Ghosts of Gold
By Laura Jane Valenza
Florence, Italy
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“So we wear our rain boots to Venice on Friday,” announced
the professor, “in case of high water. We go anyway.”
!
High water? The professor’s voice morphed into that of the
Peanuts teacher and only the words “high” and “water” emerged
from the static. By “high water” she could not possibly be
referring to walking in floods of that liquid produced when two
Hydrogens and an Oxygen have a ménage à trois, could she?
Visions of my reoccurring nightmares flooded the classroom, and I
was drowning again in the dark waves the moon’s lure rolls out
from the depths of the sea. With two simple words, the dreams I
had been nurturing since Indiana Jones took me to Venice as a
four-year-old were washed right out the door.
When I was little, about four, my dad and I watched
Indiana Jones over and over again. My favorite film was the third
when he goes to Venice. The scene in Venice when Indie and Dr.
Elsa Schneider make love while the sounds of opera drift through
the windows stood out in my memory—though not for the reasons
you’d think. I had almost entirely forgotten the scene accept for
a few background details. My focus was behind Indie and Elsa—
on the floor-to-ceiling Byzantine-style windows draped in white,
gauzy curtains that framed a sun-soaked Venice. The cries of
opera drifted into the room from the canal. My four-year-old mind
tuned out the affair and got caught in a detail. The image of
those white, gauzy curtains, the open windows, and the sunny city
have become an emblem for me of what the ancient Greeks and
Romans called genius loci, the spirit of the place.
~
!
At age twenty, I sat at home watching classic movies with
my mom. We were watching Katherine Hepburn’s 1955 film
Summertime. In one scene, Hepburn falls into the melted turquoise
flowing through a Venetian canal. My mom leaned over and
commented, “You know, she got so sick from jumping into that
dirty water that she lost her hearing in one ear—”
!
…and cut. Here ended my fascination with filthy Venice.
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Take Two: High Water in my dreams the night before the
Venice field trip. I’m on the boardwalk and the aquamarine waves
are coming in bigger and faster every cycle. They aren’t the
glistening kind of aquamarine, but the black kind—only the
shadows of a cut gem. That deep, dark gray, and sometimes
black. These waves are almost touching me. They throw themselves
higher and closer like devout worshipers undulating on their
knees. They lift up and then throw their bodies harder and harder
onto the earth. I am on the verge of knowing what solid darkness
feels like. It is the ultimate symbol of unknown; the dark sea that
fills in the gaps of fading memories. Even when consciousness
returns, the dream will still be on me.
~
!
Come Friday morning, I awoke before dawn, pale and devoid
of enthusiasm. I dutifully pulled on my black rubber boots,
dubious of their ability to save me from the canals, and began my
solitary forty-minute march to the Florence train station. Gray
clouds dominated the sky, and clutching my Navy blue umbrella
like a rosary, I prayed for the end of the Italian rainy season.
I zigzagged through the riot of traffic in front of the train
station and ducked into the shadow of its overhang. Drifting
amidst the rush hour crowd, I spotted an acquaintance.
“Morning,” I said. “Where are you headed?”
“Hey. I just got in from Venice, and now I’m waiting for
my class to go on a field trip. Shit, we had a wild night.”
“I’m heading to Venice now…”
Before I left to find my own platform, she told me about
how she and her girlfriends had spent the night in Venice for
Carnival. A tempest had flooded the city, and their brains were
swamped in wine. I imagined the girls each with their own bottle
splashing through the rain and overflowing canal water in
darkness. She had spent the early morning on the cheapest train
back, a three hour ride, only to shake off her dripping coat in the
station and get on another train for class. Behind the glaze over
her eyes, the damp confetti of the night’s drama and trouble still
smoldered with an addictive allure. I backed away towards the
neon green pharmacy cross beneath which my own class had
gathered.
On the train, I kept my eyes peeled on the landscape
whose beauty was not dimmed by the ominous clouds. Sometimes,
I hated that landscape; it made me sick with insatiable lust for its
beauty. Because of its ocular nature, my love for it would remain
platonic like a visitor in a museum maintaining distance from the
art. As we traversed the Apennines, tunnels—perhaps mercifully—
blacked out my vision.
Venice, Italy
!
When we emerged into the Veneto, the landscape
transformed. For an American girl who had not left the Northeast
until college, a strange landscape emerged. Not a mountain was in
sight, and all around the land was flat. I kept waiting for the
edge of the world to appear where we would all dive off a
waterfall to our demise in the ocean of outer space. The gray
clouds were still keeping pace with our train.
!
I began breathing deeper, waiting for the flatness to surrender
to the lagoon, ready to see the gray clouds reflected in the dark
depths of water. I tried to push all of the negative thoughts out of
my head, but expecting a movie-set Venice seemed equally
unhealthy.
!
