Venice in Winter, With a Poet as Our Guide

New York Times

27-01-2025

By 2 a.m. we were happily lost again. Dimly illuminated arches and doorways reflected off the green canal waters. My daughter, Vivian, 16, and I were on a lion hunt in Venice, an annual occurrence for six years now.
If I felt slightly silly coming to this ancient tourist trap every year, I was comforted that arguably the world's coolest tourist, the exiled Russian, Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, did the same thing for 17 winters, resulting in what many regard as the bible of travelogues, 'Watermark,' published in 1992: 135 pages of vivid, profound, often funny impressionistic musings on the city Brodsky called 'the greatest masterpiece our species ever produced.'
Brodsky's fascination with Venice was colored by his childhood in St. Petersburg (then named Leningrad), another city of canals, where he'd lived in a communal apartment on a bustling street lined with czarist palaces. 'I, too, once lived in a city where cornices used to court clouds with statues,' he wrote.
My own attraction was shaped by a Danish childhood next to the languorous waters of the Baltic Sea. As for Viv? Strolling the city is the only endurance sport we can both participate in as equals and where the setting trumps her phone screen. She is a warrior princess here.
Venice recently made headlines for charging a 5 euro admission fee to stem the Disneyesque hordes of summer fanny packers. (The fee is supposed to double in April.) But on this March night the city was as tranquil and evocative as an ornate tomb. A whiff of frozen seaweed blew off the Adriatic. Viv mischievously pulled out her cellphone, but we use map apps only as a last resort. 'Not yet,' I said, and she put it back into her pocket.
We climbed the steps of yet another one of the city's more than 450 bridges and peered around the next alley leading to a square where, lit up like an alter, was our lion.
The marble beast called the 'Piraeus Lion' was plundered from Athens's main harbor in 1687 and was as familiar to Viv and me as the family dog. It has become a touchstone for many of our walks. The star of four mismatched marble lions guarding the Arsenale gate to the city's ancient fleet, the beast's ferocity was mitigated by our knowledge that runes were graffitied into its flanks by marauding Vikings — our kinsmen!
I suppressed the usual desire to drone on about the lion's 23-century history. Why kill intuitive beauty with data gleaned from tourist books? The real pleasure of wandering in Venice is to drown our egos in undefinable grandeur. 'The city is narcissistic enough to turn your mind into an amalgam, unburdening it of its depths,' Brodsky wrote. 'After a two-week stay — even at off-season rates — you become both broke and selfless, like a Buddhist monk.'
'The imperative of cold and brief daylight'
Throughout the 1960s, Brodsky's free-spirited personality and verses got him into hot water with the Soviet authorities, who subjected him to increasingly messy persecutions. The relatively unknown poet grew into an international cause célèbre until finally, in 1972, the Soviets booted him from the country with little more than a small leather suitcase in which he packed two bottles of vodka.
He landed in Ann Arbor, Mich., at the University of Michigan, where he continued writing prolifically as a poet in residence. When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, the charismatic writer became a literary pop star, packing lecture halls around the world with his melodic readings.
'Watermark' opens with Brodsky arriving for the first time in Venice's main train station in 1972, hoping to seduce a Russian acquaintance. She rebuffed him, but he instead became seduced by the city whose smells, surfaces, moods and tastes he would detail as tenderly as a lover's. 'Love is an affair between a reflection and its object,' Brodsky wrote. 'This is in the end what brings one back to this city.'
He returned almost every winter, when he could enjoy Venice unclouded by tourists. 'This is the season low on color and big on the imperative of cold and brief daylight,' he wrote. 'Everything is harder and more stark.'
'Part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers'
In the bohemian Dorsoduro neighborhood on the south bank of the Grand Canal, where some bars display 'No Tourist' signs, I met the American expatriate painter Robert Morgan, 82, to whom Brodsky dedicated 'Watermark.' After half a century in Venice, Mr. Morgan still works in his studio every day, painting sky blue cityscapes. He was introduced to Brodsky when both men were in their late 20s, creating a bond that lasted to the grave.
