ASSIGNATIONS

"There have perhaps been no more than three million
true Venetians in all the history of the place:
and this grand insularity,
this sense of queerness and crookedness
has preserved the Venetian character uncannily,
as though it was pickled like a rare intestine
or mummified in lotions."

- Jan Morris

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"Whether for good or ill, they are always
up to something together."

- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Venetian intelligence was directed solely to the
acquisition of the most difficult of all knowledge,
knowledge of one's self."

- Pompeo Molmenti

Images: Brian Sibley & David Weeks © 2007/8

For more Venice imagery, visit my website to view the album Venice Observed and then follow the links at the foot of that page to three further albums of photographs.

VENETIAN ENCOUNTERS

It is, as the cliché runs, a Small World...

On Christmas Eve, we were walking along a street in Venice, late at night, when we were accosted by an Italian couple who said to David, "Excuse us, but we met on Kalymnos in August: you performed magic for us at the Artistico taverna in Emporios and your friend, here, used to sit under the trees reading..."

Now, apart from the extraordinary fact that they identified us by the light of the shop windows of Prada and Fendi when we were all muffled up against the cold in coats and scarves and hats and yet when we last met - in a remote corner of a tiny Greek island - we were all in shorts and T-shirts, BUT they live in Milan and come to Venice every year - for one night only - to attend the Christmas Eve Mass in San Marco... And yet we happen to meet: what are the odds...?

Of course, Venice is - and always has been - a city of encounters...

Whilst tourists - being intent on seeing the sites - tend not to see the residents (who, in turn, do their best to ignore the tourists), there are places where their worlds, inevitably, coincide...

People meet in bars and cafes in campos and on bridges. They stop to talk: their voices ricocheting off ancient walls and mingling with the lap and slap of water in the canals, the chitter-chatter of heels on flag-stones, the murmuring of pigeons and the accordion-accompanied serenading of gondoliers...







Images: Brian Sibley & David Weeks © 2007/8

For more Venice imagery, visit my website to view the album Venice Observed and then follow the links at the foot of that page to three further albums of photographs.