and you realize that the only thing to do to ensure that the memory is perfect, is to drink it completely. The savor…this complex memory, demands that you do this, and who would argue with such a demand?
The elixir that is Venice, is fast coming to an end, and all of us are very aware that we about to take the last sip of her. It is clear to me that this group will not sit idly by and ‘nurse’ the last swallow, but will continue this experience that they have sustained with such admirable zeal, until the moment that they leave. These sweet but sad days will be our last.
Monday was supposed to be a day of rest for me, but I was awakened early by a call from Claudio who is the man that we rent our apartments from. The apartment in San Basilio that was inhabited by Erika, Caitlin, and Kyle had sustained serious water damage during the night after a water pipe in the apartment above had burst. It was clear by early morning that the apartment probably could not be lived in, and I began a long tour of alternative places before deciding on one that is quite close to mine in Sant Elena. The group was off with Karen painting in the cemetery of San Michelle, and after walking down to SanMarco to pick up keys, I set off on a 41 vap to find them. They had been painting in idyllic conditions just before I arrived, tucked in among the greenery surrounding the graves of Ezra Pound and Brodsky, but just as I arrived with my news of the exodus, so did a half a dozen workmen with weed whackers, and they proceeded to shred this ‘perfect place’.
It was the signal for a general packing up and we all travelled back to San Basilio to help with the clean up and transporting of ‘stuff’ to the new apartment. This turned into a very interesting exercise, and as it turns out a rather timely lesson. There were six of us to transport the belongings of the San Basilio three…And it became rapidly clear that we were not enough!
I asked the question, “How do you expect to get all this stuff back to the US in a couple of weeks?”, and did not receive any answers other than some pained looks. So it is clear that’we’ have been acquisitive during these weeks, and these acquisitions may present problems in a few short days unless ‘we’ do something about them. It was clear that our intentions of catching a vaporetto to Sant Elena were pipe dreams and I called a friend ,Sebastiano who arrived with his water taxi and ferried us to the other end of the city. After Caitlin, Erika and Kyle settled into their new digs I took the entire group out for a pizza at ‘my’ local bar, which will now become ‘their’ local bar.
On Tuesday morning we met at San Zaccaria and rode a vap to Ca Pessaro, Venice’s Museum of Modern Art. It is such a wonderful collection of works that are mostly presented in a very open and uncluttered way, and once again I found myself reveling in the looks of wonder in student faces. I left the students at Ca Pessaro and travelled to the airport to meet my brother Peter and his wife Sandra who were flying in from Australia.
Wednesday was a day given over to revisiting a number of churches that had previously been on our itinerary with the specific intention of talking about individual art pieces that, after our study of Art History, held a ‘different place’ in the story of Venice. It was a morning filled with a great deal of walking, and it was a foot weary group that I said goodbye to at 1.00pm. That afternoon they met Karen at the San Thoma vap stop and walked around the corner to a tiny campo hidden behind the Scuola San Rocco where they spent the afternoon painting.
On Thursday morning we rode across to San Salute and walked through the backstreets to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. What a treat it is to wander through such a rarified collection of Art work. To be in such close contact, and in such a personalized space, i.e. her home is a great experience and the students were visibly moved by their experience.
Friday arrived all wrapped up in a wonderfully mysterious fog that turned Venice into an amazing Monet painting and we decided to travel out to Burano and from there to Torcello for our watercolor class. We thought it would be less crowded than on the weekend, and arrived to a serene, and all but empty island. Karen set up the students close to Santa Maria Assunta and its wonderful, crumbling exterior, and all looked perfect. Soon after, however, two boat loads of elementary school children, all fitted out with either red or yellow baseball hats descend like a cloud of locusts, and the resulting mayhem was so complete that I admit to taking my brother and his wife and ‘escaping’ to Burano and its relative peace.
The students met Karen again on Saturday for their final day of watercolor, and Sunday has been a quiet day for us all.
Tuesday April 20th
I have waited to post this blog in the hope that I could pass along a travel update to parents and others that will be meeting returning students on the 25th and 26th. It is 7.00pm on Tuesday evening and I have no clear indication from anyone as to what will actually transpire on these travel dates. This morning Marco Polo airport opened on a ‘limited basis’ (and NO I don’t know what that means). I spent an hour with the travel agent that organized the tour for us, have called Ned Dunn at Flathead Travel, and the following is what I do know.
