Venice, the second weekend of September
Returning to Venice is like returning to a lover one cannot keep, yet cannot erase. You arrive knowing it will not last, that it cannot grow into a future, but still, the body remembers, the pulse quickens. A prolonged weekend, no more, yet thick with the same fever as June. I came not seeking answers, only the confirmation that longing is reason enough to return.
Palazzo Grimani opened its ribcage of marble to me again. Those rooms are not rooms but organs, resonant cavities where light and shadow perform their duet. Frescoes above me cracked with dignity, fragments of myth staring down in faded triumph. The air carried a mineral chill, laced faintly with the scent of damp plaster and the ghost of citrus left by some long-closed window; the walls seemed to exhale centuries of whispered devotion.
I brushed my hand along the balustrade, cool, veined, strangely human, as if to measure time in temperature. Grimani does not seduce; it absorbs. You leave with less than you entered, as though the walls themselves drink from your veins.
Then Fortuny. Always Fortuny. To step inside is to inhale another century whole. The fabrics do not hang, they hover, velvet turned into atmosphere, pleats breathing like the lungs of a sleeping deity. Dust gathers there with a kind of grace, golden in the slanting September light, transforming neglect into sacrament. A faint scent of wax and dried roses lingered in the air, mingling with the slow decay of textiles that had belonged to bodies. I stood before a window half-covered by textile, where the outside world dissolved into muted blue; it felt less like a museum than a chapel devoted to the fragility of beauty itself. Every time I go, I leave with the sense that I have been confessed, judged, and forgiven all at once.
And then Florian, the place I resist, too obvious, too ornamented, too busy embalming its own legend. But Venice enjoys trapping me in contradictions. So I found myself at one of its marble-topped tables, not alone. The orchestra played with mechanical grace, a piece too rehearsed to be sincere, yet still capable of piercing the air. The chandeliers trembled above as if they, too, overheard what was not meant to be said. I will not write about the meeting in detail. Let it remain in the shadows, half-glimpsed. But I will say this: sometimes a conversation is not about words, but about the rhythm between silences, about how long the eyes linger above the rim of a porcelain cup. Florian was not in a café that evening. It was a stage. And the performance, however fleeting, was ours alone.
September here is different from June. It tastes of ripe figs and bitter espresso, of sugar browning at vendor stalls and crushed grapes beginning their slow fermentation in the narrow courts.
The light is sharper now, delineating dust like constellations; shadows fall colder and truer. The air was tinged with the faint scent of endings. I wandered gardens where statues pretended to keep counsel, past walls furred with moss, over bridges that seemed suddenly tired of carrying us. Pine resin warmed in the sun, a resinous perfume that threaded its way through alleys and into the rooms where I paused, breath held, listening to the city’s softer sounds.
Venice forgave me again, in her peculiar way, not with words but with reflections: the quicksilver answer in a puddle, the lacquered door that returned me my own half-formed face, the sideways glance that might have been recognition. Forgiveness here is an aesthetic rather than a grace; it arrives in the gloss of water and the angle of a mirror, in things that look like closure but keep asking for one more look.
When I left, I carried no gift, no purchase, nothing tangible. Only the aftertaste: velvet dust in the lungs, marble cool against my fingertips, the ripeness of figs, and the quiet electricity of an unfinished sentence left at Florian. Enough to disturb sleep, enough to make me certain I will return again, despite myself.
Yours, once more, and not for the last,
t.
p.s.More photos from this trip can be seen here.
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