Listening

I know it probably isn't unusual for a visitor to try to capture the essence of this peculiar cluster of islands, to attempt to imprint its magic via photos, maybe paintings, descriptive prose... because afterwards you want to revisit Venice's essence---not precisely, because it is not a place of straight avenues and perfectly vertical buildings with predictably aligned windows. What I want to convey, after these odd few sentences, is the effervescence of it, the mood that it inspires somewhere inside your conscious mind. Of course visual captures help (I desperately want my eventual video mementoes to be that good), and poetic phrases once you seize them as they bubble up. But what I want to convey is that this is a place of mood, and if you miss that dimension, then, well, maybe this could never be your own happy place. Your psyche may be better designed for regal Rome, or arty Florence, or passionate Sicily. So. Somehow or other, I became convinced that this was so, that romantic Venezia was unique in its soul (that dimension of personality that is simply impossible to capture). You cannot simply exchange any amount of Euros for a little flask of Venetian soul: something to put into your suitcase as you prepare to return home.

But of course you have to try. Which brings us to Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), baroque composer, violinist, firmly affixed among that same class of music movers and shakers as Bach, Handel, Mozart. And he was Venetian. To explain: I wanted to hear the place as well as see it, to have its melodies wafting through my unconscious as I wandered among old canal-thoroughfares and water filled alleyways. As I caught the scent of sloshing seawater with too much algae in it. Tried to ignore the thousands of bermuda-shorts clad (irreverent) gawkers.

There was a string concert performance of Vivaldi compositions, that first night we wereb in the city, at La Pieta church just beyond Piazza San Marco. Good, good, let's walk there. Can't be that far; this is an island for goodness sake. Except it was that far (my smart watch insisted we trudged nearly 14,000 steps that evening, one-way. To some no-longer-worshipped-in church from V's baroque time frame. Um, we took a vaporetto (water bus) ride back here.

But here's the thing, the music was live, and performed in the setting it was designed for. The innate fussiness of studio recording simply lacks the depth of personality rendered by these six violinists and cellist and bassist---with perfect continuo via the harpsichordist, in that vast and probably not accoustically tuned interior. We heard The Four Seasons like never before and maybe never again. We felt its passion, gentle and fun and calm and sprightly all at once. I left kinda grinning inside, not I think unlike Dr Seuss' Horton after the egg advenure: "And they sent him home happy, one hundred percent." They don't want you to record the music, nor take videos with audio track, in that place. Which I nearly obeyed, with just these moments to share with friends who would read and wonder about it all. Sublime? Yes, it was that good.