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- by Patricia Glee Smith
Venezia - Step off the train and board a vaporetto (water bus), and Venice overwhelms you immediately: the soft, radiant colors, the lovely palaces along the Grand Canal, the sounds: seagulls, boat horns, lapping water, a confusion of languages, just getting to your hotel even!
At some point you'll need an antidote. Leave the guidebook behind, get lost intentionally, (not too difficult to do, plus you will only get so far anyhow), and concentrate on something which is never mentioned in the guidebooks: the shop windows.
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They are myriad, and particular to Venice. You won't find anything like them elsewhere in Italy. They will tell you something about the Venetians themselves. It's like discovering a secret vice in the seemingly sober, elegant, soft-spoken natives.
The shop windows, in fact, reveal a second nature in the form of riotous color and wild abandon. Objects are jumbled together filling every available inch of space in apparently chaotic disarray, with a magpie's taste for glitter. And yet the carelessness is misleading . . there is an innate, refined sense of color and composition at work. The abundance is intended to astonish. The effect is one of pure joy and it doesn't really matter what is being displayed. It might be glass trinkets, a rajah's jewels or a jumble of Venetian sweets. The effect is always the same: a carnival of Venice.
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--contributed by Patricia Glee Smith (see bio), accomplished artist and very involved archaeology afficionado based in Otricoli, Umbria. Click here to view her artwork.
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