a most improbable city…

Venice, that city of Pietro and Tullio Lombardo, Mario Coducci, Jacapo Sansavino… that most serene republic that floats upon the waters of a lagoon – her memory and desire are in the water… that city whose myths of origins and saints confront her pilings, stones, cisterns, campi, bridges, and canals – distance seems to collapse… that labyrinthine city of endless courtyards, campi, streets, and canals contain vast treasures and her eventual death…

After the Piazza at San Marco, we constructed a diagram: a line between the Doge's Palace and the Rialto linking the civic and religious center of the city with its engine of commerce and trade – beginning at the mouth of the Grand Canal and crossing it at the Rialto Bridge. Storytellers and historians weave their stories between these two points and between the mainland and the Adriatic. But, they are not ends, for they form a continuous loop whose cycles and continuity founded and preserved the city for centuries.

We followed the work of the Lombardo's – enraptured by Santa Maria Mirocoli (a "jewel box" indeed). We traced, in Istrian stone and marble, plaster and brick, the movement of Mario Coducci. We tried to decipher the thought of Sansovino and Scomozzi. In all of these architects and others, we found the threads of the narratives that constitute Venice.

And Scarpa…! Ah! that most excellent Venetian! He followed us in our passage and his voice seemed to resonate in the glass or Murano, the weightlessness of the facades along the Grand Canal, the careful way that the palaces and houses touched the water…

It may be the case that we will never leave Venice. Now that we have entwined ourselves around its images and stories, we may have become them or they us.