degli Specchieri. I have a ticket tomorrow to the famed opera house La Fenice, where I am going to hear a Beethoven symphony, and this morning, after the clanging seven a.m. bells from San Marco’s cathedral awakened me, I called in at the famous open-air market where I touched a velvety octopus and bought a kilo of wild strawberries.
I spent yesterday exploring the Giudecca, having been transported over the blue waters to the island by the Cipriani Hotel’s private launch that I breezed onto as though I were one of their guests. Once moored at the dock, I accepted the outstretched hand offered by a handsome Italian attendant, made my way along the pathway, and settled into the cushiony softness of a couch overlooking the bay, where I was soon sipping a delectable fresh peach cocktail. Later I made sure that one of the ripe peaches, growing in their private orchard, somehow found its way into my handbag. Ah, I had not really changed since 1972 when, along with a fellow student of Maestro Alexandre Lagoya, I had taken the overnight train to this magical city and mischievously swept into our knapsack an orange from a distracted merchant. Was I still that same girl, bubbling with wanderlust and ambition that had taken me around the world? How had I survived all my international adventures, my gypsy lifestyle, my trail of broken hearts, and my recent roller coaster years struggling to reinvent my career?
Today I had lunch in the Hotel Rialto, where thirty years ago my mother and I had stayed after a Mediterranean cruise aboard the Royal Viking Sky, on which I had given a concert. Even though we had no hotel reservations anywhere, I had promised her a couple of nights in Venice and a gondola ride. Luckily, Fortune smiled upon us that evening. Today the hotel café was jammed with tourists, but a young family from Pamplona offered me a seat at their table and, after we started chatting in Spanish, brought me over a caffè macchiato for which they refused to let me pay — ah, Europe, and the spontaneous generosity of random strangers that I well remembered from my youth.
After lunch, I strolled by the Hotel Danieli, where in the nineties I had stayed with my parents before we boarded the Seabourn Pride cruise ship that took us to Istanbul and the Black Sea. At dusk I called in for a drink in Harry’s Bar, that renowned watering hole of the international set where I had once chatted with the famous Colombian artist, Fernando Botero. As evening cast its long shadows along the canals, I passed the bobbing wooden gondolas and took a leisurely stroll along the seafront.
What had lured me back to Venice? Why did I keep returning to this special city? “Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go,” Truman Capote once wrote. Yes, for me Venice had always been a visual and sensual feast, but much like my beloved San Miguel de Allende it was also a familiar place where I felt safe wandering around on my own.
I thought back to the three crazy days in 1998 when I had flown here with my Hungarian videographer, Adam Soch, so he could film me playing Vivaldi’s “Allegro” and Albinoni’s haunting “Adagio.” We were seeking an unusual image for a scene, and in a moment of artistic inspiration I had purchased an inexpensive guitar to float in the Grand Canal. This we did, to the consternation of my fans, who had been horrified to see a fragile classical guitar drifting out to sea. They believed I had tossed one of my instruments along with my music scores into the waves! After fishing it out of the water and drying it off, Adam and I had donated the guitar to a local music school, which had gratefully accepted our gift.
Yesterday Ludovico de Luigi, one of Italy’s most renowned painters and bronze sculptors, someone I had met years ago with my former husband, had invited me into his chaotic, dusty art studio, a place where Tomaso Albinoni had once lived. He later walked with me over the bridge to Campo San Barnaba and the candle-scented church in which the composer of one of my favourite pieces of music was buried.
Venice had been home to so many timeless composers, from Albinoni to Marcello, from Cimarosa to Rossini, and of course to Antonio Vivaldi, who had founded a music school for orphaned girls. How connected I had always felt to this city’s rich musical past.
The Caffè Florian orchestra was now paying homage to Ennio Morricone, one of Italy’s greatest film composers, whose score to The Mission had inspired “Concerto of the Andes,” which I had commissioned from the talented Québécois composer Richard Fortin, who for a decade had been my musical assistant. After that came Bacalov’s magical theme to Il Postino, a film about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who in 1973 had drawn a little flower in my poetry book and whose cliffside house in Isla Negra I had later visited.
This was followed by Carlos Gardel’s “El Dia que me Quieras,” an Argentinian classic to which I had often danced tango in Miami and once in Buenos Aires. “The Girl from Ipanema” could not help but remind me of my steamy afternoon spent on Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro and the previous unforgettable day when my concert hall had caught on fire!
My Rio memories fade as the orchestra begins to play “La Paloma.” The melodic strains take me back to my rendering of that beautiful song, which I played in Ottawa for the President of Mexico, José López Portillo, who waxed poetic that he had “not been listening to the hands of a guitarist, but the wings of an angel.”
Today a mish-mash of tourists sit drinking aperitifs or having dinner. Visitors have been coming here since 1720, when Caffè Florian first opened. Over the centuries the world’s literati, painters, sculptors, and sightseers have flocked to this particular café in the huge square that Napoleon had called “the world’s greatest living room.” Nijinsky and Diaghilev had lingered here, savouring pastries while observing the Italian officers who paraded past, their black capes catching the breeze. Casanova used to frequent the café in search of beautiful women while Goethe, Marcel Proust, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens had come to the café to sip coffee, exchange gossip, read the morning papers, and admire the Venetian signorinas.
• • •
While the orchestra in the Florian takes a short break, the strains of “Dark Eyes” floats into San Marco from the orchestra across the piazza, and I am instantly back in the Kremlin where I heard the Soviet Army Chorus perform that classic folk song minutes after I had played “Granada” — this on the very New Year’s Eve when the old Soviet Union had broken apart and Moscow had exploded with the most amazing fireworks I had ever seen.
Now the orchestra’s eclectic menu resumes with “As Time Goes By.” How appropriate, I mused. For me time had indeed flown. Venice was a place that, for some reason, kept drawing me back, and each time it seemed that I was living a different chapter in my life.
• • •
I recalled first arriving here by train from Nice when I was a penniless student; once exploring with my father who was mesmerized by Venice’s beauty; and more than a dozen years ago renting a palazzo on the Grand Canal for three weeks with my elegant, well-travelled then-husband, John B. Simon. How after all of those visits had Venice still maintained its allure? Perhaps it was the evocative picture Ernest Hemingway had first planted in my teenage brain when I read his book Across the River and into the Trees. Perhaps it was those shimmering, watery Canaletto scenes, the early morning mists, the narrow streets, the charming little stone bridges, the striped shirted gondoliers singing “Santa Lucia” for the thousandth time and the vaporetti that churned back and forth along the Grand Canal. Perhaps it was the whispered stories of Venice’s floods, the dreaded acqua alta, the doomsday predictions that her very survival as a city was threatened once the polar caps had melted and the waters of the lagoon flooded the city. Time and death seemed to have haunted these winding streets and plazas since the great cholera epidemic of 1911, which Visconti had immortalized in his cinematic masterpiece of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, using the powerful music of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.
Tragically Venice, the dream city on the Adriatic, was now threatened by an insidious invasion of cruise ships disgorging hordes of camera-toting tourists who were destroying a way of life for many of the city’s long-time residents. Many of them had been forced to relocate to the mainland
