Shopping and Art

Shopping is fun for Lyn. I’m not talking expensive boutiques which don’t display prices here: more market stalls and supermarkets. Our first excursion for today was Rialto markets, near the famous bridge. This is mostly fruit stalls and fish markets. Lyn delighted in buying veggies here and then inflicted her Italian on the man in the cheese shop. It didn’t matter that she probably paid over the odds because the fun was in the process. Some of the photos below show the everyday life of the Grand Canal, the transport artery for a city which needs cargo barges and emergency service boats like other cities need trucks and ambulances.

On the way home Lyn went to the supermarket. The little differences fascinate: how food is handled and weighed, how to pay and receive change and how to get served at the deli. Meanwhile I went to my favourite shop in Venice, Tre Mercanti, where they make and sell tiramisu. We returned to our apartment with the loot and sat down for a light lunch while we watched the wedding of Harry and Meghan on Italian TV.

Our afternoon excursion was to see the Peggy Guggenheim collection. Peggy was an American millionaire who created one of the world’s great collections of modern art. She housed the collection, herself and some of the artists she patronised, in a mansion on the Grand Canal. She challenged herself at one point to buy one artwork every day. She also claimed to have had over a 1000 lovers. (This is less than one a day but that assumes she only loved them once. I’m also assuming, perhaps wrongly, one at a time.)

The mansion is beautiful and the art was challenging, interesting, good, wonderful, dumb, irritating and many other things - it is modern art after all. I continue to be haunted by Year 10 art lessons. Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ was there. We walked home, browsing jewellery stalls and eating a giant piece of pizza en route. Sadly the most beautiful bridge in Venice, Ponte de l'Academia, is wrapped in scaffolding so it was good to get similar views from Peggy’s front porch.

On the way back Lyn expressed the thought that, if she had millions of dollars she would be happy to buy an art collection, patronise up and coming artists and live in a mansion on the Grand Canal. Lovers were not discussed.