Venice, Vegas & Vice
text
Sebastian Lockwood
photographs
Marigold Randall

Flying into Marco Polo airport there is the slow descent over the Lagoon, the strange tidal pools and marshes cut through with intricate patterns made by the shifting flow of the currents, and then, suddenly, the two open claws of Venice: two hands almost joined with the grand Canal between. Then, in picture book clarity, you see the great square, St.Mark’s Basilica with its domes, the Campanile watch tower, and the Palace of the Doge. Venice seems small and improbable in the vastness of the lagoon: beyond, the sun picks out the pink tips of the Dalmation mountains; behind us, sun tipped Pyrenees and Mt.Blanc. The clouds had been a complete blanket over northern Europe, but mercifully here the sun shines brightly on the waterways of Venice.

Flying into Las Vegas there is the long trembling descent over the Mojave desert: a desert of petrified dunes, an impossible, hostile geography that is utterly beautiful in it’s lithic fluid forms: a frozen flow of sand. The sunset beyond Vegas deepens the bands of red in the Red Hills and the Valley of Fire. Las Vegas rises from the desert as a glass mirage catching the desert sun and playing it off a wild array of buildings: the Pyramid of Luxor, the stone temple of Caesar’s Palace, the Bellagio, the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, the faux of the Venitian Casino itself with replicas of St’Marks Square, the Campanile and the Rialto all in collage beside the relentless bright flow of Las Vegas Boulevard.

Two cities that rise out of powerful and strange natural landscapes, both monuments to city building in hostile environments: they are both city as city where the garden is banished and all is building. One city holds the dream of the past and maintains it in a mystery of water-ways and light, while the other is a city of flux, electricity, money and chance.

This story starts with two travelers, a photographer and a writer, planning to go to Venice for Carnivale and deciding first to pay a visit to Vegas and see how the faux of The Venetian compares to the “real” of Venice. We start in Boston. As we fly out we get into conversation with Debby and Arnold, a couple in their fifties enjoying their freedom with children grown and the luxury to travel. Arnold is in metals, Debby likes to gamble. Her game is Black Jack and she explains the ropes in her menthol and rum voice.

“It’s all timing and patience. You know the numbers, you watch the cards and you wait. You play for an hour and you wait. You win, you lose; you stay about even – but somewhere in that hour the cards start to run your way. When that starts you come awake and play like hell: could be just ten minutes, but for those ten minutes you are on … you play hard, bet hard – it’s all about how you bet right then, while the cards run your way - you have to know when it’s over. Now it starts again: you win some, lose some – stay about even and wait. Patience and observation: that’s the game.” Advice to the young artist: hone your skills, be patient and when inspiration hits, work like hell and know when it is done.

It cost $1.6 billion dollars to build the Venetian Casino. That fact alone sets the skeptics back who want to laugh at the idea of Venice in Vegas. From the outside we see the Campanile, the façade of the Doge’s palace and the Rialto: in Vegas the Rialto leads directly into the Doge’s Palace. The Vegas Rialto at night has a look of alabaster arches bathed in milk white light. On this Rialto people move up and over the famous arch on a moving side walk to be delivered into the Doge’s Palace. This is a palace. The floors are marble, Cararra rich with tumbling block patterns: the marble is fastidiously polished to a rich gleam. Above the marble floors are impeccable replicas of Titian and Veronese. As you walk into the palace you pass a living statue of the Doge, the highest ranking Venetian, who unfolds his stone limbs for just the flash of a smile before resuming his form.

Within lies the city itself: a city within a casino. Two tiered stone facades in shades of pink and bone white with Venetian windows: shops and trattorrias line the Canal. This Canal boasts fifteen Gondolas and their handsome young Italian gondoliers – straight from central casting – who sing Santa Lucia as they execute the large turn at the end of the canal and make their stately and precise way back along this waterway within a hotel. We are beneath a dome where Titian clouds float in chiaroscuro light, sun-tipped at dawn or dusk: eternal sun-set or sunrise and no way to know which is which. There is a strange serenity to this scene – a calm. Here there are also women working the gondolas: a quick reminder that this is America. The Canal is lined with expensive shops selling jewelry, antiques, fashion and up market accessories: the same shops we will find surrounding St. Marks Square Venice.

In this Vegas St Mark’s Square, artists sketch your portrait or cartoon, musicians and opera singers in period costume wander about and sing. We stop and talk to three of the singers in their period costumes: they tell us it is their Friday though it is our Monday and that they are excited to get home and change into their Levi’s and T shirts and relax, take a drive in the desert and get ready to come back. We ask how it feels in all this faux and beneath a sky and temperature that is forever the same. Oh wonderful they say, where else can you be amongst people who are always happy to see you and practice your art to an appreciative audience and make enough money to go home to Italy three time a year. This is the same answer the Gondolier Giorgio gives to this question: the people are happy, the canal is calm, the money is good.
Luck be a Lady Tonight.

In the cavernous halls beneath the faux city, with its canal and singing gondoliers, the slot machines hum, whir and sing their cash crash of crazy coins. As soon as you sit to a machine a well dressed, high-heeled, short-skirted woman is there to take your drink order and is back in a whisper with rum and coke. In the oxygenated air the rollers spin up their cherries and Jacks as the quarters jingle out. In the elevator to this floor we hear the story of the woman who keeps putting her quarters in the Coke machine and hitting the button and another can adds to her growing pile. When the woman behind her asks to use the machine, she replies, “Are you crazy! I’m winning here.”