'We took to each other because we were both single exiles in love with this place,' Mr. Morgan told me. 'We walked and talked, often all night, without any big purpose, although we did tend to bump into a lot of women, cocktails and cicchetti.'
Cicchetti are Venice's version of tapas, which absolve Venice of two centuries of mediocre tourist restaurants. These snacks were also integral to Viv's and my nightly foraging routine, where instead of dining at restaurants, we wandered bar to bar nibbling fresh cod, cottony finger sandwiches, pickled vegetables and other bites to be walked off until the next worthy spot.
'Joseph joked that wherever he ate here, he knew he was eating better than the Soviet Council of People's Commissars, who had given him so much trouble,' Mr. Morgan said.
Mr. Morgan invited me up to his flat, with its bright paintings and flowers, tended to by his sparkling writer wife, Ewa, 52. Tea was served, gossip and stories shared. Brodsky's playful spirit animated his octogenarian friend. 'You could see him observing everything behind the cigarette smoke and Irish whiskey,' Mr. Morgan said. 'Always making mental notes even when entertaining an entire table.'
I wandered 10 minutes east of the Morgans' apartment to a dead-end street, Calle Querini, where, at No. 252, a salmon-colored house was the setting for a provocative literary encounter in 'Watermark.' A marble plaque above the narrow front door explained that this was where the American poet Ezra Pound lived with his mistress, Olga Rudge, while broadcasting Fascist propaganda to the United States during World War II. Brodsky wrote about squeezing through this doorway in 1977, five years after Pound's death, with his girlfriend, the writer Susan Sontag, for tea with Rudge, guarded by a three-foot phallic bust of Pound.
Although Brodsky had translated Pound to Russian in his youth, Rudge's pro-Mussolini utterances and the oppressive bust had Sontag and Brodsky hastily retreating back down this tiny street into the night. The bust is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
One morning after an all-night walk, Viv and I emerged on Piazza San Marco, Venice's main square. The pale winter sun rose across the lagoon and the weak rays unexpectedly exploded off the five domes of San Marco, turning them into lighthouses against the leaden sky.
Brodsky described winter mornings here as 'part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers,' and sure enough, the bells in the campanile began tolling for morning Mass while waiters pulled out tables and chairs from the surrounding cafes. This was our last stop, as it usually was for Brodsky, who often ended up lounging on these very chairs with a cigarette and an espresso.
Venice, forever
Brodsky's chain smoking and lifelong poor health felled him in New York at the age of 55. His Italian wife, Maria Sozzani, whom he had met just six years earlier when she was a student at one of his lectures, arranged for him to be buried on the cemetery island of San Michele just north of Venice.
The funeral was not without one last drama in this dramatic man's life. Mr. Morgan told me that he and Roberto Calasso, Brodsky's Italian publisher, went to the cemetery before the cortege floated across the lagoon and discovered the grave was adjoining none other than Pound's. 'Roberto and I told the gravediggers there's no way he could be buried there, and they hastily found a spot a few yards away. They were still digging when the coffin arrived.'
On our last evening, Viv and I jumped on a vaporetto and crossed over to San Michele, whose cypress trees towered over the island's walls like ghost sails. 'I knew what water feels like being caressed by water,' Brodsky wrote sensually about sailing to this island of death. He often tarried here among the many exiled Russians' tombs, notably the composer Igor Stravinsky and the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, where dancers still leave their worn slippers on his gravestone.
Viv and I wandered over to the familiar rounded white marble headstone at the edge of the Protestant section, where two Ukrainian women in miniskirts despite the cold were taking selfies. Brodsky seduces even from the grave.
San Michele closed at 6 p.m. and we headed back to the tiny jetty beyond the cemetery gates as Venice's night lights set the medieval towers aglow across the lagoon. The evening fog danced across the walls and around the cypress trees like ballerinas. One of San Michele's cemetery cats approached Viv while we were waiting for the vaporetto, which reminded me of a line from 'Watermark': 'I would like to live my next life in Venice. To be a cat there, anything, even a rat, but always in Venice.'
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