The ground ran away from the train in a blur and then there
was turquoise. Turquoise glittered everywhere. The clouds had fled
and a white sun shot down arrows of light in a way that someone
had once told me meant that the gods were happy. The lagoon
engulfed me into an ecstasy that made turquoise squeeze from my
very eyes. We sped down a single track across the lagoon towards
Venice.
!
Once in the city, we followed weaving paths, alleys, and
bridges along the edges of Venice’s turquoise veins, a reminder of
Byzantine blood shed by Venetian swords. The professor led us to
the San Marco campo and its basilica. The five-domed church, a
relic of deceased Byzantium, reminded me that while the sight
bound me to millions of strangers, it would be strange to loved
ones back home in the States. I was on my own, thousands of
miles from my family, and experiencing new places that they
could no longer share with me. I snapped some photographs for
them before we ducked into a narrow stone stairwell that was like
the black tunnels through the mountains between Venice and
Florence. When we emerged on the upper balconies of the
cathedral, the sun filtered through stained glass and caught on the
interior of the domed ceiling, which sparkled gold. The San Marco
Basilica was nicknamed Chiesa D’Oro, or Church of Gold. When
it seemed no one was looking, I turned toward the wall and
caressed the mosaicked dome.
!
We walked around the cathedral and exited onto the outer
balconies overlooking the square that belonged to a make-believe
world of movie sets and art studios. The sun caught on the
aquamarine lagoon to the left and shimmered off of the basilica
and its statues of Saint Mark’s winged lions. The professor
explained that during High Water, wood planks were laid out not
only in the campo but also inside the church so tourists could still
visit when the whole scene was flooded. The catacombs beneath
the church were permanently closed due to now permanent High
Water.
After I had taken all the quintessential photographs and was
back on the train to Florence, I realized my camera was broken
and none of my photographs had saved. The link between Venice
and Home was severed. I had known my experience would never
truly be shared with family in the States, but now even the way I
saw it in the camera lens could not be shown to them. I cried on
the phone, trying to explain to my father that the camera had held
the last vestiges of the Brigadoon that I might never see again.
I still have the deceased camera as a relic of my journeys.
The memories fade into ghosts of gold and turquoise—no more
real than the films and paintings. Before we left the balcony at
San Marco, the professor pointed out the famous four bronze
horses and the Roman tetrarch statues, relics of antiquity
decorating a soon-to-be relic of a time of low water. But these
are fake like much of exterior Italy is—the authentic sculptures
are indoors away from the elements and pollution, safe for now.
!
Four horses, four tetrarchs, four sides to a campo in Venice
or a piazza in Florence. Like the four-stomached cows that give
us the famed bistecca alla fiorentina, Florence, arguably, has four
hearts: Piazza di Duomo, Piazza della Reppublica, Piazza di San
Marco, and Piazza di Santa Croce. Now, if you please, follow me
back to Florence to its third heart over which a second Church of
San Marco presides. Unlike the Venetian splendor, this church is
more restrained, as is the Tuscan manner. Around 1440, Fra Beato
Angelico decorated each of the thirty-seven whitewashed cells of
the Dominican convent of San Marco with a tranquil fresco.
Florence, Italy
!
Walled in on four sides by the colonnade cloister and
courtyard, pimpled with Medici crests—the surveillance cameras of
their time—it is difficult not to notice the drab grass that does not
quite live up to the Tuscan grandeur prevalent in Florence. This
simplicity pervades the convent, the most ostentatious detail shines
in the ground crystal sprinkled over the wings of Gabriel in the
Annunciation fresco that welcomes us to the Dominican’s isolated
world. The fresco’s light source is the real-life window to its left
whose sunlight shimmers in the crystal pigment and shines on Fra
Angelico’s genius. Some historians speculate that this church will
soon take its own orders and cloister itself from the public
because the frescoes are cracking and bubbling off the walls due
to poor air control inside. Though the Duomo is always the
symbol of the Renaissance, it was the Classical texts in the
Dominican library at San Marco that unleashed the wisdom
necessary to ignite early modernity. !
Standing in the solitude of a cell, I wondered if the Holy
Ghost was enough company for the Dominican friars. The walls of
each cell do not meet the ceiling, the reasoning behind this,
according to the art historians, is to foster community, emphasis
on unity. Fra Angelico’s frescoes finish this work. Perhaps
loneliness necessitates art.
In 1966, Florence, like Venice, fell under the spell of High
Water. The floods of the Arno crept all the way to the Piazza di
San Marco. The scars can still be seen today. When I first
arrived, the shadows of water lines on buildings darkened my
path. Fra Angelico’s work was safe, but now the threat of
humidity and human breath may close it up anyway. Inside a cell,
I visually traced the telling line of a crack in the plaster. Then, I
took a deep breath and exhaled my good-bye.
~
!
