A "treasure hunt" can help a traveler find the real city behind the postcard scenery.
By ROBERT N. JENKINS
Published July 13, 2003
[Times photos: Robert N. Jenkins]
A fisherman prepares to take his boat from moorings in a residential canal in Dorsoduro into the Giudecca Canal.
A drain pipe skirts plaster ornamentation on an apartment building near Venice’s Ponte dell’Accademia, the bridge linking the San Marco sestiere with Dorsoduro.
Inside the Cantini del Vini gia Schiavi wine store in Dorsoduro, a worker prepares cicchetti, appetizer-sized nibbles, before the lunch crowd arrives.
VENICE - In a city that is a treasure, I am on a treasure hunt. I have a map of sorts, and it promises that the answers to its questions are in plain sight. Maybe so, but I cannot figure out three of the first four clues.
Yet no one comes to Venice and leaves without feeling richer for the experience.
As I follow my map through Dorsoduro, one of the small city's six neighborhoods called sestiere (ses-chee-AIR-ay), I double back more than once. "You are lost again?" asks a charming woman who has been hired to guide some American tourists.
"Lost" depends on how you look at my situation. With this woman's help a couple of minutes earlier, I had retraced my steps over a narrow footbridge and looked high enough to read the sign announcing the famed Peggy Guggenheim museum. But my map had taken me to the back of the waterfront mansion that holds one of Europe's great collections of contemporary art.
"She is buried here, in the garden, with her dogs," the guide, with a lilting accent, is telling her little group of tourists. In the last half of the 20th century, Guggenheim, a transplanted American, had simultaneously renovated a crumbling canalside mansion and enhanced Venice's reputation among art lovers.
So am I "lost"? No, for I am standing where my treasure map has directed me: "Continuing on, you cannot miss (obviously, I am the exception) the entrance to the famous Peggy Guggenheim Collection housed in the Palazzo Venier.
"The statue above the gate depicts St. Christopher gazing raptly at the Christ Child's head, which is . . ."
This is the clue for this stop. To finish the sentence, there appear seven blank squares; study the statue and fill in the blanks.
But the ornamental metal gate is not topped by a statue of anyone, rapt or otherwise.
I turn to my borrowed guide, showing her the oversized paperback book that was leading me through the backstreets of the Dorsoduro. (The book also has maps to each of the other sestiere.)
The guide ignores her flock, which is starting to drift away, and looks at the colorful page, drawn as if it were a child's storybook.
"Oh, I have this book! It is 20 years old! That statue is not there anymore."
I have been following an outdated map, and for this I blame the otherwise altruistic Save Venice Inc., a nonprofit organization that is supplying money to preserve or restore 55 projects in the city.
The New York-based Save Venice solicits money, and my treasure map is part of The Riddles of Venice, selling for 20 euros (about $23.60). The organization's experts first perform triage on Venice, deciding which facades or frescoes most need help. A governing board chooses among those recommendations.
To move fundraising beyond the attend-a-gala, write-a-check routine, Save Venice has published several books, such as The Riddles and 30 Lions and a Pig (a winged lion was the symbol of once mighty Venice; the pig is one of that book's riddles).
These books bring donors to the back streets and bridges beyond the St. Mark's Square landmarks of the Campanile tower, the Doge's Palace and the Basilica. If concerned people can see real-life Venice, where its citizens live, shop and pray, their interest will grow beyond the postcard scenery.
Thus, I am wandering about Dorsoduro, which lies between two large canals. Here are green grocers stacking crates, a butcher bringing his cleaver down on a cut of meat while a customer waits in the tiny shop. A fishmonger locks his front door to get an early start on the lunchtime siesta.
No siesta for Pelosin Fabio, though. He sits in his workshop behind display counters of the Peacock, where he makes and sells decorated paper. The slightly built, mustachioed Fabio glances up as the occasional browser wanders in, sorts through hand-stamped stationery, lovely little books, photo frames and even T-shirts bearing Fabio's designs.
Geppetto, I think. This man looks like a young Geppetto, at least like the man in the Disney version of Pinocchio. And is life not about to break out from Fabio's colorful designs?
Back outside the Peacock, my treasure map directs me past narrow art galleries and boutiques offering ornamental furnishings, past a television store and bookshops. In the boxes provided for answers to the book's questions, I write garden, helmet, stars, pipes and doves. The last four are plaster decorations on residence walls and a church.
I have now walked from the side of the Grand Canal, which separates Dorsoduro from the San Marco sestiere (named for St. Mark's Square) through the neighborhood to the broad Giudecca Canal.
I cross bridges over some of Venice's 177 canals, and I pause at a large home, where I read a plaque in Italian and then fill in blanks with questa casa. At the 18th century Church of the Gesuati, I learn that the architect was Giorgio Massari, and I fill in another set of boxes.
The Dorsoduro is easily revealing its secrets, until I get to a site that had been one of the infamous "mouth of the lion" decorations. These were 72 slots in walls around the medieval city; in them, in the old days, citizens could secretly place accusations of wrongdoing for review and action by a complex set of judges and officials.
Unfortunately, this lion's mouth decoration has been vandalized. I cannot read the plaque that should offer a 17-letter, four-word clue.
This is the beginning of a dry spell in my treasure hunt. For instance, at the Church of San Trovaso, I cannot discern how "the facade of its bell tower is distinguished by the pattern of a (six blank boxes) in a (six blank boxes)."
At the next stop, I can only guess the answer despite the clue that said that the color of "bricks in (nearby) buildings vary in shades of red, yellow, green and" gray?
I'm not sure I even have found the "famous Ponte dei Pugni, the Fighting Bridge, its surface marked by (10 blank boxes) on which the leading combatants from the rival factions took up their stance." The two bridges I study seem to lack anything significant.
The bridge that does reward me arches over a small canal and practically empties into the doorway of Cantini del Vini gia Schiavi. This wine store is a popular stop for cicchetti (chee-KET-tee), which are canape-sized appetizers that can make a quick lunch for the hurried Venetian but more commonly are eaten as predinner snacks. Thus, cicchetti stops are much like Spain's tapas bars.
Usually costing one euro each, these one- or two-bite items can be a slice of sausage, cheese, olive, hard-boiled egg, pate, pearl onion or combinations of them. Customers ask for or point at what they want, then tell the busy folks behind the counters what color of wine they need to wash it down. The small glasses are ombra (OOM-bruh) and also cost about a euro.
The Cantini has no seating, so customers stand at the counters, munching and talking. If they feel the need to sit, they walk out the door, take a stride or two and settle down on the steps of that bridge.
Plates on their laps, they snack, drink, chat. Simple to learn, even for someone who can pass by the Guggenheim museum while looking for it.
The Cantini is just down the canal from what has been a popular spot for tourists: one of the few remaining gondola work yards. The Riddles book even mentions it. However, the yard recently has been closed while the two canals that intersect along its borders are dredged.
I follow my map beneath countless window boxes overflowing with magenta and white blooms, by pasticceria with their display cases of pastries almost on the sidewalk. Locals and tourists eating their gelato (ice cream) pass me as I look for clues.
I answer a few more of the riddles but not quite enough to let me fill in all the blanks at the beginning of the map that complete a quotation by Lord Byron about the city.
But after a two-hour stroll along backstreets and canals, I still take away my own treasure from Venice.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: The Web site for Save Venice Inc. is savevenice.org. The e-mail address for its is newyork@savevenice.org For the on-site office, the e-mail address is venice@savevenice.org That office is immediately adjacent to the Ponte dell'Accademia, the bridge over the Grand Canal at the city's most important art museum. In Venice, call 041 52 85 247 Monday through Friday.
