As some of you know, I haven’t been too well this year so it was a great idea to spend two weeks in Venice this summer. I got back a couple of weeks ago and, even though I can’t report a miracle, I feel that I’ve been for a cure.

I was staying in a rented apartment on the Lido, the island that faces the Adriatic on one side and the Venetian lagoon on the other, ten minutes away from San Mark’s Square by the Vaparetto water bus. It was home from home and after two weeks I was beginning to feel that it actually was home.

It didn’t take long to get into a new routine and a new rhythm. It’s strange how quickly I can adapt to other people’s decor. Especially as there was a large wrap round balcony where life could carry on almost entirely alfresco.

Rest was the name of the game and I spent a fair amount of time reading while lapping up the Italian sun. Even though I was in one of the most beautiful cities in the World, there was something enjoyably decadent about spending time up here in my own private zone.

It was the perfect space for my morning kungfu practice which soon became a habit.

Chinese martial arts demand that you develop a sense of space and, quite quickly, it became my space.

Up there above the little town, life caried on beneath me and I wasn’t at all embarrassed being watched by the man installing the air-conditioning next door.

It was relaxing doing my exercises while the people of the Lido went about their morning routine.

Being high up but near to water felt very Zen and I’m convinced that this ritual built a connection between me and my surroundings.

As with all the other Venetian islands, everything has to get here by water and there was always something interesting to watch down there on the canal.

Where there’s water, there is always something to watch – the light itself is drama enough.

My view was still interesting at night with little boats about their business ferrying party-goers to and from the small outdoor bar across the road.

There was a bar next-door to my apartment too and it was one of life’s essentials to make it down there for coffee every morning. I particularly liked the fact that it was frequented by Lido residents and not just holiday visitors like myself.

The Lido is more “normal” than the rest of Venice. The houses are mostly late Nineteenth or early Twentieth Century and even though motor vehicles have to be transported here by ferry, some people actually do drive cars or, more commonly, travel by bicycle. If I lived here permanently, I’m not sure that I would bother with a car. The Lido is still very tranquil and reminiscent of the days before motorcars changed the environment. For centuries this island has been where Venetians go when the city gets hot and humid.

The art nouveau style houses are wonderful – they lack that rotting-around-you look of Venice’s much older buildings. They are little Italian palaces with all mod cons.

I envied those gardens with their palm trees and scented hedges and wondered why anyone ever bothers to grow geraniums if they don’t have an Italian balcony.

The Lido is green and decidedly leafy so a gentle stroll down the avenue to the sea is enjoyably shady.

As with most holidays I have been on, there was a house for sale that would have been the perfect fulfilment of my vacation daydreams. Oh what joy to have responsibility for that rambling Italian garden.

Five minutes walk from the apartment was the public beach with its flights of engineering fancy, raised walkways and an open air night club for when the season gets going in July.

I was happy enough with the restaurant on the beach where it was, naturally, still possible to get a cup of very good coffee.

Here everyone could get on with whatever they like to do on the beach on a hot Italian morning.

No one seemed to notice when I got on my with my tai-chi. The coffee must have revived my dormant energy.

The Lido really is the place to cool down – the sea was warm and clear and decidedly welcoming.

The public beach was free and perfectly enjoyable as long as you could find yourself a bit of shade. A short walk away, under another avenue of trees, there was a much more expensive option.

Just down the road was the Grand Hotel Des Bains, the most fashionable Lido hotel in the early Twentieth Century. I visited here in 1972 but could only afford one drink inside its lush interior.

Sadly that is no longer possible as the hotel has closed and is being refurbished as an extremely expensive set of apartments. While I was there, it was well and truly locked up.

Once, of course, it looked very different. I’m told that the main halls are to be restored to their original glory but I hope that the likes of you and I will still be able to go and have a look inside.

I am sad that this memorable and historic building will now be closed to the public even to people like me who only ask for a drink served with style.

It still looks fine from outside and I was delighted to be able to see it from the beach. This is the hotel where the Russian ballet impresario Diaghilev not only stayed but it is also where, in 1929, he died. Dying in Venice has always been trendy. His friend and protégée Igor Stravinsky came here too and, when he died, in New York, he left instructions that he too should be buried in Venice next to Diaghilev’s grave.

