October | 2018 | Michael S. Moore

Saturday 29th September, our second-to-last day, started off

with a vaporetto to S. Zaccaria,

espresso in a narrow alley, a look at the Arsenale’s looted leones

before wandering small streets to

eventually locate the Scuola Dalmata dei Ss. Giorgio e Trifone with its numerous Carpaccios

then, seemingly lost

[Rick actually had a Plan no one suspected],

wandered ever deeper ever hungrier until our noses led to

the discovery of Osteria alla Staffa [next door L found a model boatmaker which we didn’t have much time to peruse as they were about to close and all were eager to eat at alla Staffa].

We bought the hand-carved hand-painted nave in the window and settled for fresh porcini ravioli, the correct choice. Lunch

was followed by a short walk to Campo Santi Marco e Paolo for a look at a major renaissance equestrian statue, Bartolomeo Colleoni astride his massive bronze horse which, like many of the era, replicated the stance of the Roman horses stolen from Constantinople by the Venetians, stolen from Venice by Napoleon and subsequently restored to Venice where replicas now reside above San Marco’s loggia while the originals are sheltered within. Bartolomeo had specified his statue be prominently located over in Piazza San Marco but the Council thought

differently, splitting hairs to posthumously install it on another, the Campo Santi Marco e Paolo in front of the Grande Scuola di San Marco instead, which coincidentally once housed several of the Tintorettos seen earlier in the week. While there proximity [and Rick] drew us inside the neighboring basilica wherein was found more art than could be reasonably absorbed of an afternoon; Veroneses, Bellinis, bas-reliefs, statuary and vast vaults of architectural extravagance generally. Bursting out into the afternoon sun afterwards

there remained one – just one! – last little chiesa, Santa Maria dei Miracoli, right around the corner, modest in size, all in marble with wonderful acoustics and exposed – this unusual – on all sides. We then struggled through the most touristy densely packed streets yet ever, over

Saturday’s massed Rialto Bridge [none of it shown – too crowded] to the relative calm

of S. Polo and home, quite spent. Evening saw a final foray to Cannareggio, the Osteria da Rioba, where Linda’s crab ravioli disappointed but I had wonderful mackerel with, afterwards,

a zibbibo in celebration of Sicily. Sunday, though Venice’s tourists were overlaid

with weekending Italians, we returned to densely packed San Marco’s Palazzo Ducale

for Tintoretto, the Final Installment, his late works grouped thematically [for the most part]. The exhibition was Inexplicably nicely uncrowded and quite spectacular, notable [among much else]

for the early and ultimate self-portraits which bracketed it. The atypically complicated composition of “Susannah and the Elders” reminded me of the different ways we look at paintings; Rick and Sandra initially through story and history while L. and I focus firstly on execution and composition, the ins and outs of “Susannah” being particularly engaging. Also revelatory was a gallery of consummately professional portraiture,

a perfectly sized small oil of the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo and of course too many to mention here, many more. Afterwards L. and I took Rick’s recommendation that we experience the Sala Grande, but having neglected to mention how one might circumvent the nightmarish one-way

path among shuffling hordes of gaping tourists through the dungeons resulted in Linda experiencing a panic attack, no great fun. Interesting, though, how many more chose to endure that claustrophobia while eschewing Tintoretto. We eventually escaped, fled past the crocodile-on-a-pillar to the S. Marco vaporetto, crossed the great water and searched for food, not

entirely brilliantly settling for a hotel named after a German mountaineer, where they initially

frightened us with packaged crackers, packaged breadsticks and tuna spread on stale crostini [with a toothpick?]…but my bream, fresh caught and nicely grilled, was fine. Rick and Sandra walked home while we, although momentarily stuck behind loitering smoking teens,

made our way to the Guggenheim, finding in Modern Art a Certain Simple Solace after days of Saints in Torment who definitively put the more contemporary works in an interesting perspective.

[above, Joel Shapiro, reflective; below a surprising Kandinsky

…and glass thingies from Peggy’s cute girlfriend] She always had quite an eye; her Ernsts were outstanding, her history with Max notorious.

The collections definitely bespeak a uniquely catholic sensibility and consistency of quality; surprises, surrealists, Miró, Pollock. One of the temporary exhibition spaces displayed an architectural model complete with miniatures of many things we’d seen in the house, a documentation of her curation of the collection for the 1948 Venice Biennale [that must have been QUITE the postwar event], which was most illuminating…not to mention the light-filled palazzo. Nonetheless, were I staying in Venice lengthily I think I’d prefer a room [on the canal, of course] more like the one in which we’d spent the previous week…

with the addition of something like this;

Just me, though.

Our last dinner was by fortuitous chance at Osteria al Vecio Forno, a pleasant Neapolitan-owned establishment near home where Linda and Rick had calamari and fritto misto respectively, presented street-style in paper cones, while I, in another Avoidance of Pasta, a non-disappointing chicken piccata, after which we retired to the sala grande

for prosecco in Anticipation of The End…Monday. In the morning, lightly raining, we breakfasted one last time in the dining room, closed up, schlepped to S.Toma for a