Vespa Tunes XIII: Venezia, Francesco Guccini, 1981

All photographs taken by me in Venice in June 2020

In early June of twenty-twenty, almost exactly three years ago, and for the first time since that March, movement between Italian regions reopened. I had the great fortune to have a generous friend with an empty apartment (and super fast broadband) in Venice, and on 9 June 2020 Massimo and I went on the Frecciarossa to La Serenissima and had it almost entirely to ourselves. The five or so weeks, off and on, I subsequently spent exploring, and preparing and giving my online talks, between that summer and the following spring was one of the most notable silver linings of a very cloudy period.

As I walked and walked, often in elaborate and unintentional loops, I repeatedly stumbled across the echoes of my very first visit on a week-long school trip. It was 1993, I was in the Lower Sixth, and the previous year the Maastricht Treaty had established “every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the [European] Union”. I had no idea then how important both the trip and the treaty would be to me.

The Venice trip was really for girls studying Art History and I was then doing A-levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics, and Chemistry but I asked if I could go anyway. It turned out to be one of the revolutionary experiences of my adolescence.

Sixteen and shy, I remember successfully ordering a piccola Coca Cola at a bar near the station and feeling the world full of infinite possibility; the Scuola di San Rocco, Titian’s Madonna of the Frari, and the astonishing sight of the mosaics on a day in Ravenna; sitting on church steps on a balmy October evening, sufficiently out of context that the rigid friend groups of my brittle girls’ school coalesced offering a glimpse of adulthood.

At the end of the week the coach from the airport deposited us back at school and I nervously waited to say thank you to the soignée History of Art mistress who had organised it all with such aplomb. My mother imbued in me the importance of thanking teachers after trips which ate into their school holidays and required much organising (I now, of course, know exactly how much), but I had never meant it so much. Earnest and awkward I proffered my thanks, little knowing how important that week in Venice had been.

In 1981 Francesco Guccini, a Modenese singer-songwriter now in his early eighties, released an album called Metropolis which among songs dedicated to Byzantium, Milan, and Bologna includes a melancholic ode to Venice. I find it has echoes of the pamphlets printed of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto and hurled from the campanile of San Marco in 1909.

We repudiate the ancient Venice extenuated by morbid secular voluptuousness, though we have loved it long and possessed it in the anguish of a great delightful dream. […] Burn the gondolas, those rocking chairs for fools and erect up to the sky the rigid geometry of large metallic bridges and factories with waving hair of smoke, abolish everywhere the languishing curves of old architecture! May the dazzling reign of divine Electrical Light at last free Venice from the venal moonlight of her furnished room”

Manifesto of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1909.

The eccentric translation of the pamphlet is theirs, that of Guccini’s song below is mine.

Venezia che muore, Venezia appoggiata sul mare

La dolce ossessione degli ultimi suoi giorni tristi

Venezia, la vende ai turisti

Che cercano in mezzo alla gente, l'Europa o l'oriente

Che guardano alzarsi alla sera, il fumo o la rabbia di Porto Marghera

Venice is dying, Venice resting on the sea

Venice sells the sweet obsession

of her last sad days to tourists

Who look for Europe and the East in the midst of the crowds

Who see the smoke and the rage of the port of Marghera rise in the evening

Stefania era bella, Stefania non stava mai male

Ma è morta di parto gridando, in un letto sudato, d'un grande ospedale

Aveva vent'anni, un marito e l'anello nel dito

Mi han detto confusi i parenti che quasi il respiro

Inciampava nei denti

Stefania was beautiful, Stefania was never ill

But she died screaming in childbirth, in the sweat-soaked bed of a big hospital

She was twenty, with a husband and a ring on her finger

Relatives told me that it was as if her breath couldn’t get through her teeth.

Venezia è un albergo, San Marco è senz'altro anche il nome di una pizzeria

La gondola costa, la gondola è solo un bel giro di giostra

Stefania d'estate, giocava con me nelle vuote domeniche d'ozio

Mia madre parlava, sua madre vendeva Venezia in negozio

Venezia è anche un sogno, di quelli che puoi comperare

Però non ti puoi risvegliare con l'acqua alla gola

E un dolore a livello del mare

Venice is a hotel, San Marco is undoubtedly also the name of a pizzeria

The gondola is expensive, the gondola is just a lovely fairground ride

In the summer Stefania played with me in empty idle Sundays

My mother talked, her mother sold Venice in the shop

Venice is also a dream, one of those you can buy

But you can’t wake up with water up to your neck

And a pain at sea level.

Il Doge ha cambiato di casa e per mille finestre

C'è solo il vagito di un bimbo che è nato, c'è solo la sirena di Mestre

Stefania affondando, Stefania ha lasciato qualcosa

Novella 2000 e una rosa sul suo comodino

Stefania ha lasciato un bambino

Non so se ai parenti gli ha fatto davvero del male

Vederla morire ammazzata, morire da sola, in un grande ospedale

The Doge has moved house and among the thousand windows

There’s just the cry of a newborn baby, there’s just the siren of Mestre

While she went under Stefania left something behind

Novella 2000 [a women’s magazine] and a rose on her bedside table

Stefania left a baby behind

I don’t know how much it really hurt her family

To see her killed, dying alone, in a big hospital

Venezia è un imbroglio, che riempie la testa soltanto di fatalità

Del resto del mondo non sai più una sega

Venezia è la gente che se ne frega

Stefania è un bambino

Comprare o smerciare Venezia sarà il suo destino

Può darsi che un giorno saremo contenti

Di esserne solo lontani parenti

Venice is a scam, which fills your head with cruel destiny

You don’t know a damn thing about the rest of the world

Venice is people who don’t care

Stefania is a baby boy

Buying and selling Venice will be his destiny

Perhaps one day we’ll be happy

Just to be distant relatives.