The beach is still there and I was lucky enough to be able to spend a truly memorable afternoon feeling that I had walked straight into the film.

Like Gustave von Aschenbach, I hired a beach hut with my own deckchair, sun-bed and canopy – all set out, as in the film, by a bathing attendant, or bagnino, called Tomaso.

It didn’t take much imagination to feel oneself a part of Thomas Mann’s and Luchino Visconti’s world.

The sea was as wonderful to bathe in as it looked.

The light was a film-makers dream.

The old hotel smiled benignly on my indulgence and put on its show almost as if it knew that it was preparing for its farewell performance.

I didn’t die in that deckchair, phew, but I did feel like whispering, “ready for my close-up, Signor Visconti.”

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then read the book and see the film. You won’t be disappointed. Here’s the trailer:

Next time, I’ll show you what I saw in the great city of Venice itself. Ciao!

 

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STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

It is now available as a paperback or on Kindle (go to your region’s Amazon site for Kindle orders)

You can order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20lovefeature=mhee

COLIN BELL’S PUBLICATIONS:

Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love
Ward Wood Publishing
October 30, 2013

http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm

Genius Floored: Uncurtained Window
Soaring Penguin Press
June 15, 2013
Poetry anthology


http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/publications/poetry/genius-floored-whispers-in-smoke/

Genius Floored: Whispers in Smoke
Soaring Penguin Press
June 6, 2014
Poetry anthology

http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/publications/poetry/genius-floored-whispers-in-smoke/

Reaching Out
Cinnamon Press
December 2012
Poetry and short story anthology

http://www.cinnamonpress.com/product-item/reaching-out/

Tic Toc
A Kind Of A Hurricane Press
June 2014
Poetry anthology

http://www.kindofahurricanepress.com/2014/06/tic-toc-is-now-available.html

The Blotter
The Blotter Magazine Inc.
November 2009
Three pages of poetry in the American South’s unique, free, international literature and arts magazine.

http://www.blotterrag.com/back-issues/2009-11.pdf

The Fib Review
Musepie Press
My Fibonacci poetry has appeared in this journal from 2009 until the present

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/writers.html

Shot Glass Journal
Muse Pie Press
My poetry has appeared in various issues of this short form poetry journal

http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/writers.html

Every Day Poets Magazine
Every Day Poets
I have various poems of the day published in this 365 days a year poetry magazine.

http://www.everydaypoets.com/?s=Colin+Bell

In The Night Count The Stars
Bittersweet Editions
March 1, 2014
An “uncommon anthology” of images, fragments, stories and poetry.

http://www.bittersweeteditions.com/in-the-night-count-the-stars.html#%2EU8ZFXY1dXoo

 

The post Not so much Death In Venice as Life on the Venetian Lido appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I have been on holiday and have just got back from two weeks in Venice – just long enough to begin to feel that it was home. I’ve always  loved Italy and now it doesn’t feel right to let a year go by without visiting this inspiring country. Venice, of course, is uniquely beautiful and atmospheric and I was lucky to have so much time to wander around its watery labyrinth.

I was staying on the Lido where it was possible to escape the city’s heat on the beach made famous by Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice where the Adriatic water was warm and clear and the sandy beach will always be redolent of Visconti’s movie of the book.

After the sea and a very necessary siesta, it was time to return to the city which takes on a different hypnotic beauty when darkness falls.

After two weeks in Venice, my small urban garden did its very best to welcome me home. Lewes, UK, on Midsummer’s Day was pretty special too.

While I was in Venice, I went to some concerts and, amongst other things, made my first acquaintance with the music of the 18th Century Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi (1706 – 1785). Here is one of his harpsichord concertos – a little bit of Venice that I was able to bring home with me. I shall return to my Venice holiday in some later blogs when I have the time to sort out more photographs.

STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

It is now available as a paperback or on Kindle (go to your region’s Amazon site for Kindle orders)

You can order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

The post Life in Venice – as intoxicating as ever. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I haven’t been well over the last few weeks and, without being exactly a hypochondriac,  my mind does go back at these times to that great death scene in the photograph above.  The famous death In Venice is, of course, by German writer Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955). Well, lots of Venetiains die in Venice, of course, but since Mann’s book there’s been a romance about foreigners dying there. Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death In Venice (Der Tod in Venedig),  about a writer, Gustav von Aschenbach with writer’s block who takes a holiday in Venice, at its elegant Lido beach, where his depression is lifted by the hope and beauty personified in an aristocratic Polish boy, Tadzio, there on holiday with his family.

Thomas Mann did take such a holiday himself, but he didn’t die there, in 1911, and, apparently, was inspired by a young Polish aristocrat,  Baron Władysław Moes (1900 – 1986) who was probably the original for Tadzio..

Later Mann’s story became an even better known film by Luchino Visconti (1906 – 1976), Death In Venice (Morte a Venezia, 1971) starring Dirk Bogart where Mann’s writer is turned into a famous Austrian composer. Soon after the film it became an opera, Death In Venice (1973) by Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976). It’s unusual for three works of art from three different art forms could all achieve true greatness.

Visconti made atmospheric use of music by the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler  (1860 – 1911) in his movie and there are still people who think the film was about Mahler and that the great composer died in Venice which he didn’t – he died in Vienna in 1911, the year before Thomas Mann’s novella. Another composer, Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971), is thought by some to have died in Venice but he didn’t either – he died in New York in 1971 in the same year as Visconti’s film was released. Stravinsky was buried at his wish in Venice next to the grave of his friend and mentor, the great Ballet Russe impresario, Serge Diaghilev (1872 – 1929)  who really did die in Venice in 1929 as did the American Modernist poet, Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972). Venice and death seemed to be in the air in the 1970s.

No, I’m feeling a lot better today and, putting all these deaths in Venice to one side, the really great foreign composer to die in Venice was Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) who rented a first floor apartment on the Grand Canal in the magnificent Palazzo Vendramin Calergi for the winter months after his last opera Parsifal was premiered at his Bayreuth opera house in Bavaria.

He arrived there in September 1882 with his wife Cosima (Franz Liszt’s daughter), their children and their staff of servants but Wagner was unwell and he gradually declined under the strain of a heart condition.

Two months later, in November 1882, his father-in-law, the great pianist and composer, Franz Liszt came to stay – he didn’t leave until January 1883, he wasn’t the first or last in-law to outstay his welcome. Only two years older than his son-in-law, Liszt too was in declining health and had become increasingly obsessed by death and, almost from the start, was haunted by the sight of funeral gondolas making their way past the palazzo on their way to the cemetery of San Michele.

Whether this was prophetic or just tactless, we will have to decide for ourselves but when Liszt left Venice for Budapest in January 1883, Wagner had only a month to live and then his coffin was placed in one of those very gondolas that Liszt had described so vividly. Wagner’s body was taken to Venice’s Santa Lucia railway station by gondola and then by train to his home at Bayreuth, Bavaria, where, three years later, his father-in-law would die. In case you wonder why I’m going on about Wagner’s death today, it’s because on my journey through the history of music, I’ve reached the year 1883 and it’s time to say goodbye to some of the composers who dominated the musical world in the 19th Century, Wagner being by far the most influential and controversial.

So for all the stories about deaths in Venice, Wagner’s is the one nearest to Thomas Mann and Luchino Visconti, Tadzio apart. He may not have seen Tadzio on the beach but he is said to have been enraptured by a young English opera singer at this time, Carrie Pringle (1859 – 1930), one of the Flower Maidens in the first production of Parsifal – someone whom Cosima Wagner refused to allow into the Venice apartment.

With Wagner dead, Carrie Pringle found her contract at Bayreuth cancelled and her career in ruins. She didn’t die in Venice either but lived on until 1930 and died just down the road from where I used to live in Kemptown, Brighton, UK.

So even though we will always associate the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with Death In Venice as used by Luchino Visconti in the film, the music for the real death in Venice, is Liszt’s La lugubre gondola played here in its final, paired down, enigmatic and harmonically adventurous version by that fine Lisztian pianist, Arnoldo Cohen:

If you can’t resist hearing the Mahler with Visconti’s movie images, here’s a special treat, the final scene from the film. I can watch this again now that I’m feeling better myself.

