Notes from the North 3 2024

 I didn’t think I’d write another post from Venice but here I am on my very last day before I ride more trains through the Alps back to France once more. I was prompted to this after reading about Niccolo Tommaseo 

whose statue stands proud and high in the Campo Santo Stefano, right by the Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. 

His back is turned to a pile of weighty books. Those are just some of the eight volumes he wrote between 1861 and 1874, il Dizionario della Lingua Italiana. I could hardly fail to celebrate a lexicographer, especially one of such industry, after my own many years of dictionary writing. Tommaseo was a Dalmatian Italian and is considered by many to be a precursor of the Italian irredentism (I got that from Wikipedia).

Now irrendentism is another word I have had to contend with while being here – first of all to learn what it means and then to reckon with its power in the fluctuating and often disputed lands of central Europe. This I suppose, can be considered one of the benefits of getting off an island to appreciate at closer hand how it feels to live on a very large land mass where rivers and mountains are often what shape the outline of countries on a map.

 

Venice has been decaying and sinking for a long time now but it does so with grace on the whole, albeit with too many tourists and too many little boats racing up and down the canal grande. I have seen so much beauty – on walls, ceilings and in unfrequented, or at least quiet, corners of this city. Here are some images I’ll take away with me. 






The mimosa is flowering out of walled gardens, cascades of yellow blossom presaging warmer days.  




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