Venezia e' un pesce

Venice is a city full of contrasts, especially the light.  As dark and brooding as the nights are, as shadowy the corners are, there are moments of truly luminous light.  You walk through a dark alley and are emptied out into a piazza overlooking the lagoon, where the light is so brilliant you must blindly search your bag for your Persols.

This photo was an obvious mistake of overexposure, but I love how it came out.  Sometimes mistakes make the most dreamy photos, isn't it true? 

Now walk around the corner and you had better take off your occhiali.  This is the cavernous galleria housing the fish market, where I found some of the most fresh fish I've seen since the back of my father's boat.  Maybe we can try a local Tocai at that bacaro across the street?

Let's duck into the inumbrated palazzo of the great Fortuny.  Even the courtyard reflects his almost ghostly sense of style...

Now let's end the day on Giudecca, the outer island of Venice, where the true Venetian still lives, and where you can still find fishermen picking through their nets like back home, and where the salty smell of low tide makes you painfully homesick for Point Judith, which is something you never thought you'd ever say.

As you can see, I quickly became infatuated with Venice.  But I think it was it's relationship with the sea which I loved the most.  And as I told my parents in their postcard, 'You can take the boy out of New England, but you can't take the New England out of the boy...'