...and, well, Venice

Italy was not the most impressive place on the trip. Both Venice and Rome were filled with two types of people, both largely disagreeable: the tourists and the Italians.

In Venice we stayed at a campground across the water in a place called Fusina. Camping Fusina. We arrived about 7pm and so didn’t have time to go into town that first night. The campground was decent. It was really cheap. 14 dollars a night for a “cabin”. There were tent sights and trailer hook ups available as well. Two restaurants, a bar and Internet service. A boat left from across the street to Venice and it was pretty cheap also. It only ran until 10pm though, so the first night we ate at a restaurant at the campsite. I was stoked to have real Italian food made by real Italians. In Italy, most of the restaurants are Italian. The food was mediocre; it was a campsite restaurant after all. But the wine, the wine was awesome. A cheap red house.

After the meal we went and sat outside and had a few beers from the bar. We met some people and I took their picture. Drank a few beers not nearly as good as the wine. On the way back to the cabin we found one of the restaurants had turned into a dance club. We went in and had another beer. Hope met some Australians on a huge bus tour. We hung out for a while. Hope got sick and went to bed and I stayed and bullshitted with the Australians. Good bunch of people. Most of them were blue collar, electricians and carpenters and the like.

The next day we got up early to catch the first boat into Venice. It was a thirty-minute trip across the water and it was a brilliant way to enter Venice.

Venice, early morning ferry ride


I found Venice to be architecturally charming. The canals, the bridges, the jagged streets and winding alleys. I enjoyed navigating the city, although I found it really difficult to keep my bearings. Eventually, I began to navigate from Campo to Campo and Piazza to Piazza. I would say, I want to go to this place. That will take me through this campo and this piazza and then it’s right there.







I was in Venice to attend the Architecture Biennale. I was pretty stoked for this event. In my mind it sort of means something larger then it is in reality. There is a Biennale every year. But it alternates between architecture and art. Essentially, for the architecture anyway, there is a theme and each country produces an installation based on that theme. This year, the theme was Cities. In addition to the country pavilions, there was a large exhibit about the cities of the world and the importance of understanding the urban environment. This was cool. There was also an exhibit about stone architecture that was great.

Urban Exhibit


I organized this adventure to the Biennale because Sverre Fehn designed the Nordic Pavilion and so I went to take pictures of it and draw it.





I even talked my way into the back rooms and took some photos of the bathroom.



The building was beautiful. Simple, gracious. Not perfect. I went back twice, and the second day I met ladies who got the pavilion ready into the morning. (They are the ones who let me into the backrooms.) Their job was to clean up the pigeon crap off the floor since the pavilion was not closed to the outside, the joist being exposed on the ends, pigeons made their nest there in the night. But still, the place was inspired. It’s one of the first buildings I encountered by Fehn when I began architecture.

The exhibits as a whole I found lacking a certain passion. A few stood out, though. The American exhibit was all about the devastation in New Orleans and Mississippi with some urban solutions to building in flood regions. This was both touching and well done. I also liked the Korean exhibit. They had a series of boxes that opened like books. They were on a shelf incorporated into an undulating wall. There were several sets marked by different colors. Each box contained some artifact from a different place in Seoul. But the exhibit I found the most intriguing was the French (Which continues my theme of thinking France rocks.) They had built a little community in their pavilion called Metavilla.







It was different work/live spaces built out of scaffolding. There was a kitchen, a nest of sleeping spaces, some work areas, a TV space, and on the roof were the showers, bathrooms and sauna. And they had people working and living there as part of the exhibit.

I went two days because the first day my battery ran out while I was taking pictures of the Fehn’s building and the other battery was back at the cabin in my backpack. Hope didn’t go the first day because she wanted to go to Murano. Murano is a glassblowing island off of Venice. So I met her in the afternoon. The second day Hope didn’t go either, because it wasn’t that interesting for the twenty bucks it cost to get in. I met her in the afternoon again at a restaurant on a campo. We started drinking wine at 3 and stayed there until after 7. Drinking wine all afternoon on campo in Venice, it turns out, is one of my favorite things to do. All the people with their families come out and inhabit the square. There were few tourists. It was really pleasant.

We were in Venice for three nights. And then we flew to Rome. Also full of two types of people.