Summer Shorts 43 – Venice, icon of longevity

“Venice – mirror on the world: a source of inspiration and a microcosm of many of the most important global challenges.” 

Jane Da Mosto, Co-founder – We Are Here Venice at the Osella D’Oro 2017

As in Venice itself, meandering while you read, unexpectedly you arrive with either a supportive example of your vision or a new variation on your previous impressions. Reading The Venice Variations by Sophia Psarra brought back memories of certain quiet moments I have experienced in Venice, while with another flip of the page, I was taken instantly to other familiar places entirely out of the blue. Reading is traveling, and I am a gullible traveler, somewhat a Venetian flâneur.

With a five hundred year history, one visual variation of Venice featured in Psarra’s book is the birds’ eye view map Venetie MD by Jacopo de’Barbari. One of a limited set of prints of the woodcut, which I have explored so to speak, is in the British Museum in London, Room 90a to be exact. So there I mind traveled. Worthy of a linger Room 90a is one of those specific sanctuary locations in London with a great collection of prints and drawings that will take you on some fantastical journeys.

Back to The Venice Variations, in the chapter titled Crafting architectural space, Psarra focuses on the 1964 architectural design of the Le Corbusier Venice Hospital. What is amazing and sad about this story is that the hospital was never built. What is visionary about it, as Psarra points out, is that “Le Corbusier described Venice as a cardiac system…intersecting but also separating the waterways from the pedestrian routes.”

Coincidentally, on my last Venice visitation, I took a slow walk through the grounds of the Ospedale SS Giovanni e Paolo on my way for a morning at the fantastic complex of Scuola Grande di San Marco. Neither of these interconnected locations would be on most people’s top ten list of places to see in Venice.

In the chapter on the Le Corbusier hospital, only in our imagination now, I suddenly landed in Sir John Soane’s Museum Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. If there ever truly was a captivating place to disappear quietly in London, this would be it for me. Another unexpected detour, Psarra’s drawings added new dimensions to my own countless submersions of Soane’s home.

As I wind down these summer shorts literary travels, my meandering finally took me to a new website destination We Are Here Venice. Describing itself as a think tank and activist platform, I found myself at one with its narrative as crafted by a collaborative of universities, businesses, cultural and public institutions not only from Venice, but also from other parts of the world.

One of the group’s statements took me full circle back to Salvatore Settis, in If Venice Dies where he sees Venice as “a laboratory of what fate has in store for the cities of the future.” As if an echo in We Are Here Venice you hear – “Venice’s singular circumstances offer huge potential as a laboratory for exploring innovative approaches to community resiliency.”

Community resiliency.

Certainly the urban call in our COVID world.