venezia tre

(courtney)



With the light we could be in a black and white photograph. Chiaroscuro. The Venetians love their glass not for the glass but because it is a vehicle—it is like the water everywhere, and it holds color pigment with primary exactitude, and because it is a way to carry light. Chandeliers like I’ve never seen, and everywhere. There are three chandeliers in our bedroom.

We leave Italy tomorrow at noon. Right when we don’t need to reach for our phrasebooks to help us learn how to say the basics. We have come so far since we first arrived in Rome eight days ago. We overcame the early basic confusion about how to flush Italian toilets and what the funny string is in the shower, and now if we wanted to we could subsist as we have been, knowing how to say our wants and our thank yous and knowing how to ask where something is. We learned Italian like babies, just by gathering meaning through circumstance.

LANGUAGE: Now we speak to each other in choppy English and form sentences with too many Italian-inspired adjectives. “This is a quite extraordinary piece of stone work,” I will say to Stefano. “No thank you, I would not like that glass of white wine,” he’ll say in another scenario. We emphasize all the consonants too much. Yesterday Steve helped someone on a bridge. “Gracie,” he said in Americanized Italian. “Prego,” Steve responded in Americanized Italian. Ciao. That's always CHOW in my brain, never an embedded lagoon of Italian.