sea-change:Everything was decoration in that happy city. Luxury became us. In Venice we were mesmeri
sea-change:Everything was decoration in that happy city. Luxury became us. In Venice we were mesmerised by our own entrancing vision in the mirror: the mirrors of the water and the speckled mirrors in our sumptuous bedrooms. In Venice, every boat wore at the point of its prow a lacy little spume of foam. As the world closed in upon us, we used our depleted stocks of gunpowder not to arm ourselves but for fireworks! Fortunately, we were so beautiful that we frightened our enemies; they did not think themselves good enough to conquer us. When you hear that it was necessary to forbid the Venetian laundry women to wear velvet, satin and black fox fur, you start to understand what kind of city we were then.Ah, we were a happy city! Venice had become so old that she had fallen into her second childhood and laughed at everything. We were voluble as parrots. Our hands conducted simultaneous conversations, eloquent as a pair of poets. With a flourish, we welcomed in all the self-styled counts and virgins, the fortune-tellers and the snake-oil salesmen. The very men who swept the streets sent the dust dancing in graceful arcs, tendering their brooms like slender ballerinas. We even made joy of acqua alta! We pirouetted over the passerelle with the water clucking underneath us like an old governess. We splashed and giggled even as the sea dragged our chairs and our underwear into the lagoon.The sea took all our memories and our sins away. She bestowed upon us her strange mother-of-pearl light which changed every instant and gave us a taste for lightness and infinite variety in all things. She revived us with her fresh breath upon our cheeks after we had spent ourselves in our debauches. She was always behind us or ahead of us, winking at us, showing us the futility of caution or even planning. For us, the sea was a liquid stimulant like coffee or hot chocolate. And she was everywhere. You could not close your bed curtains against her moist, lascivious sighs. You could not stop up your ears against her saucy whispers. We had Carnevale six months of the year. In our strange and beautiful masks we always had a choice of who to be. In our masks, we were accountable to no one, and we took full advantage of this. In those days Venice kept eight hundred and fifty mask-makers in business. For our masks were not merely for Carnevale. They were for the fairy tale of the everyday, to be worn every night.- Michelle Lovric, Carnevale -- source link
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