Good day cuz and ‘tis a fine day to be abroad, ‘tis not. Let us sally forth and climb the ramparts grand and take good from evil, making merry whilst we do so!
Why, you might ask, are we be-decked in Shakespearean prose? Well it’s Trinity examining time again and the powers that be have seen fit to send me to the north of Italy around Venice and Verona. So we have literary history at every turn: Merchants, moors, Montagues and mavericks. Even a few gentlemen and a Jew besides. Not that a Jew can’t be a gentleman, naturally...
After flying into Venice on a balmy Sunday afternoon, I made all haste to Treviso, known locally as ‘little Venice’. Regarding this, it’s certainly more a ‘little Venice’ than London’s ‘Little Venice’ but perhaps less of an actual ‘little Venice’ than a little town near Venice. Maybe a case of excessive ellipsis, me thinks. The picture to the left shows the River Sile, one of the two rivers the town’s canals feed from. Maintaining the literary thread, Dante conveniently described the spot just down from the picture where the two rivers meet:And where the Cagnan and the Sile meet,there’s one in power who goes with head held high:
the net to catch him is already made.
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, IX.49-51
Perhaps the pastoral theme was taken a bit far when they were decorating the hotel I was billeted in: the room was kitted out in a nightmarish style of ‘Downton Abbey floral drawing room meets Laura Ashley in a chintzy mood’. The picture doesn’t really do justice to how floral it is, nor how offensive it is when waking up to it in the morning after too much of the local ‘house red’.
On the topic of wine, I am finding that the habit of ordering wine by the half litre much better than ordering a ½ or whole bottle. Half is never enough and a whole bottle just tips me over at dinner, and so the ‘mezzo’ of house wine fits the bill admirably. Not sure what Othello’s Cassio (quote at the top) would make of that, mind, but being a ladies’ man he might like the sculpture I describe next:
Of the many find statues there are in Treviso, one in particular stands out - this one of a lady, who in times of celebration, spouts wine from her bosom. And yet it gets better still: one bosom pours forth white wine; the other bosom pours forth red, so you can choose from which to sup, so to speak.
Since originally posting this, a colleague (thank you, Yvert) has suggested that if this were a sculpture of Anne Boleyn, who was rumoured to have had three breasts, you could pop a rosé in there, too. Now there’s a thought for the curators at Hampton Court Palace.
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