Turquoise is a good luck charm until it changes color. Then
it foretells impending tragedy. I see Venice dark and stormy. First
the turquoise waters will rise like Byzantine soldiers relinquishing
an ages old surrender in favor of revenge. Then, the water will
lose its color and the charm will disappear, but by the time the
tones shift, the tragedy will already be upon us. These days
turquoise is easily faked, thereby muting its power. The stone
becomes loose like a mirage flowing before our eyes. Its meaning
becomes unclear because it has no more substance than an
illusion. In Italy, in Venice, it is nearly impossible to tell the
illusion from the truth: the four-winged horses, the four tetrarchs
caressed by the sun’s warm hands are not the true art—their
predecessors lay tucked away within the shadows of the basilica.
Someday, if Venice settles completely and the sea levels rise and
engulf it, a replica of the replicas will be built somewhere else as
another Italianate amusement park.
I imagined myself returning to this land years later, barred
from the Florentine frescoes of divine and Humanist wisdom—
those treasures too sacred and yet not sacred enough for
replication. If Venice sinks, it will be nothing more than a
catacomb for itself. I could see myself swimming through the
Venetian Basilica, touching the dome again and not feeling its
smoothness through my diver’s gloves. I could pet Saint Mark’s
winged lion of courage that could no longer fly over me. The
gold domes forever dimmed—for what use does the abyssal sea
have for sunlight and sparkle? It would suck the light into its
stomachs. The basilica would be like a History Channel special I
once saw on an ancient Japanese stepped pyramid Yonaguni
Monument that was discovered under the sea. You have to dive
into the strong current and hammerheads in order to see it. The
builders of the pyramid had carved a gigantic “face” into it, now
softened into little more than a mask with stomach-like pits for
eyes always staring hungrily towards the surface. I wondered if
the basilica would melt into a ghost of gold like the face
softening into the pyramid.
Venice is like an old house that is always settling—
snuggling its old bones into the earth and gently tucking itself in
under the rising Mediterranean blanket. Scientists have noticed that
the city also tilts eastward. I can’t help but wonder if it tilts
enough will it snap the way a sinking ship might?
I realize I was wrong to fear the sea; it’s not the enemy. I
am, we are. Driven beneath the ocean’s blanket of the unknown
like divers today looking for the face of man in Japanese waters,
we evade loneliness by searching for our collective self, neglected
once upon a time when the water got too high. But then again, I
like to believe in hope. In The Lorax, Dr. Seuss taught us as
children that there is always an “Unless”—that conditional happy
ending solely dependent on me and you.
The memories still ride in on wave after wave: the grand
canal looking as blue as the photographs, the gold domes, the
bridges and cityscape at sunset, Titian’s Ascension glowing red in
dim chapel lighting, the sun rays over the lagoon that must have
inspired the Ascension. They are images that come in blurry snap
shots like smeared Polaroids. Their common denominator is the
Venetian light. Still, all I see is that light filtered through gauzy
white curtains billowing in the breeze.
My perception of Venice originated in a film. In their paper
“The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A
Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Stephen Jay Gould and
Richard C. Lewontin say by simply considering the present
purpose of an adaptation, we only see a sliver of that quality’s
history. They describe the ornamentation of one of San Marco’s
spandrels, the triangular spaces between the arches forming the
domes—a sort of architectural lacuna. In the spandrel, Lewontin
and Gould describe an allegory of the river pours water over the
church. The spandrels represent the significance of original
structural necessitation over aesthetic design, according to the
researchers. My ghosts of gold and turquoise are nothing more
than my adaptation of perception. But even if we return in time
to before my memory, before the camera, to my very eyes
beholding Venice before me, and before that to pictures and films,
we will find, in a Zen way, that even original perception provides
us with a faulty origin. Some greater essence lies beyond that.
Before there was the memory, before there was the camera, before
there was the eye, there was the essence of a place colliding with
the essence of me. But what originally necessitated it? A broken
camera, beauty, or memory itself. Then I remember the solitude of
my other San Marco. Perhaps loneliness necessitates memory.
!
After discussing the stories of Renaissance artists who
travelled great distances to view a work and once home again
recreated it perfectly from memory, my friend asked, “Is our
memory getting worse today?”
Perhaps our will to use it is. This essay performs the same
function as the artist’s copy: a regurgitation of beauty in an
infinite struggle to dissolve into our environs. The alchemy of
memory forever tries to turn my ghosts of gold into gold. I write
about my two San Marcos in hopes of finding my own genius
loci—some sort of memory capsule belonging only to me. I must
keep writing in order to remember, in order to see the beauty
again. The funny thing is that each word I write not only brings
my reader closer to what only I could have seen, but it also shifts
my own perception of memory. The more I write and re-write, the
further I get from the truth. Sometimes, I do not even recognize
the gold mosaics.
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