The Venetians claim to have invented Casino gambling: their usual hubris. Indigenous peoples have gambled ever since ritual burial: but, yes, for the western world the Venetian Casino has this air of rarefied original decadence where money is lost and won at a toss. In Vegas, my poet friend Elizabeth will only play the slots that have an arm to pull and before each pull she offers a Tibetan mantra: a meditation to small time losing and the occasional bonanza.

The real action is at the Black Jack tables, the Craps, Roulette, Poker: this is where the steely faced, big stake players play. Here is another world that is timeless and where money flows like the tidal currents of the Venetian lagoon - sweeping away fortunes in a distraction. Debby is at the black Jack tables all fierce concentration on the odds, but with a face of resigned insouciance: her gambling mask. At the craps tables the thrower warms the dice, blows on them, offers incantations and throws to howls of delight and scorn. Drinks delivered, cigarettes finished, smooth flow of cleansed pumped air and Old Blues Eyes singing: Luck be a Lady Tonight.

In St. Mark’s square Venice, the great 98.8 meter tower of the Campanile rings its five bells: the most famous bell is called Marangona. It was this bell that sounded the beginning and the end of the work day for Marangoni, the carpenters. In this Vegas Venice of today there is a timeless flow of tourists and transients where time is measured by meals: there is no time, no natural light, no clocks - just food, drinks, music and chance.

From the Venetian Casino, where rooms can go for $600 a night, it is a twenty minute walk to the end of the boulevard with it’s strip clubs, marriage chapels and motel rooms for $26 a night.

Flying back from Vegas we watch a small old lady in her seventies. She has the wrinkles and stoop of a life of worry and hard work. Her face is Madonna sad. I ask her where she is going. Boston she says in a whisper, and then adds: I’m just not lucky, I just don’t have luck…and she shuffles off, bent to her cane to board the red-eye. I imagine her praying to St. Jude, St. Simon – the whole hagiocracy – and then taking her little nest egg to Vegas hoping it will multiply like the fish and loaves; and now she returns empty handed and eggless. Vegas swallows the weak and the strong: the god of chance dishes out good and bad to good and bad alike.

On top of the Campanile the archangel Gabriel looks protectively over the square and city. No Archangel in this Venetian Vegas: but there is a calm in the casino the next day as we find the lovely Violante di Modena, Don Cornaro and Don Morsini wandering the square in full regalia as they regale us about life in the surreal Venetian casino and how to clear our minds we should drive out into the desert. Their names are pastiche history: Titian’s lover, Modena, and the names, modified, of early Doges. These wandering minstrels, imported from the Italian opera, look beautiful and happy under the sky that never changes its chiaroscuro blush.

So we drive down Las Vegas Boulevard. In front of the Bellagio, there is the eight acre lake built as a reminder of lake Como. As we pass water burst into life as a hundred jets of water blow a hundred feet into the air and as the water falls back in a wandering mist, hundreds of smaller jets play up and dance to the music. Sinatra’s velvet voice is pumped through a thousand hidden speakers. Cars and people stop to watch the show, as they will every forty five minutes.

Never have I seen water flow with such profligacy: fountains, lakes and water follies. There is the truly tacky Treasure Island Casino with its lake and Pirate ship. Each casino along the strip features water flow and effects: the Roman Baths of Mandalay and its shark’s reef where you can watch the great sleepless beasts watch you. In the Bellagio, there is a sushi restaurant where behind the sushi bar twenty foot long jelly fish drift and coil there saffron diaphanous tentacles in black back lit tanks. Water water everywhere in the middle of this desert. Water in a place that averages 5 to 8 inches a year! This endless water is pumped in from the Hoover dam. Those beyond the dam must feed this voracious thirst.

At the confluence of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara we turn left. We were told that if we just followed Sahara for a half hour we would find ourselves in the desert. Ghalib says: the faster I run the desert runs faster.

This is no place for the pedestrian. Blocks are walled-in blocks with houses within. The sidewalk has a six foot wall beside it: the walker is trapped between wall, cement sidewalk, and tarmac road in a city where the temperature can sit at 101.F Vegas ends abruptly after blocks and blocks of half finished new houses. People are pouring into this city in the desert – the fastest growing city in America - they all will shower, flush and sprinkle their ever green lawns.

The red hills are frozen flow. These red, red hills, and before them the flat scrabble desert broken by Joshua trees with their wild drunken angles and pin sharp leaves. Cholla, prickly pear, barrel cactus, creosote bush and Mojave yucca: these are all so hard, so forbidding, so beautiful. For most of the last 600 million years this was an ocean. As this ocean dried it left behind a 9,000 foot layer of shells and skeletons that ossified as limestone. There is also salt, gypsum and iron deposits that create the deep red bands of color that is the distinctive color of the Mojave Desert. There’s snow on the hills, though the locals tells us it never snows in Vegas – but there it is.

As we tour the loop road that takes you into the Red Hills nature reserve (of course we view this from the car) we are overwhelmed by the sheer grandeur and the strange beauty. Here you think of the origins of Vegas. How once this was sacred land reflected in the prehistoric rock drawings: the petroglyphs and pictographs left behind by peoples during and before the time of the southern Paiute.

There followed various western traders and then those intrepid Mormons who stopped here at the springs in the 1840s. Once silver and lead were found the fate of the land was sealed and Las Vegas founded in 1905. Still, it was just a scrabbled dirt town in the desert until the big boom of the Hoover dam in 1930. Then Bugsy Siegel came along, took a fancy to the place, and envisioned a palace.

