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.
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.
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…
