Venice – Experiences

Venice is the city of love and death in literature and in movies. My favorite movie about Venice is “Summertime” from 1955 with my beloved extraordinary beauty Katherine Hepburn. I have seen it a hundred times. Enjoy it. They’re still selling the red goblets…

Our hotel was full of Belle Epoque funiture and a bit shabby, too.

Lying in this bed we recognized that the ceiling was completely made out of golden mirrors, very hot.

Of course Venice is much more crowed than in the old movies, but it still has its magic. We tried to move anticyclical to the tourist masses and we found a lot of lonely places that way. First we stept into a little gay shop full of funny dramatic decoration and opera music. I loved this little rabbits hat:

And the town made me an unexpected birthdaypresent – the Diana Vreeland Exhebition. I just finished reading the “Allure” book about the great trendsetter, so I couldn’t wait to see something from her work on HARPER´S BAAZAR and VOGUE or something from her spectaculary privat life.

Sadly taking photographs was forbidden inside of the bad illuminated Fortuny Museum. But see what I did anyhow:

One of her favorite private outfits back in the 30s.

What a wig! I need this for OPALICON.

My friend bought me the exhibition catalog full of great fashion illustrations from the 40s to the 70s – love it, have to post some scans soon. If you like Diana Vreeland too, watch the great movie “Funny Face” with Kay Thomson playing the character Meggy Prescott – who is inspred by Diana.

 taken from here

The only plan I made at home was to visit the palazzo of Peggy Guggenheim, because I read two books about her and I wanted to see her collection of sunglasses, her collection of earrings and something that illustrated the excentric picture of her that I had in my mind. But there was nothing like that.

taken from here

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection  “just” included great paintings and sculputes from the last century. But they had the original paintings of Max Ernst, an artist I adore and so did Peggy, she was in love with this beautiful man for a while.

Max Ernst:The Robing of the Bride from 1940

Thank you Peggy, as a lady born with a silverspoon in hand you did well to promote all these great artists and your palazzo is the most beautiful. So RIP next to your puppies.

After we had seen all this it was time for good food, and the Italian knows how to do. One of the pink ones was my birthday cake. Enjoyed whit lots of Aperol Sprizzes, THE Venize drink!,

To round up the experiences, we had come a bit closer to the death theme in Venice. For that we had to go to the Cemetri – an island just full of graves. It was so special and silent there. I admired the pictures on the graves from peoples gone by in the WWII time.

The Entrée

 

The green field on her grave was 
filled with little blue forget-me-nots.

The Russian art critic and former of the Ballett russe Diachilew 

had lots of flowers and ballett shoes on his tombstone.

Sitting on a bench in the shadow we talked about our lives and what we both want to change in the next year: more effort to the career, losing weight and say once more to our loved ones at home, how big their meaning is to us.

We left the “Island of the Dead” via watertaxi, felt the sun and the wind in our faces a bit more intensive as we did before and we had a deep happiness in our hearts about beeing just alive!

Venice, I will surely come back…