Now, with the city hidden behind us, there is just these hills with their rune like markings. This desert that was once sea bed, then shifting dunes, and now petrified red bands in limestone relief. Rock climbers inch like lizards up to the caves high in the hills. We are here in January and there is snow on the tops of the hills: another contradiction – the locals tell us that you almost never see snow here. The snow adds a contrasting beauty to this strange red.

Beyond the Red Hills we stop at Bonnie’s Springs for lunch. Here there is an original mining town, deserted now, and a mock cowboy town and zoo. When we pull up the sheriff smiles a smile with missing teeth and tells us if we hang about for ten minutes there’s going to be a hanging. He assures us there is a hanging every hour. I tell him my neck feels itchy, and he says not to worry, they always hang a member of the staff.

We are hungry so we head into the low slung restaurant that sits next to a busy duck pond with wandering Peacocks. The waitress barks us to a table and shows us the menu that is pasted on empty Vodka bottles. Buffalo Burgers and strip steaks: fries of any size and shape. A central fire is burning and gamblers on break have their cowboy boots up on its rim and are sipping the eternal drink and smoking. Every inch of the bar walls and ceiling are covered with decorated dollar bills. The Ladies room is indicated by the size 44 bra that hangs on the door and the Men’s by a pair of leather britches. The waitress’ bark is also faux as she soon honey’s this and honey’s that and tells us about “them hills” and how this place got started. By the time we leave we’ve missed another hanging. We drive further out into the desert to feel it’s sheer size and the black top that vanishes ahead: flat lands and hills in the distance; hawks and buzzard circle for road kill.

There’s uranium in those hills and the UFOs are looking for it: lot 51 is out here, America’s most famous UFO conspiracy where it is rumored that a UFO crashed in the fifties and was found and covered up by the US airforce. We make a U turn in the Amargosa Valley – death Valley is beyond the Amargosa Range – and head back to town.

Dusk falls with just the first shaving of a finger-nail new moon and Venus beyond. As we come over the last hill we see first the glow and then Vegas: the electric mushroom in the desert. She is all rose pinks and the flash of miles of neon: an illumination in the desert; a hallucination of light and flowing electricity.

When we get back to Vegas we go to the baths at Mandalay Bay. A friend dropped this suggestion: at $25.00 she said it was the best deal in town. Three hot pools with jets: 80. 90 and 102 degrees and then the cold plunge, all this arranged about a marble and granite center piece with water spouting from elephants and lions. There is sauna and a huge semi-lit eucalyptus steam room. You sweat, steam, boil and cold plunge; then lie on the chaise lounges and watch the gamblers sweat. In the 102 degree pool, I hear one say to another, “ how hot do you want to get?” When I leave I see them leave together. Water, marble, bronze, glass and money: so Roman, so profligate.

So we leave Vegas behind: the glass mirage, the Pyramids at Cheops, Caesar’s Palace, Paris and the Vast sprawling Venetian with its Rialto and Doge Palace, missing only the Bridge of Sighs; for truly, many a sigh of loss is heard on the way to the airport. First arriving at the airport one is immediately struck by the slot machines there at the gate, and as you leave, a last chance for chance. We carry away our dreams and visions of the desert and this city of flow, flux and a future that imitates the past.

The yellow number five bus takes you from Marco Polo airport to Piazzale Roma, the Venice bus station: a disappointing ride. After the beauty of Venice seen from the air coiled in it’s great Lagoon with that incredible maze of red tile roofs and Domes; the bus then crawls though a dismal landscape. As we grind towards Venice we pass ugly gray cement apartment buildings and then the workings of the industrial port of Mestre, with its massive oil refining complex. This all falls behind as we head down the causeway - Ponte della Liberta - the only road into Venice. Alongside the bus we see the real way to reach Venice: the sleek cigar shaped, mahogany decked, water Taxis and hotel boats gracefully riding the lagoon. The bus station has stalls selling Carnivale masks and all manner of Venetian kitsch, including a full body apron of David: the impossible body!

Across from the bus station begins the web of bridges and canals and at once, within a turn, we are lost. Our requests for directions from elderly Venetians bring a wavering hand and, poi…poi…a destra,ci…poi a sinestra…poi… This is the formative experience of Venice: anytime you think you can get there by heading in a direction, Venice will swallow you and spit you out in the opposite direction. This is fun when the air is warm and you are light: weighed down by bags, cold and hungry; the maze can be agony – but still, even in pain and exhaustion you look up and think: Oh look, how beautiful the light on that wall, that window, the sweet arch of that bridge: I’m lost, I’m cold, I’m in Venice!

Hotel ai due Fanali is across from the train station. With it’s harsh authoritarian façade and steps this station is a stark reminder of the recent past: a harsh 50’s building completely at odds with the rest of Gothic, Renaissance and Palladian Venice.

For now, this city at sea is fairly calm, but in one more day Carnivale will start and that station will disgorge two million masked revelers who will pack the bridges, alleys and squares till you wonder how it is that the great old lady does not sink beneath the sheer human weight.

Hotel ai due Fanali, is in a small square dedicated to San Simon. From the window you look across the little square to the canal and the raw sienna and burnt umber façades of the buildings beyond. Light is reflected up off the luminous rich green water: water that is roadway and light-way. “The water is like musical sheets, frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to you in tidal scores, in bars of canals…” As Joseph Brodsky writes, and he reflects how “A miracle that, rubbed the right and the wrong way for over a millennium, it doesn’t have holes in it, that it is still H2O.”

