Long life
A ghost Upon the sands
Nigel Nicolson
DVenice esmond MacCarthy used to say that a man should keep in reserve one place, easily accessible and of outstanding beauty, Which he will visit only in his old age. He Chose Venice. He went there for the first time when he was over 70. His astonish- ment was triplicated by his long abstinence. My future treat will be Bruges, but I wish
I had followed MacCarthy's example. The first impact of a place is the one that counts, and the first impact of Venice on me was so bizarre that it was wasted. In the last month of the war the New Zealanders bypassed it in their race for Trieste, and it was open to anyone to liberate it. I was by no means the first to reach the city that day, but with a few others slid across the lagoon to land at the Piazzetta. There was rio great rejoicing among the population: indeed the place looked desolate. We motored slowly up the Grand Canal, look- ing out more for snipers than architecture. It seemed shabby. My second visit was scarcely more auspi- cious than the first. I was there by mistake, on my honeymoon. My car ran into a farm- tractor south of Verona, smashing both and nearly blinding my young wife. We convalesced in Venice, wondering how soon we could get home. Then we spotted a cruise-liner berthed in the harbour, and returned in her to Southampton. Once again the experience was flattened by its incongruity.
So the real Venice was still to be discov- ered, and the chance came years later when John Julius Norwich, 'the greatest living non-Venetian Venetian', led a group of us by night round the back streets from one painted campo to another, flinging explana- tions over his shoulder from the crests of little bridges. It was then that I began to understand the extraordinary phenomenon of a city that had emerged out of a swamp to become the most sumptuous in Europe and set a pattern of urban living that has never been imitated or excelled, a place Where the artists were more important even than the Doge. Now I'm back there to join the 70th- birthday party of an English friend whose favourite city it is. I have been wandering around it alone. Venice demands company in the evening, freedom all day — freedom from the necessity to exclaim, consult, offer and receive information, the freedom to dart on impulse into this church, jump on to that vaporetto, to linger, to sit rumina- tively over a chocolate ice watching the light flicker off the water to the undersides of bridges. If I were a Venetian I might resent the tourists and ask why I should be denied the conveniences of a sensible city so that they can enjoy its quaintness, 'a ghost upon the sands of the sea', as Ruskin called it, 'so Weak, so quiet, so bereft of all but her love- liness.' Well, not quite. The hotels and restaurants are marvellous, and the canals no longer stink. As a Venetian, however, I would be tempted to leave. Perhaps that would be the best. Like Bath, Venice is a place to visit once every five years, not to live m, and to think about in absence, to imagine its shimmering luminosity, the curve of palaces each side of the Grand Canal, San Giorgio apparently floating on a raft, and the Piazza San Marco receiving from the rising tide its matutinal wash.
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