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My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

The post Richard Wagner: the other Death In Venice. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

When I woke up the other weekend, I had forgotten that I was in Venice but the view from my hotel room soon reminded me.

On my trip round Switzerland and Italy, I had come to Venice for the weekend and found a small hotel off a back street in a part of the often very over-visited city that was definitely far from the madding crowd.

I was even able to do my early morning taichi on a nearly deserted space by the Grand Canal with a backdrop of essential gondolas.

Then, panama hat essential of course,  it was time for a wander round this wonderfully beautiful place which can also be infuriatingly complicated to navigate with its crisscross of canals, tiny alleyways interspersed by startlingly dramatic glimpses of magnificent medieval and Renaissance palaces.

This is the city of the great Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707 – 1793) whose comedies, especially  The Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni), written in 1745, can still make us laugh in the modern theatre – well when I saw it, I loved it and laughed a lot. Goldoni’s comedies are full of intrigues, confused identity, stolen back street conversations and all the things that we can still imagine in this labyrinthine place.It is quite right that Goldoni has a very jolly statue right at the heart of the town.

This is a place for confusion certainly, intrigue too no doubt, and, as I wandered down small alleyways, over tiny canal bridges and then found that I wasn’t where I thought I was, I was quite convinced that Goldoni found his inspiration here.

It is also, of course, very beautiful but, if you are there in August like I was, it is essential to keep away from the crowded parts if you want to savour the atmosphere of the place. Venice is crowded for a reason, it is really somewhere everyone should see at least once in their lifetimes but, as I was lucky enough to have been here a few times before and seen Saint Mark’s square on a rainy November day when I was the only person there, I decided that I would keep well away from the crowds and that meant trying to make sure I was never within five minutes walk of  the main square or the Rialto Bridge that leads to it. San Marco is large enough to accommodate, or so it seems, every other visitor here at this time, except me. It is great that most tourists in Venice stick together – almost literally in this heat.

Elsewhere there were all those moody streets, some too narrow for more than one person at a time.

The play of light on water and the shadows on Venice’s wonderfully decaying bricks was always changing and alluring…

and those tempting little bridges ahead always drew me onwards, deeper and deeper into this ancient urban landscape.

Looking up at those shuttered windows or wondering what was going on behind closed doors, I often thought of Goldoni and sometimes more macabre thoughts too.

Then, seeing a church tower behind a row of houses, I decided to find out where I was.

There were two people inside this vast and awe-inspiring building which had plunged me into darkness as I stepped in from the blazing sunshine outside. I had read in my guidebook that the Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488- 1576),  better known as Titian,  had once painted an altar piece for this church but I assumed that it would have been packed off to a major art gallery centuries ago but, no, there it was. Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin Mary, in its original setting, in a church that I nearly passed by.

It is easy to get swamped by religious paintings in Italy but this dramatic masterpiece stopped me in my tracks. I, maybe for the first time, sympathised with Mary as she is whisked up into Heaven. She is leaving a panic-stricken and distressed crowd behind her lit with a lurid front light whilst she is drawn upwards to a terrifyingly golden sky with the dark clouds of her maker directly above her head. She is disturbed, confused and awe-struck. It is a frightening image of death.

Then I was outside again, walking through empty squares……

….to the sound of distant and very near bells ringing in conversation with each other over an other-wise silent car-free ambience.

There were times when I thought that Venice had really lost all of its visitors and then I came across Giorgio.

This solitary gondoliero was looking very morose until we agreed a price for a forty minute gondola trip around the Venetian canals.

He led the way down another alleyway to where he moored his gondola……

…and soon I was seeing Venice as it is meant to be seen – from the water.

Giorgio cheered up remarkably as soon as he got into action and maneuvered his gondola down various canals which were only navigable by boat.

This, I suggest, is the true spirit of Venice….even if a gondola ride is also the ultimate in tourist luxuries.

We were constantly travelling between darkness and light……

to the excitingly broad and palatial Grand Canal itself.

….and there it was, the Rialto bridge which leads to Saint Mark’s Square with its glorious Byzantine cathedral.

You follow this guy if you want to…..he was one of the hundreds of tour guides leading long and exhausted looking files of weary tourists around Venice’s main attractions.

The post Life in Venice appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.