Here you watch the freight barges that supply Venice: barges loaded with fresh water, wine, bread and all the needs of the thousands of restaurants and hotels and all the construction material for the endless rebuilding and renovation. All of these needs are hand supplied; men throwing the kegs of wine and water from barge to pier and then moving the goods by hand to their destination. Even advertising is by barge: we see a faux half bridge on a barge with a bright new station wagon, and sitting behind the wagon, death in white mask and brilliant blue cloak: odd add. There are no vehicles in the alleys and squares: the only traffic is by foot or on water.

Water is the lifeblood of Venice as marble and stone are the bones. The endless play of sunlight on water and stone: as you soon as you think you have seen it, the chiaroscuro, the light shifts and changes; breaks apart and floods in new patterns and palettes of color. So many writers, artists and photographers have tried to catch that light in art; but it is the most elusive light. Perhaps Sargent came closest in his water colors.

Rilke saw Venice this way, “ Its marble is ashen, a pallid grey, as luminous as the edge of a coal that has just stopped smoldering. How inexplicable are the red of the walls and the green of the shutters; so restrained and yet impossible to ignore; it is the past, but in the fullness of flight; it is so pale, just as people turn pale as their emotions increase.” This is Rilke writing to his sister November 20th, 1907. This has not changed; and the city is a person turning pale with emotion. This city that was created in a lagoon and miraculously took hold and prospered: and how it prospered! Jacopo Fasolo, in his Another Venice, quotes the Venetian poet Diego Valeri thinking about the origins of this city. “Our holy fathers, more than a thousand years ago (…) must have had not only an uncommonly iron will but also a touch of generous insanity.”

The Venetians, like so many island peoples, prospered and conquered: they were always moving out onto the sea and exploring. Island sea peoples: the Danes, Albion, the Greeks, Japanese, Haida…to name a few; always these island people invent, explore, build and trade. So with the Venetians who from their city in a Lagoon reach out and invent a particular future and power: a power that is only broken with the brash force of Napoleon.

As we move into Carnivale we will see many little Napoleons, proud as peacocks, strutting about in their bee-button uniforms, for all the real thing, yet with cell phone to ear and point and shoot in hand. They love to play Napoleon, but would not wish for that lingering arsenic stool bloated death on St. Helena, alone and betrayed.

On this, our first night, carnivale is just a premonition. We cross the Ponti degli Scolzi and turn right, a destra, by the Chieso degli Scolzi (two drunks sleep in its elaborate marble protection) and head down Lista di Spagna into Rio Tera S. Leonardo. In other words we cross the bridge by the train station, turn right by the great white marble Renaissance church and head down the closest thing to a main drag that has signs saying, Rialto: here all roads lead to Rialto or St Mark’s Square.

This is a first view of this street and it’s sudden squares and many, many churches, including the Santi Giovanni e Paolo with the equestrian Statue that Ruskin makes such a point of in, Stones of Venice. I gaze at it and see Klaus Kinsky riding a horse with that Wrath of God look on his face: it is in fact Bartolomeo Colleoni, made by Verrochio in 1481, and by all accounts he was the Venetian’s Wrath of God to his enemies. I make a note to come back in the day as we walk into Restoranti Serenissima. Oh, the Venetian food! Bigoli in Salsa, Tajadee coe Capesante, the risottos, the salt cod, eel and squid ink dishes: lagoon food.

In this restaurant, we watch a classic old world waiter work the tables with laughter and amusement: his counterpart behind the bar is in her twenties with purple hair and face piercing, yet timeless and Venetian in her own way. They laugh together as they work. As the waiter takes orders and jokes he leaves his cigarette burning on the marble counter next to our table: we are not in America. As we eat a Gypsy woman comes in with a child on her hip and a five year old in tow. She marches up to a table of four and rolls her fingers for money. All go quiet as the voluble waiter walks up and scoops her out: on his return they laugh and say that even the baby was trying to steal.

I stared at that face that was hard deep and ancient as the Pyrenees: a face full of character and raw beauty next to the dough fed faces of the wealthy tourists laughing their disgust.

We return through the silent streets, softly lit: the canals dark and echoing their lap of water. In the morning it is the bells that peel the dawn and call back and forth across Venice. I count one bell that tolls 138 times before dying away to silence. Breakfast in the roof of the hotel offers a view of the undulating flow of red tile broken by towers, many ribbed with scaffolding, and the massive Campanile seeming so close, but so far by foot. We decide to use this day to go to the islands and toss between Murano and glass and Burano and bright houses: we go for the glass.

It is cold but bright weather: the sky a pale distant egg-shell blue, the few clouds tinged by bright sun: it is the real to the faux of the Venetian Casino roof. The wind off the Lagoon has a bitter chill and as the Vapporetto heads out into large water you feel the sea. We leave Venice behind with a last sight of a new apartment building that is built in the old style with colors and form that, with the distinctive bee hive chimneys, let it blend in with the old city. Ahead is the Cemetery island with its long red brick walls that glow oven warm red in the morning sun.

At Murano there are the immediate tourist stalls hawking glass, glass and more glass. We head off down the main canal and are drawn into the charm of this sweet island town where the houses are painted in gentle pastels which puts me in mind of the colorful houses on Ireland’s Inisfree. The houses on these islands were painted these bright colors so that fisherman could see their homes from sea

Murano is glass. The guide book tells us that the glass works were moved here from Venice in 1291 in order to reduce the risk of fire. In the 18th century the glass indusrty employed over a thousand craftsmen. We walk down the main canal and enjoy its bustle and beauty and stop for lunch in a small square where a long brick wall offers a warm spot in the sun. We are eating at Busa all Torre, Da Lele Trattoria. Lele is the owner and loves his Trattorria. A masked woman holds a menu in a living statue pose. We are impressed by her skill until we see the one iron leg and have been caught by the faux as real. After a splendid lunch that includes, baccala mantecato con polenta (cream of salt cod on polenta) we admire the Basilica of San Donato. The Basilica dates from the 13th century and has undergone endless restoration. At the foot of the bell tower there is an oddly modern war memorial sculpted by Napoleone Martinuzzi: here a stone angel of death comforts a dying soldier who sinks into the ground. Modern and ancient stone woven together.

