The alarm sounded at breakfast. All of the guests in the dining area looked at each other, breaking the myopic gaze of anonymity that we self-impose in shared public spaces.
"It's the flooding. What else can it be?" a young man said directly to me, as if we had got to know each other each morning in our adjacent tables. The woman who guarded the cappuccino machine, ensuring no guest pushed the single button that made a cappuccino, didn’t flinch at the sound. She knew her post would extend as visitors stayed inside.
The deciding factor for Vanesa was the rain. She didn’t want to repeat the puddles and water drops on her glasses from yesterday, so she ascended to our room to wait out the forecasted afternoon sunlight. I felt adversely. In the weeks before our flight here, Venice had been under a historically unusual high water. All of the newspapers were showing tourists wading up to their wastes through water. Vanesa had wondered if we shouldn’t cancel our trip; but for me, with my interest in urban design interfacing with climate, this was a perfect opportunity to capture footage of the slow erosion of normality on dry land.
FIrst, I ventured out and see if I could collect some algae from the canals, using a dirty pillowcase I sequestered from housekeeping and weighted with a brick that I had found some days before. A rubber band from a tree to bound my pole to my net.
The water looked solidly blue-green, and the acqua alta had brought the water onto the ruga of Dorsoduro up to about 3 inches in most places. In searching for a dry path off the island, I was playing a little memorization game of where I could go and how to return. I navigated to a relatively unpopulated ramo and attempted my contraption. A few tourists watched me with confusion and horror: Is that guy collecting wastewater from the canals?But the blue-green liquid was elusive. A wet-dry vac filter would have been perfect. A project for another time.
I returned for my camera and shot a few static scenes of the water, tourist negotiating the tide and waves crashing onto the island. If you look closely at the edge of fondamenta, you can see the layers of the marble, sometimes only a few centimeters thick, to lift the city against the rising tide.
By 10 another alarm sounded and the water had retreated. The masengo still looked and were wet, and the arch in the center appeared more exaggerated, elevated. We left the hotel and meandered through the streets with a tentative idea of having a coffee and/or finding more/better gifts.
At Caffe Brasilia I overheard a couple talking with a recent expat, assuring her that she would be speaking Italian within two months, and then coached her on a few expressions to accompany her anecdote about dancing with a gentleman the evening before. As people passed the table, the couple greeted them. Had we found a local cafe where actual Venetians came?
I sketched the street while Vanesa had a glass of wine. In the seeing I found the ages and ages that had layered story after story of the casa fondaco’s architectural "improvement." Television antennae; informal roof-decks. The notion of history, in reference to place, is the ambiguous allusion to this layering. In buildings you can read the shift of aesthetics paradigms, but also the change in municipal codes (or absence of them!), the appreciation of neighborhood identity, when areas are collectively or simultaneously created, and even the intention of individuals to respond to everyday conditions of light, rain, wind, decoration, luxury, or poverty–everything we as living humans compromise in the utterance of "life." At times even death is visible. The architecture is a material manifestation of history. A man-made geological formation. "History" is not just architectural, of course, but having an entrance into the historical is useful if one wants to transcend the "10 Places to Visit in Insert City" list.
I visited the “Machines of da Vinci” exhibition at Chiesa di Santa Barnaba. After paying the 8€ and being directed through the shoddily hung black curtain that was the entrance, I already knew that I had been had. The exhibition was essentially wooden maquettes of the drawings of the machines of Leonardo with an explanation of the importance of the technology, accompanied with a pixelated image of the page of his notebook in which one could see the drawing. What was disappointing was that no actual works were shown. Being in Italy, I had expected more, at least antiquated models! It was an educational rather than cultural exhibition, and the production of the exhibition (excluding the models which were pretty well produced) looked cheap, as if the church was trying to raise money for its physical repair.
Aside from the presentation of the works, the exhibition emphasized the military application of his designs and the centrality of the problems of friction and gravity he sought to solve. The most interesting work was Leonardo's bicycle. Unlike the rest of the miniature models that fit on a plinth, the bicycle was the size. The explanatory text described how two sheets of paper that had been glued together for centuries were recently separated and the restorers had found the design of a gear-chain bicycle. Since several other models in the exhibition have chains or gears, it didn't seem completely unlikely. Still, how come I had never heard Leonardo invented the bicycle?
The story of the Leonardo bicycle is more complicated than just the engineering. According to several source, this drawing was a forgery, created by Italian monks who were restoring Leonardo's Atlanticus Codex in the 1970s. But the drawing was not the only fraudulent construction. Two narratives hinge on this drawing: The first is the ongoing dispute of which country can claim one of its citizens as the inventor of the bicycle. If Leonardo had produced these drawings, the Italians would claim credit for one of the greatest human transportation devices. Most historians believe that prize goes to Germany, whose civil servant, Karl von Drais, at the University of Heidelberg made a crude drawing of a man on a bicycle with no pedals in 1818.[1] This fits since bicycles were not in use until the 19th Century.
The other narrative at stake in veracity of the drawing is Leonardo’s status as genius, or more subtly, what a genius does and doesn't draw. According to a historian who had examined the Atlanticus Codex prior to its restoration, there was no bicycle on those glued together pages, only a primitive drawings of penes. The supposition had been that the penes were drawn by a disciple of Leonardo, since no serious genius would doodle a penis, moreover multiple penes. But when the monks were restoring the papers and found the penes, they made the testicles into bicycle wheels, and the shafts into the bike frame.[2]
The battle for the bicycle and the status of Leonardo doesn't end with this exhibition, or academic disputes of authenticity. 2019 would be the 500 year anniversary of his death in France, and the Louvre was planning a large exhibition, which included many works borrowed from around the world, including Uffizi. The right-leaning Italian government detests the idea that the French exhibition will not only overshadow their own, but make any competing exhibition impossible. The fact that the Louvre possesses more paintings by Leonardo than any other museum in the world, seems to nullify the nationalist frustration of Italy. [3] But had the restorers not erased the penes, the Italians could have really competed with a show called, “Leonardo’s Hard Ons.” That would have been a crowd pleaser. And why stop at Leonardo? How about, “500 Years of Genius Penes,” and get Picasso in there?
In the evening we continued our tour for food and drinks around Venice, stopping at several bars with varying quantities of tourists, pretension, and youth. All Arco, which closed at 14, was the busiest and probably the best food. At Chet Bar, I directly asked the bartender if Venice is thought to have the worst food in Italy. He agreed without hesitation. As a city populated by students, 50,000 inhabitants, and perpetual tourists, he framed the culinary achievement as inconsequential for the survival of a business. We closed the evening with a drink at Corner Bar, laden with Wake Forest stickers. It had a better Negroni than Chet Bar, and it was twice the size. An unleashed dogs begged for our basket of chips, and I happily fed him while I drew penes in my notebook.
