Gondolí, Gondolà

Uneori, în faţa unei acuarele cu Veneţia, nostalgia transforma în arome dulci de flori înmiresmate mirosul de mâl de fructe de mare putrezite pe canale.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez

An orange gem resting on a blue glass plate: it’s Venice seen from above.” Henry James

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.” Italo Calvino

By day it is filled with boat traffic – water
buses, delivery boats, gondolas – if something floats
and it’s in Venice, it moves along the Grand Canal.
And by daylight it is one of the glories of the Earth.
But at night, especially when the moon is full
and the soft illumination reflects off the water and
onto the palaces – I don’t know how to describe
it so I won’t, but if you died and in your will you
asked for your ashes to be spread gently on the
Grand Canal at midnight with a full moon,
everyone would know this about you – you loved and understood beauty.” William Goldman

“In the glare of the day there is little poetry about Venice, but under the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again…” Mark Twain

“A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.” Arthur Symons

“I cannot write about Venice; I can only write about me, and the sleeping parts of myself that Venice has shocked into wakefulness.” Jessica Zafra

“The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists – incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.” Mary McCarthy

“When I went to Venice, I discovered that my dream had become – incredibly, but quite simply – my address.” Marcel Proust

“There is something so different in
Venice from any other place in
the world, that you leave at
once all accustomed habits and
everyday sights to enter an
enchanted garden.” Mary Shelley

“When I seek another word for ‘music’, I never find any other word than ‘Venice’” Friedrich Nietzsche

“If I were not King of France, I would choose to be a citizen of Venice.” Henry III

“To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.” Alexander Herzen

“Venise à la qualité de disparaître en un instant, de ne pas courir derrière le train avec des clins d’œil à gauche et à droite comme le font d’autres villes, mais de sombrer aussitôt, comme si elle n’existait pas, comme si elle n’avait jamais existé.” Nina Berberova

«It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it, means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.» Peggy Guggenheim

“It is held by some that this word VENETIA signifies VENI ETIAM, that is, come again, and again, for however often you come, you will always see new things, and new beauties.” Jacopo Sansovino

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima.” Jan Morris

“In the winter, Venice is like an abandoned theatre. The play is finished, but the echoes remain.” Arbit Blatas

“Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of sex and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly.” Jonathan Galassi

“I had my dreams of Venice, but nothing that i had dreamed was as impossible as what i found.” Arthur Symons

“I would rather die in Venice than live anywhere else”.

“Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer’s plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian’s; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl’s ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay.” Gary Inbinder