We then stop into one of the many small shops selling glass. Here we see the glass worker bent over his rods of many colored glass fashioning the little figures of his trade: I buy a family of owls, guffo, while he patiently lets his picture be taken as another glass creature forms at his fingers.

At the glass factory of ( ) we are in luck and have the glass works to ourselves and watch as four men work and joke in rhythm as one pulls the glowing ball from the oven and holds it over a bench while another snips it off and the third shapes it out into petals that are again snipped by the fourth man and shaped into further leaves while the first has returned to the oven and rhythm repeats. These petals, stems and leaves will all then be joined together into an elaborate floral glass chandelier. On a table by their work they have fashioned a prancing stallion all erect and proud in pure white glass. As we leave a gossip of French school children enter and take to the benches and the too enthusiastic young guide begins his glass patter. The men work on about the mouth of the oven with their own listless glass making gossip: the same rhythms and gossip that glass makers have had ever since the Etruscans shipped out great balls of glass to be traded in Glastonberry for English tin.

As we leave the island, I turn back and to see a ragazzo leaning nonchalantly against the rail of the Vapperatto landing, the back of his Jacket emblazoned with, DIESEL: hip-hop is alive in Murano.

After glass, there is time to visit the Rialto: to look north from the bridge and see what Canaletto saw. The bridge in its first incarnations was wooden – the last time it collapsed the crowds had massed to see a new Pope. In 1588 new designs were offered: Palladio drew a flat marble road across the canal, Michelangelo drew a version, but fortunately the appropriately named, Antonio da Ponte, gave us the Rialto we know today.

Looking south from the bridge you see a great palace to the left, once a trading house, now the Venetian Post Office. Standing at the top of the bridge looking north I see the scene that never ceases to fascinate and amaze. In the canal below there are two vaporretos, two laden freight barges, three water taxis and five gondolas: the wind is blowing hard and the current running – catastrophe! But no, with incredible precision and clearances less than an inch, they all move through around and past each other and the flow goes on with the water-men laughing, insulting and singing all the while.

Beyond the Rialto I find the fish Market. So unlikely a place: from the canal it looks grand and eloquent with beautiful arches and tile roof: for all the world it looks like an elegant theatre. When I get there the show is over. Inside there are empty stone slabs and just the carved away skeletons of great fish, including five heads of sword-fish, their great swords pointing up as though they are fencers ready to engage.Returning I pass a church, at some point: above the door is this familiar image of the circle, the square, the ovoid and the all seeing eye. Underneath it says: Sapientia Aedificatvit sibi domum

Wisdom Has built this HouseI cannot find this Masonic edifice again, a cabalistic illusion – perhaps I walk by it, but always distracted. True that the Masons would build so well here: they must have had much to do with why this city that stays afloat. They would have given the city its secular wisdom in the midst of so many churches: they performed the miracles of engineering that baffle today’s engineers. Wisdom built this house.

Tonight we go to Cafe Florian in St.Mark’s Square. Mark the evangelist: Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus. The words beneath the winged lion right paw: oh how we love our St. Mark, or words to that effect. Tonight the Evangelist looks over a square where the Queens Reign.

At the bass of the Campanile is a 50 by 50 giant screen that is filled with moving images of previous Carnivales. At first it seems an insult to the vast ancient dignified square to have this digital projection in its midst. But it is compelling as giant costumed figures flow across the screen under the great tower with the domes of St Mark’s Basilica as back drop: a strange mixture of profanity and beauty - to be here and yet be riveted by the images on screen? The faux, the real and the surreal.

Inside Florian the screen figures are here in the flesh: mostly men in deep white make up with dandified airs; all lace and velvet, pose and hose, canes and powdered wigs. They swan for the cameras; dip and swoop and acknowledge the stares and flash. We drink rich hot chocolate and fold into the dream as we sit where Byron sat as he watched the real fin de siecle.

Byron who boasted making love to two hundred women in Venice. Byron with the wildly beautiful baker’s daughter. Byron who swam the Grand Canal to cheers and jeers. Byron who adored Venice. He is here somewhere, as are the ghosts of Dickens, Proust, Goethe and Guardi who also sat here. Across the Square Casanova was imprisoned in the coldest dampest dungeon in Christendom before escaping to rake his way across Europe. This Florian is the very image of exuberance and decadence.

Venice was vice as Vegas is vice. Both more or less cleansed now; both once centers of prostitution and raw gambling. Venice at one time hosted a population of prostitutes that was a quarter of its population: at the beginning of the 16th century there were 11,650 prostitutes out of a population of 160,000. Prostitution was carefully controlled and seen as a necessity that had to be kept in check. Many of the Casinos were originally houses of prostitution. All swept away now. In the fifteenth century the Venetian city fathers took steps against the rising numbers of prostitutes, yet at the same time, wanted to make sure that there were enough, and even decreed how and which parts of the body should be displayed: they did this in order to be sure that the young men would stay attracted to women and not fall into homosexuality.

