Excerpt…
Venice, December
THE BEST THAT could be said about winter in Venice was that the colder temperatures suppressed the smell of the canals. There was, however, no known advantage to the constant fogs that lay heavily on the Laguna Veneta, ghostly tentacles of which slithered up the canals to enfold the city in a chill embrace that no hearth fire however large could ease. After nearly two years spent traveling the Road, most of the journey spent in dry desert country where a day without a hot sun glaring down just meant that night had fallen, it took some getting used to, especially in the location Johanna currently occupied.
Which was the minuscule square fronting Ca’ Polo, with lesser buildings crowding the sides. She had found an alcove created by the uneven joining of two of these, bought a dark, hooded cloak that enveloped her head to foot and melted into the shadow created there, from where she observed the comings and goings of the Polo family…
…The two older Polo daughters and their husbands were the first people she identified, though she only saw them once and each couple for the exact amount of time specified by duty and no more. They arrived by private gondola, attended by personal guards, wore sumptuous clothes that shouted their worth from across the square and wooden pattens on their richly embroidered shoes to keep their feet up out of the mud. They were not noticeably grieving as they left. She didn’t see anyone who looked like the third daughter, Moreta. She didn’t see the wife, Donata, either, but that was more understandable.
Dana sez…
I traveled to Venice to research Silk and Song and hired a guide to take me to all things Marco Polo. There were very few. Well, one. Well, maybe one. Marco’s house burned down in 1596 and they built a theater on top of the foundations. Allegedly these arches are the only thing remaining Marco would have recognized.
It took an effort to conjure the bustling boomtown of Venice as Johanna would have seen it from the dead city Venice is today, a faint and shabby echo of past glory.
Yes, yes, I have friends who call me a Philistine for saying so, but every night it’s like that John Denver song about Toledo, where ‘They roll up the sidewalks precisely at ten/And the people who live there are not seen again.’ In Venice that’s because everyone who works there closes up shop at 5pm and gets on a boat for the mainland and their real lives. Venice today is for tourists (great shopping, for sure) and history buffs, and novelists who are trying to catch a glimpse of those splendid, far-off days. And if you want to see it you better get there quick because it is sinking, slowly but inexorably, into the Adriatic.