Venice itself is inspiring, a temptation and a place marked by cinema and literature, since everything in it tells stories that are daydreams and stories about love and desolation, like that dreamlike and disturbing Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann and directed by Luchino Visconti and that moved us, while Venice enveloped Gustav von Achenbach to death because “whoever has contemplated beauty with his eyes will be condemned to seduce it and satisfy the desire to possess it, and, if not , his sentence would be to die”, or that other beautiful film On the other side of the river and between the trees that Paula Ortiz premiered in March 2022 and where the lagoon contains all the disorder of unattainable things.
I think that the first time I saw Death in Venice I knew that the day I set foot in that city, everything that there is of lethargy and poisoned sleep in it would move me and these days, Venice, is all the places one wants to go, of course. those you want to escape and those you always want to return to. They say that we should not die without seeing Bruges and I add that we should not do so without visiting Venice, but not for its Piazza San Marco and its basilica, a masterpiece of Byzantine architecture, or for its Fenice theater, or for its bridge of Rialto, nor for all its unparalleled and beautiful Gothic architecture, nor for its vital and seductive Cannaregio or its mysterious and fleeting Dorsoduro; The truth is that we should not die without seeing Venice because nothing drags you into the abyss like that lagoon that separates the world of the living from that of the dead and narrows at an unmatched angle with that great canal, which is the place where everyone rests. desires and where ghosts are undressed and our little miseries are sweetened.
In Piazza San Marco there is a clock that is a vestige of the time that we do not see, because it only tells us about the past or the future and never marks the present, as if it did not exist or should not exist for Venice to continue its unstable journey over the waters that reflect all their pain and beauty. There is a continuous rumor in this city that rocks on the waters and spreads like a slander on the eyes that look at it without knowing what to see or how to know or think about it, because it scares you just as it makes you fall in love and in the same way that you want to flee from its spell you want me to lock you up with a: Stai bene?, which is a shelter and a shelter in the place where all the sighs swing.
*Journalist and writer