Oh Venice and Vegas, vice is thy middle name.We return home across the dark square, always the feel of threatening water beyond as it splashes it’s high tide warning and rocks the gondolas and snaps at the mooring lines. High tide water bubbles up out of the man hole covers; but this time it is just the threat; but the biting chill is real enough.

Carnival is beginning: those alleys and calle once almost empty are filling: a swarm of masked revelers swoop down the Train station steps and flow into Venice. We have errands: tickets for the ball and costumes to pick up. What should be an easy stroll to St.Marks Square becomes an event. In the midst of the crowds, there are clutches of 18th century Lords & Ladies in full regalia. The shoes! Beneath the flowing dresses and hose the period shoes shine in the midst of the bustle. In the squares groups in costume stop and pose against a church wall, an arch, a façade: at once they are surrounded by cameras furiously catching this faux past. It is enchanting, strange, dream like and disturbing – full of juxtaposition. To see what it must have looked like and in that instant to see also the cell phones and point and shoot: the Adidas and New Balance and baseball hats next to the powdered wigs and the women’s elaborate chapeaux and vales.

Around St. Mark’s square we start to experience the real density of the crowd: we are no longer walking, we are moving as part of a throng. To break away in a different direction to the main body of the crowd takes real physical effort. We dive down a street behind the square looking for the costume shop where the tickets to the ball are sold. We know it is beyond the American Express and beneath a red awning. In all of this it is even colder today as the wind blows wet and bone chill off the Lagoon.

The costume store is tight with masks, hats, chiffon, silk, canes and 18th century accessories. In the back of the store a small group are waiting for tickets in their street clothes: these are those who we will see later in the day at the Chocolate ball transformed and time traveled. We buy our tickets and I indulge in an Owl headed cane, and we set off to cross St.Marks Square for our next costume destination: the Danieli.

Now the square is a solid form of bodies: each decorated from simple bauta or pulcinella mask to elaborate visions of white angels, sea nymphs and Poseidon himself. We force our way, sometimes with the current, sometimes against: at one point I feel the crush bear down and put my arms out to protect a fragile old woman in front of me – she looks up in panck, then acknowledges what I am doing – the density reaches a point of alarm, and then suddenly releases us. We head for the Campinale with it’s giant screen now picking up the action in the square, and on the stage in the center of the square, and projecting that so we see what we are seeing as instant film. Everyone wants to be in this film: as soon as a camera is raised there is the desire to be shot: everyone here is famous in this anonymous moment.

We force our way out along the façade of the Palace of the Doge. As we turn left we pass under a large section of the palace that has hung fabric that reaches from ground to roof and stretches across fifty feet of the building: this is painted in a faux image of the palace as though it is a courtyard with the great Lion of Venice in it’s midst. We pass over and the Ponte de Paglia, and see behind, in the quiet of the canal the ever sad and intriguing Bridge of Sighs, Ponte de Suspiri.

The Hotel Daniele is a luxurious oasis away from the chill wind and intensity of the crowds. Just within the famous lobby, a room to the right is transformed into a dressing room with hundreds of costumes and two chairs for make up and a crowd that is half transformed.

We are seeking an arabesque hat and a powerful Austrian woman sweeps into action to make it so.

Gripped by a gripping necessity I make my excuses and disappear looking for a men’s room. The lobby is a parade of finery: everyone in costume and in the elaborate rococo marble all looking as they should: the men’s room is on the fourth floor. This is an elevator ride in an exquisite mahogany box. When I return the elevator is acting up: doors not quite closing. I do not want to be trapped in an elevator at the top of the Daniele. I see a sign that says, Uscita (exit) and the symbol for stairs. I dive through the door and find myself suddenly in the eaves of the roof. As I make my way downstairs I realize I am in the working half of the famous ancient hotel: at each landing there are piles of dirty linens; beyond are doors that when they open give out clouds of steam; people are running in all directions with trays, towels and clean linens: as I pass nary a glance at my Pucinella mask, owl cane and tri-cornered hat.

I emerge on the second floor coming out of the streaming bustle of the workings and back into the quiet smooth luxury of the lobby. As I descend the stairs a woman in front of me is wearing a high silk hat with black veil and much bejeweled bodice and a skirt that must have sixty petticoats and extends four feet in each direction beneath her waist and gives way to exquisite black leather boots. Her white long gloved hands hold a fan she works furiously: as I pass I hear that hard New York accent saying: what a rip off, what a rip off, I mean we were really ripped off… the illusion shattered.

We have costumes and arabesque hat and leave the powder, make up and perfume and are back out onto the Ponte dell Paglia (does Ms Paglia get her formidable patter from the rush of feet over this bridge?) needing to make our way down across the square, past the little garden, Giardinetti Reali, and hopefully onto a #82 vaporretto that will get us back to Ferrara and Roma stops.

At one point we make the fatal Venetian error of thinking we can take a short cut and dive down an alley hoping to circle the crowd. At once we find ourselves stuck at the intersection of two alleys: the crowd pulses forward and then surges back and we are pressed tighter and tighter with no retreat. We realize there is no movement ahead and the crowd is packed in tight behind us, but only for fifty feet or so, and so, clinging to the wall we inch our way backwards – but still we are going nowhere, and just then we are in-front of a small shop selling prints of Venice: the usual views gondolas in the sun-set: we dive into the store for the quiet and to escape the claustrophobic, agoraphobic crush.

A sweet young Italian couple welcome us, brush our feathers down, let us use the telephone and in broken English, and much Italian sign language, they engage these complete strangers in the gentlest way: here is kindness to strangers and doing for someone who will not necessarily do for you. A Homeric hospitality. We use their phone, make a plan, get our bearings and refreshed and renewed head back out into the crush. It is only a half hour later that I realize I have left my owl cane behind. Caneless in Gaza!

