My favourite things in Venice

Just returned from a long weekend in Venice. By a wide margin the best new thing I encountered was the art of Ludovico de Luigi, a Venetian painter/sculptor apparently classified a "svedutist" (I would simply say surrealist, or per Gil Bruvel visionary). It was also good to get another look at Magritte's Empire of Light (the only really good piece in the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which I visited in search of Max Ernst; odd that Peggy Guggenheim could have been married to Ernst yet collect relatively weak examples of his work, there was nothing there in the same league as his Eye of Silence or Europe After the Rain). Both the small room in the Doge's palace containing the majority of Hieronymus Bosch's significant output and Rodin's Thinker simply lying around on a staircase in a minor museum that I only really visited to admire the building itself were pleasant surprises. Seafood in Venice was unsurprisingly excellent, especially Osteria di Santa Marina, though the sushi I had (at Mirai) was only passable by London standards (see eg Cafe Japan in Golder's Green); I was unmoved by the endless parade of carnival masks in the shop windows, but I found the apparent convention of numbering all the buildings in the city sequentially from one to about six thousand inexplicably charming; I'm always surprised by the high quality of Italian wine (about which I know next to nothing so consistently assume, erroneously, that I won't particularly like); and while there I happened to read The Blade Itself, a xmas present from my dear friend Adam, which is the best book I've read so far this year and recommend to fans of Robin Hobb, George R R or China Mieville.

Comments

[Rick]

"Rodin's Thinker simply lying around on a staircase in a minor museum"

Nah, the Thinker is at the Rodin Museum in Paris (dull place), although there are 10 or 20 or more copies around the world - including one in our own dear Bankside Powerstation.