Venice Imagined

        Never having been to Venice, I nevertheless have a vivid picture of what I imagine the city to be. Having read Cornelia Funk’s The Thief Lord as a child and having read Martin and Romano’s Venice Reconsidered more recently, my main perception of Venice is of a city in which nothing is as it seems. The Thief Lord conjures a mystic and magical city in which foreigners abound and characters hide behind literal and figurative masks. The buildings are beautiful and majestic, but old and full of hiding places. There is a sort of fog, a mask over the city, that lets one disappear into the shadows. It seems that every corner presents a new theatrical experience, and one never knows what is true and what is a façade in Venice. Full of exotic people and artwork, characterized by elaborate Gothic edifices and classic Renaissance structures, Venice seems a city perfect for an observer; it seems all to easy for a plain traveler to become unnoticeable in the extravagant crowds of the piazzas and merely take in the experience of Venice.

      More than just being unnoticeable to others, it also seems that there is the exciting, but unnerving, possibility of losing oneself in Venice. As Venice Reconsidered points out, Venetian history is malleable and has changed over the years to fit the current image that the inhabitants want to adopt. In traveling to a place without a firm history, does one’s own history become transformable? As Venice famously forces travelers to lose sense of their physical location among the narrow and winding streets, does it also cause visitors to rethink the winding trajectory of their own lives? In my romanticized vision of Venice, it is a city that allows visitors to become whoever they wish at that point in time. The city also seems like the ideal place to step back from personal experiences and reevaluate life from a novel, enlightening, and somewhat removed perspective. As De Botton writes in The Art of Travel, “we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.”

    As arrival in Venice draws near, I am increasingly excited for the discoveries that I will make in the city. In The Art of Travel, De Botton presents two scenarios: the imagined experience is far superior and more poignant than the actual crude action of travel or, conversely, the traveler replaces fantastical images of a foreign place with more accurate, yet just as thrilling experiences of that place. I certainly hope that I will experience the second. In my experience, the actual travel contains an immeasurable amount of details that cannot be imaged and is therefore a more intense and gratifying experience. In revisiting Venice, I hope to discover aspects of the city I that have never considered and, in doing so, replace “an absurdly idealized image with a more realistic but nevertheless still profoundly admiring one.”