Brian H. Appleton
01-16-2008, 10:59 AM
The last time I went to Venice I was five years old in 1955. I can remember standing in Saint Mark's Square feeding hard dry corn kernels to pigeons from a little newspaper cone that an old white haired lady had sold to me for 100 liras like a scene from Mary Poppins. Feeding the pigeons was such a happiness and simple pleasure enjoyed by the young and the old and I never tired of it. Like all small children I also liked to run at pigeons while they speeded up their pace until I succeeded into getting just close enough for them to suddenly burst into flight...there was something thrilling for a little boy to see the flurry of feathers and wings and hear their high pitched whirring.
I remember having icecream at Florens Cafe at the far end of the square... Some friends of mine went there for icecream, all the way from the West Coast, just a few summers ago, like nothing had changed.
In fact I remember going for a gondola ride right under the Bridge of Sighs. Then later, while touring the dungeon there, looking out the little window from inside the bridge, which I had seen from below in the gondola before. We had our friend Harry along with us on this trip to help him get over the death of his first wife, whose surgeon had not gotten the message about her allergy to penicillin. He never let on to us children, his great sadness. In fact he was quite the jolly fellow and whenever there was a Harry's Bar, he would always tease the management about being Harry.
We were there for the regatta. I remember that we were packed into boats in many rows along the edges of the Grand Canal, so that there was no way to get to shore until it was over. Occasionally some young man in a boat moored even further out into the canal would leap into its brown water to relieve himself...don't know how all the poor women,with their smaller bladders managed to hold on in the crowd of boats until the race was all over...
From time to time a canoe or two would paddle by with two young men in each vessal, dressed like Sioux plains Indians with long feathered head-dresses, war paint on their faces and bare chests...of course I always took the side of the Indians in the '50's Cowboy movies and was thrilled that they had shown up at the Regatta. However the water police had different ideas and as the canoes wandered too close to the restricted main channel of the canal, where the racing boats were to pass, the water cannons were turned on them, which were so strong that the canoes capsized putting my red Indians into the primordeal soup...it was like a scene from Peter Pan...and for the few minutes of intense cheering from the crowd which accompanied the passing racing barges even with all their gilded finery and heaving howing rowing men, the Indians blown over by the water cannons caught more of my little boy fancy...
The last thing I remember from that trip was going on a tour of the Doges Palace. They were setting up for an outdoor concerto in the middle of a large marble paved courtyard. A seemingly endless row of metal folding chairs were leaning one against the other like dominoes but tethered together by a long rope waiting to be unfolded and arranged.
I don't remember specifically bumping into them or touching them but of a sudden they all went down....crashing down one after another in the echoing marble courtyard with an unearthly rucus like some Python monster of Grecian mythological antiquity and proportion, roaring in a cavern beneath the earth...I remember being so embarrassed and so scared by the sound and worried about being reprimanded by the custodians, that I ran and hid under my mother's beige long coat,next to her in it. We must have looked reminiscent of one of those horse pantomimes with our four legs sticking out from under the coat's edge...
It seemed like the echoe from the clatter of the chairs just roared on and on without showing any signs of diminishing but I guess eventually it did long after we had snuck out of pallace.
So that was Venice at the age of five,
Brian H. Appleton
ps. that's me feeding the pigeons on my CD of children's songs I cut last Christmas called: "For the Kid in You..."
I remember having icecream at Florens Cafe at the far end of the square... Some friends of mine went there for icecream, all the way from the West Coast, just a few summers ago, like nothing had changed.
In fact I remember going for a gondola ride right under the Bridge of Sighs. Then later, while touring the dungeon there, looking out the little window from inside the bridge, which I had seen from below in the gondola before. We had our friend Harry along with us on this trip to help him get over the death of his first wife, whose surgeon had not gotten the message about her allergy to penicillin. He never let on to us children, his great sadness. In fact he was quite the jolly fellow and whenever there was a Harry's Bar, he would always tease the management about being Harry.
We were there for the regatta. I remember that we were packed into boats in many rows along the edges of the Grand Canal, so that there was no way to get to shore until it was over. Occasionally some young man in a boat moored even further out into the canal would leap into its brown water to relieve himself...don't know how all the poor women,with their smaller bladders managed to hold on in the crowd of boats until the race was all over...
From time to time a canoe or two would paddle by with two young men in each vessal, dressed like Sioux plains Indians with long feathered head-dresses, war paint on their faces and bare chests...of course I always took the side of the Indians in the '50's Cowboy movies and was thrilled that they had shown up at the Regatta. However the water police had different ideas and as the canoes wandered too close to the restricted main channel of the canal, where the racing boats were to pass, the water cannons were turned on them, which were so strong that the canoes capsized putting my red Indians into the primordeal soup...it was like a scene from Peter Pan...and for the few minutes of intense cheering from the crowd which accompanied the passing racing barges even with all their gilded finery and heaving howing rowing men, the Indians blown over by the water cannons caught more of my little boy fancy...
The last thing I remember from that trip was going on a tour of the Doges Palace. They were setting up for an outdoor concerto in the middle of a large marble paved courtyard. A seemingly endless row of metal folding chairs were leaning one against the other like dominoes but tethered together by a long rope waiting to be unfolded and arranged.
I don't remember specifically bumping into them or touching them but of a sudden they all went down....crashing down one after another in the echoing marble courtyard with an unearthly rucus like some Python monster of Grecian mythological antiquity and proportion, roaring in a cavern beneath the earth...I remember being so embarrassed and so scared by the sound and worried about being reprimanded by the custodians, that I ran and hid under my mother's beige long coat,next to her in it. We must have looked reminiscent of one of those horse pantomimes with our four legs sticking out from under the coat's edge...
It seemed like the echoe from the clatter of the chairs just roared on and on without showing any signs of diminishing but I guess eventually it did long after we had snuck out of pallace.
So that was Venice at the age of five,
Brian H. Appleton
ps. that's me feeding the pigeons on my CD of children's songs I cut last Christmas called: "For the Kid in You..."