I will have to come back and the next day I will spend a full hour, cold and tired, circling and circling: is this the same bridge? Same square? And eventually find the little shop to retrieve my owl head cane. When I find the shop I explain to the sweet couple that part of my life is performing the Odyssey and hence the owl cane: owl sacred to Athena. The woman smiles and says her husband is obsessed by all things Homeric, and did I notice the name of the store where I had left my owl cane and struggled a long journey to return to find it? The store is called Ithaca.

But on this day we are now caneless and trying to get to the ball. After a forced march back through the crowd and St.Marks’s square: hallucinogenic apparitions at each turn: we find our way back to the Vaporretto stop by the Giardinetti Reali. Here, with whipping wind and waves, there is a long line pushing and shoving down towards the Vaporretto stop. Once in this line there is no turning back. We are caught half way down a gang plank with bitter cold winds and a mob that wants the next boat at all cost. Looking over my left shoulder I see for a moment the exact view that Canaletto painted: all blue and calm bustle of gondolas and courtiers: stark contrast to this millennium cold, gray and masked crowd. We are packed onto the Vaporetto like subway riders in Tokyo rush hour. There are shouts of “basta, basta” as we are packed tighter and tighter. We are on the far side of the boat and as it crosses the canal it crosses a wake from another vaporetto and the wind fingers and lifts its hull: all at once there is a long heavy lurch towards the water: behind us are hundreds of costumed characters and for a moment we think this…is this how it ends: forced down into the thick teeming waters of the cold canal with a hundred masked revelers: death and the face of plague doctor swimming us down into this green underworld.

We debark, gratefully, at the Ferrara stop and prepare for the chocolate ball.

Once changed, I think, oh these clothes feel good: A deja vieux; a feeling of having lived and worn just these clothes in dangerous and decadent times.

We take a #1 vaporreto that says St.Mark’s, and hope it is a faster ride than the #82. We sit in the front and shiver and realize this boat is going out of the grand canal into a route that goes past heavy working docks where loads are shifted from trucks onto the cargo barges that will deliver the goods in Venice. We feel lost but helpless: no getting off now, but at last the boat comes out into the open waters of the harbor and heads into Canale della Giudecca: a quicker, but colder ride than heading back up the Grand Canal, or Canale Grande.

In front of us there’s an English family: a heavy set bleached blond mother with a no-nonsense look, two teenage boys in soccer shirts, and a man of indeterminate age who is probably not the father, but is with the mother. The teenage boys have just soccer shirts on. One says to the other, “pretend it’s hot, feel the cold like it’s hot, so hot it burns.” The other boy frowns in concentration then looks up mid-shiver and says, “I’m trying – doesn’t work: it’s cold no matter wot I pretend: it’s cold.” A moment of silence as we watch the banks slide by then one boy suddenly says, “Is seaweed alive?” After a moment the older man says, “Corn’s alive.” More quiet as the grand façade of San Basilio comes into view. “Well” says the teenager, “Is your Penis alive?” and the other adds, “Yeah, does it know it’s being sucked?” At this point the philosophy and cold are too much and the whole family retreats to the cabin.

We make one more stop at the magnificent San Giorgio Maggiore on the Giudecca before heading across Bacino San Marco towards St.Marks, Palazzo Ducale, or Palace of the Doge and the Ponte della Paglia still packed with people. As we cross this open stretch of water we see the full effect of the faux front of the Palace: in it’s midst the hanging held on scaffolding that gives the visual impression of the palace forming a square, and within that square, enormous and proud, the Venetian lion holding it’s open book in one massive claw. So real, so surreal, so faux: faux as this same palace facade set on Las Vegas Boulevard in the midst of the Mojave desert.

In the “real” Venice, we gratefully debark, re-enter the crowd packed tight as herring, make our way past Harry’s Bar and find Hotel Luna de Baglia, and within, the great hall mirrored and frescoed where the now fully costumed crowd mills about silver pitchers of rich smooth drinking chocolate. The contessa is there with her dog and a row of well wishers who line up to pet, pout and gossip with lady and pooch. There are the Napoleons and generals, a Casanova or two, a Doge, rich clergy, a Neptune all in blue and pearl, faux sea-weed and shells; and everywhere a cross-dressed sense of just who might be who.

There are formidable ladies here and one in particular keeps circling ever closer until she asks me to shoot her as she poses for her point and shoot. It is only taking the pictures that I realize how large the hands, broad the shoulders and the tell tale silk scarf hiding the Adam’s Apple. “Thank you darling” she intones in that rich male sotto votche. “Must run,” and she rustles away. “Where are you from” I call after the disappearing apparition of pearl silk and lace, “New York darling” she calls back, “New York!”

Where are we? I wonder looking back into this imagined theatre of the 18th century with it’s bestiary of swans and mallards, herons and peacocks all preening for the flashing cameras before settling back into idle gossip about the cold, the crowds, the money. Same gossip in Vegas, different look: but in each case, everyone on show.

Our big show is later that night: the grand Ball is going to come off: Il Ballo del Doge. Tickets in hand we head out again: this time in the luxury of water taxi.

