There are over forty rooms in this house, and that’s not counting the mezzanine and the attic – various servants’ quarters and store rooms and such. My friends, when they are in Venice, which is ever more rare, so rare in fact that it is almost never, reside in the middling sized rooms in the southern wing, respectable rooms, with Southern exposure, and not too large, with 3 meter ceilings, which all makes them easier to heat and get around in. After all, who in this day and age, wants to walk several minutes just to get to his library?
Personally, I can’t help feeling their decision is – well – modern (so as not to say middle class): practical, comfortable, and casual. But I, since I was free to choose any room I liked, chose the Portego – the classical Venetian state room. It is on the third level of the house, the first being the damp sea level, which includes the boat parking, the second – the mezzanine – the servants quarters. The Portego is the size of a small football field (I should guess, not having ever been to one), has 12 meter ceilings, and two galleries, one on each side of the room. Once, when balls were given here, the orchestra was placed here while the lords and ladies danced below. The southern and northern walls, under the galleries, each have a set of titanic doors in them which lead to other sections of the house while the east and west walls each have a row of tall, ogee-arched windows: one gives out on the Canal, the other on the inner courtyard. The courtyard is a deep broad well, very classical, complete with Doric columns and life-sized Roman emperors in Carrara marble. (One, I am told, is a Canova).
The walls of the Portego, peeling in places, are covered with faded frescoes by Morleiter, which are, for the most part, difficult to make out. There is also magnificent plaster work, largely in bad repair, of mother of pearl shells, olive branches, and broad leafy plant I have decided must be cabbage. From the ceiling, also covered with plaster work and faded frescoes – the usual apotheosis of the resident family – chubby ladies and gentlemen rendered unhealthy looking by years of hard living, receiving obeisance of Apollo and the Muses, as far as I have been able to make it out – there hang two fantastically twisty Murano chandeliers, like gigantic snowflakes, each the size of a compact car. Though they had been wired for electricity early in the 20th century, I have been unable to get them lit.
I had the bed brought in – a large 16th century job, heavy as all creation, reddish orange with a moth-eaten white and gold brocade baldachino – and placed smack in the middle of the Portego, feet facing east. The first light of the breaking day, coming in through the lead glass windows, wakes me by glowing dimly into my morning dreams. When I fall asleep the ceiling frescoes, briefly ripped out of darkness by the swinging lights of passing boats, look down upon me several times an hour.
The desk I placed at the window – that way I can get a passable wireless signal for this laptop – as well as have good writing light all day, regardless of weather.
The only other room, if you can call it that, which I use with any frequency, is the balcony on top floor. It is a good place to sunbathe on a warm day since the house is bigger than all the surrounding structures. All I can see from there, when lying down, is the open sky. Last week I had the tub brought up there and bathed deliciously in soapy froth under the two faux Egyptian obelisks which grace the roof.
The Canal in front is quite busy all day; there hangs over it a constant hum of hundreds of internal combustion engines laboring their way up, down, and across. But come 8 PM, the traffic thins out to the occasional water bus, and it becomes very quiet and very dark indeed. With the exception of the few houses used for government offices or museums, which shut down at night, and the very few waterfront hotels, most houses in the Grand Canal are shuttered up. The city’s heart – the Canal – has been dead at night these 50 or 60 years.
I like to sit by the Canal windows – the panes are made of the bottle-bottom kind of glass, which admits light but no vision – watching the dusk gather in. Only when it gets very dark do I light a desk top chandelier – I decided against electrical light after the first few nights – and take it to the bed. There, I place it on a chair next to the state bed, crawl into the damp, cold sheets, and read. Or just look up through the 12 meters of darkness and the vague shapes of my friends’ ancestors graciously receiving homage of the gods. Every quarter of an hour a sweep of the oblique light of a passing boat brings them back into vision: fifteens seconds of immortality for a family now dead two hundred years.
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