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Click on images to enlarge | © Pablo Luis González 1987 |
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Verona • Venezia Photographs can be used at no charge for non-commercial purposes, ie, community groups, students, schools, etc. To request an image or images email me with a description and location of the photograph(s), stating your proposed use of them. A JPEG file(s) at 300 dpi will be emailed back as soon as possible. No further copies can be made without the permission of the copyright holder. |
Milano airport was where I landed on September 1987, during the early evening. An Ecuadorian stonemason, on his way to an international exhibition of stone being held in Verona, was one of my companions in the bus from the airport to the city centre. We finally managed to get into a hotel with a tiny lift; the city was crowded, as usual we were told, with some international event or the other. We slept in the room occupied by the night attendant, a university student revising all night for an exam he was taking the following morning, law, if I remember well. Wine, wine, wine... The word kept spinning in my head as we travelled next morning by coach to Verona across the lazy vineyards of Valpolicella country. A couple of German marble slabs became my rather heavy companions for the rest of my travels through Italy, finally ending embedded in my kitchen tops. The snobbery of international events, an unwelcome guest, stayed firmly behind, sulking. "So many Juliets... yet no Romeos in sight!" the heavy afternoon seemed to sigh in that house in Via Cappello, Juliet's house. The afternoon continued in the serene calm of Castelvecchio, where the elegant and precise architectural interventions by the Venetian Carlo Scarpa recoiled under my insistent gaze, the penetrating lens being not far behind. An exchange of portraits with Sylvia and Alexandra followed in Venezia, two children playing in the Campo di Santa Maria Formosa, a wisp of a square befriended by canals, crouching behind the basilica of San Marco, where I had gone persecuting Scarpa's work at the Querini Stampalia, a palazzo that had been converted into an art gallery. I was staying in a hostel in Treviso run by a comrade of the Italian Communist party, an affable and supportive man also making a living from the working class bar and restaurant attached to the house; travelling by railroad to Venice, the lagoon jumping to embrace and engulf us every morning as we approached the city, the ample steps of the station caressing the waters of the Gran Canal; a black thong soon disappearing into the labyrinth, the girl bending barely still long enough for the pencil to scratch its marks on the rugged surface of the paper. "I want a cab! Where are the cabs?" the American woman, complete with innumerable baggage and canary yellow trouser suit, was crying as she stood on top of the steps, surveying in distress the scene that had opened in front of the pink vamp shades perched on her nose, the shrill of her voice drilling into the hulls of the boats gently rocking below. "Madam, the cabs are there, they're boats!" Drawings » Comment »
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