We arrive at the dock in front of Palazzo Pisani Moretta. It is evident from the first moment that we are in for a grand Ball: the dock has flaming lanterns, dancing dwarfs and jugglers. As we are ushered in we pass a nude man who is half-goat half-man. The goat hair of the lower half of his cloven body functions just enough to be a fig leaf. As we ascend we are trumpeted into the grand hall where the guests are assembling at round tables all a glitter with glass, silver and decanters. Our companions are British and American and all too familiar and ready to complain and gossip as though in Starbucks rather than a Venetian Palace in the 18th century. This is not true of the Japanese couple opposite. They are glorious in riotous wigs respectively bone white and Flamingo pink. They are in Kabuki make up. The older man throws a velvet rope about the younger man and breaks into a broad laugh at the game as he offers designer cigarettes around: they are declined and looked at with horror.

Dinner is served by costumed waiters who are there with constant wine and champagne and as the main course is cleared away, the Doge appears to make his speech. He is accompanied by a woman, half naked and her body painted gold with her hair rising up like a great confection. “Let the revels begin” intones the Doge as they depart.

The first of these revels is to be a counter tenor, an imitation (we hope) castrati who enters in a swoosh, nods to his accompanist and begins to sing arias in the most exquisitely pure and high falsetto: notes beyond belief that rise up into the blazing chandeliers and fulfill the image of being in court and hearing the new and exotic talent: this glass breaking voice that is all female in it’s range, yet the strange purity of the male castrati.

Upstairs the roulette wheel spins and wigs wag and fop as they place their bets, laugh, circle about each others elaborate beauty marks. Oh that Vegas could find this! Not all the money in oil could produce this truly rarefied decadence and timeless cinquo-Cento fingered ceilings and walls; heavy drapes, powdered smiles and raised eyebrows of acknowledged interest and boredom.

Downstairs we dance in columns to a caller wishing perhaps that this was more Prussian battle arrangement than dance: she is ignored and we spin and bow at will, and then, in the setting where it truly belongs, waltz into the mesmerizing circles and step of the eternal waltz. The Japanese designer is there with Kabuki smile and cigarettes: we take a turn on the elaborate floor: a faux couple from the extremes of east and west: male as female male: a turn about the great rooms.

Beyond the glitter and beauty, the sumptuous music and river of wine; the Lagoon rises with the full moon tide, Gondolas rock and their six toothed bows push at the wharves and stone: in St. Marks Square the water begins to bubble up from the drains and the wind howls a chill cold. Within we bask in the soft glow of candle light and make-up: the water Taxi will whisk us home safe and warm along the cold canals that have seen so many home in this state of softly drunken bliss full of the dance, music and the endless chance. Full moon over Venice: glittering light off the canals; soft calls of the last revelers: reality a dawn away.

The next day all are unmasked and the city feels as though it has shrugged off the weight of Carnivale and it is time to return to the business of pleasure as usual: the tourists are here, transient and wanting to be fed the food, sight and memories of the town.

In Vegas Mondays bring a similar sober change: the weekend gamblers and fun seekers are gone, and in their place vast crowds pour in for convention time: hotel prices treble and the city gets serious about entertaining the computer world, the “magic show” of the fashion world, the plumbers world, the dentists world: whoever it is now needs to be entertained and do the their business of convention time. In both cases these twin cities barely miss a heartbeat as they change pace. In Venice the big show is over, but the eternal show goes on. The masks are gone but the city is still it’s own mystery wrapped in a dream.

Leaving Las Vegas and leaving Venice: both have the feel of leaving an other reality to return to the normal world. Leaving Las Vegas you take Flamingo road down to Paradise avenue to get to the airport. At the gate there are still the slots with a coil of last minute gamblers smoking and pulling on the one arme’d bandits: last chance.

I leave Venice in a hurry, earlier than expected to catch a deadline. At one moment I had left passport and wallet in the drawer of the small bureau in the hotel room: I had not wanted these in my bag forcing my way through the crowds. I am up and out of the hotel by 7:30 and at Piazzale Roma bus station waiting for the number 5.

There is that last sadness of crossing those bridges for the last time: as I look back across Venice that morning I see snow on the mountains in the distance, and this day it will snow on Venice: snow on the gondolas being worked on in the yard, snow on the bridges, snow on the laundry hung across the canals, snow on the great equestrian statues, snow on the horses, lions and gargoyles. So strange to see snow here: strange as the snow we had seen on the red hills beyond Vegas. Both these cities associated with great heat, here with snow on their shoulders.

When I board the bus there is an old mad-man rambling at the station in deep conversation with himself. He has green Wellington boots, corduroys from another era, jacket and bright scarf, cane and a face like a tobacco pouch. He climbs aboard and motions me to an empty seat and continues his loud monologue interrupted by laughs and grunts. The only word I can catch in his ramble is: Catastrophe! Catastrophe!

We grind away from the station and back onto Ponte de Libertad: ahead to the left the vast oil refinery and then the sad shabby route to the airport. As we reach Marco Polo airport, the bus is just about to terminal, and still behind me “catastrophe” when the word passport passes through my mind and I see in that instant the small elegant bureau where I had put passport and wallet for safety sake. Catastrophe! There is nothing for it but to sit tight on the #5 and ride back to Venice, run across bridges and down canals weighed down by bags, back into the hotel and return: a morning marathon, and again, the #5.

In the air both cities are remembered as invisible cities: cities that are beyond reality, cities that live in memory. Vegas is being ripped down and re-built as speak: constant flux and an electric future - an image of where, heaven help us, we are going. Venice, sinking under the sea, soon will only be where we have imagined we have been.

Venice fits the way an 18th century costume fits – oh how comfortable the illusion, but today is today. What was that light? Lagoon light, desert light – first light, last light – light remembered as we make that all too real tortured slow rumbling approach over the frigid waters of Boston Harbor.