It looks as if the folk flying Delta on Sunday will be able to do so.
Lufthansa flew out of Frankfurt today, but did not fly the connecting leg out of Venice…and if that continues into the weekend it is unlikely that Erika, Caitlin and Jessica will be able to make it home on Monday
My hope is that this situation will reach some level of solution in the next few days, but if it persists into the weekend then I will begin a process that will bring them home on an alternate route. This is, of course, not an easy thing to accomplish because we are only a small part of a herd of people all trying to do the same thing.
I’m sorry that I am not more definitive than this, but at this juncture, neither is anyone else
The weather is wonderful, Venice shines in the sun, and we are all wearing smiles.
Ciao, ciao
John
John Rawlings, Director, FVCC Semester in Venice Program
Jessica’s blog
Oh my goodness! Our wonderful trip abroad is quickly coming to a close, it makes me so sad to think of having to leave this wonderful place and go back to the daily grind of what was my life. I have spent much of this week mentally preparing myself for leaving, and busily going to class, watercolor, and writing a paper for John. I have not had a lot of time to myself this past week because my days have been jam packed with visits to museums, churches, and random excursions all over Venice to learn how to water color. It has been quite the adventure, this water coloring course has. We work outside in plein air and just learn by trial and error, there is no inside work what so ever, and I find myself having to tune out all of the curious passersby. Just yesterday when we were on the tiny island of Torcello, I looked up from my painting and there was a sea of little yellow hats surrounding me and looking up at me in awe. They were cute little school children that kept inflating my ego with “oh bella!!..Brava, Brava!“. So cute! Water color I am finding is a very soothing activity that I could spend almost all day doing without even realizing I had. That in fact happened just the other day when we head out to Burano to paint the brightly colored buildings there. I started painting in the morning and by the time it was three in the afternoon and everyone was telling me it was time to leave, and I was very reluctant to pack up all of my things.
Erika’s Blog:
Life was thrown a bit off kilter for us in the San Basilo apartment. Kyle awoke at two in the morning to discover water streaming down his walls like a gently cascading waterfall and his lamp turned into a shower. He spent the rest of the night trying to catch the water as it slowly flooded his room. Caitlin and I woke up sometime in the morning to discover all the contents of Kyle’s room scattered about our living room, Kyle, haggard with blood-shot eyes, mopping his floor as the water steadily dripped from the ceiling. That afternoon, we packed up all of our things in an hour, saying goodbye to our home for the last three months forever, jumping on a taxi and dumping all of our things at a gorgeous new apartment in Sant Elena. Our new apartment is a palace compared our last, but it’s not home for me, and I’m still fairly unsettled just because I feel like I’m in between homes, having to leave my old one so fast and too early, but still have time before I return.
Because of all the stress and because our new place happens to have an oven, I made “stress pies” this week. They were some of the greatest pies I’ve ever made, maybe because I haven’t had one in almost four months, or maybe the level of stress increases the goodness of the pie. Whatever the case, they were simply delicious and were an amazing way of feeling more settled in this lovely little place at the far end of Venice. I sit up many nights now in this comfy green chair in the corner reading books from the amazing English selection left here by the owner. We swear that the owner has to be some kind of professor or something because he has a very high-end book selection, some serious reading. You can always tell by the books in someone’s home what kind of person they are, and this man is very intelligent to say the least. I’m just grateful that we have a place to stay as we count down the days until we must uproot ourselves and return home. It’s bizarre to think that my time here is coming to an end, but at the same time, as I look back over all I’ve done and seen and experienced, it sometimes feels like I’ve been here so much longer. Perhaps that’s why it’s difficult to even imagine myself at home anymore, just because this has become my home in so many ways. It’ll be different; I just wonder how I’m going to manage it.
Alyssa’s blog
Ciao, ciao! Another week has come to an end; we only have one more blog after this one! It’s gone by so fast! We’ve finished all of our classes. This week was full of painting: the cemetery island, my favorite campo, and the panoramic view of San Marco from San Giorgio. We also climbed the art history timeline into the 20th century. You’d be amazed at how much modern art is in Venice! I saw my first (and sometimes more than one of) Kandinsky, Chagall, Klee, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Chirico, and many other amazing pieces. These were held in the Museum of Modern Art inside Ca’Pesaro, and also within Peggy Guggenheim’s frozen collection. Her collection astounded me because she collected the pieces as they were produced in the era. She was on a wave of contemporary appreciation that is seldom pursued by anyone; today, and in generations past. Her collection (in New York she simply called it: Art of This Century) inspired so many people, and fueled the genre of Modern Art. Even with our classes over, most of us are all still finishing our project for art history. It’s really the perfect closing project to culminate all that we’ve learned about Venice, being her history, people (of today and centuries past), language, culture, and architecture; all reflected in art of this island that was once an empire. I hope to be able to find some Renaissance art enthusiasts in the valley. That and Italian speakers to carry on with my conversation skills! Honestly though, I have learned that I really love art history. I once thought the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was a confusing conglomeration of too many events. Now I can follow the pattern that is reflected through the art, and I can see the web formed by the apprenticeships, influence, and lineage of the artists. I am really fascinated by analyzing and dissecting the pieces because they are so full of symbolism. Because of the architecture class, I am now able to look at a building I know nothing about, and give you an approximate date of establishment. I can tell you which components represent that genre of architecture. That was what I was challenging myself with for the art history class. I wanted to be able to look at a piece I’ve never seen, and be able to approximate the year and authorship. I have been getting very close to this goal, and this project is one way to really compare and contrast the different painters of the Italian art timeline. A ways back, when John told me I was becoming a “Venetophile,” I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to be anything that ended in “phile.” Now, I’ve learned the understanding it takes to be able to reach such a position. You can swing the information with memorization, but the moment it clicks for you and you really get it, it’s the most amazing experience. I have had so many moments like that on this journey. Like when I realized I could converse with another person in their mother tongue, another language! I didn’t know what I was getting myself into by taking this art-filled, language-learning, pre-Brescia trip, but it has been the most amazing experience of my life. Plus, I’ve met all these interesting and beautiful people along the way! The five of us are already planning our future reunions.
Ciao di nuovo, ma non e’ ancora l’ultimo, (Ciao again, but it is not yet the last,)
Alyssa
Caitlin’s blog
Well yet again…where did the week go? This past week was full of painting and church viewing. We got to paint in Torcello on Friday, and that was really fun! There were people everywhere (especially small school-children) who came and watched all of us paint. I unfortunately got rather sick in the beginning of the week and am just now beginning to get better…I must have went through thousands of tissues to get to this point though. One of the most memorable moments of this week occurred on Monday evening though.
We all woke up early in the morning to the sound of dripping water in our apartment in San Basilio. I got annoyed with it and went back to sleep…I actually don’t know if Erika even woke up. Kyle’s room apparently had turned into a shower from water problems in the apartment above us. We woke up to our apartment owner in the house assessing the problems. Throughout the day our walls and ceilings proceeded to crack and sag. We were informed later that day that we had to vacate the house as soon as possible. Apparently our house wasn’t going to last much longer…so it was a good thing we got out of there. We know live in the “boonies” of Venice (over by John) in a very large and luxurious apartment. So we traded proximity to the city for a beautiful apartment…not too bad!
And on Thursday, the volcano in Iceland erupted. None of us thought much of it to begin with, but we found out just a few days ago that it really does have a huge impact. Almost every airline/plane in N Europe and N Italy is now closed. We had to cancel our trip to Rome because of that. We are now crossing our fingers and hoping that the flights will be back up by the time we leave next Monday, but the chances are small. Oh well…it won’t be too bad to be “stranded” in Venice for a little longer.
Kyle is on vacation with his parents…..He will return to help with the LAST blog next week.
Ca' Pesaro
Ca' Pesaro
Waiting for the 'vap' o n Fondamente Nuove in the fog
Mysterious Venice
More mystery
Across to Burano
Passing San Michele in the fog
The Faro on Murano
On the 'vap' to Burano
What were these three thinking!
sculpture in the old vineyard at Torcello
Burano
Burano
Kyle discovers he is a watercolorist
Burano
That chair again!
And again
Painting from San Giorgio
Painting in San Michele
In San Michele
Karen in San Michele
In San Michele
