Circumambulation is one of the most spiritual walking practices there is. Circles are probably the most spiritual shape, a symbol of the infinite, the emptiness but simultaneously the whole. Most major religions practice some form of circumambulation for its spiritual significance (read more)
On 1 Dec, I set out to walk the perimeter of Venice, keeping my right shoulder as close to the lagoon as possible at all times and without taking any dead ends.I kept encountering my phantom selves: returning constantly to within visible distance of where I was some time ago…
Walking a straight (for Venice) route from Zattere to Sant Alvise (a vertical line on a standard map) and using the twenty ENEL gas main covers I found on that route as a navigational aid (click to read more…)
I took this photograph on a weekend break aboard brother Amos’s yacht in the lagoon of Venice, at exactly the same time that Sophie H. wrote this poem…mauve skies are arresting, it seems…
One city slowly sinking, one city crumbling to dust. Andi Arnovitz makes a personal comparison between Venice and Jerusalem, where she lives and works…(click to read more)
Is the issue (and aesthetic) of the ‘abandoned’ cemetery solely a concern to northern European Protestants? No one is going to the cemetery anymore (click to read more)…
Some people In the Middle Ages believed that the plague was spread by ‘vampires’ which, rather than drinking people’s blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying (click to read more…)
To talk to the dead you have to be quick these days (click to read more)…
I’ve been documenting a small in-between space in the square over the last year or so. It’s a window with an arrangement of plastic animals, arranged by the house owner (click to read more)…
So how does walking through the labyrinthian habitat of less than sixty thousand souls, but in the footsteps of twenty-seven million visitors each year make you feel? Try drifting off-track, completely alone, as the sun sets or at night (click to read more).
The story begins on ground level, with footsteps. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give shape to spaces. They weave places together. (click to read more)…
Transformation, integral to portals, doesn’t have to be spiritual. If you had the courage to cross this particular threshold in the 1920s, you would have witnessed the rise of the communist party in Italy (click to read more)…
Some thoughts after meeting the ‘New Venice Haggadah Group’ and navigating the city using an unusual objective: investigating which palimpsests of officially sanctioned posters would easily and quickly part from their metal housings when soaked by inclement weather…
This plaque, placed in the dilapidated, soft-earthed cloisters on Lazzaretto Vecchio by artist Herman De Vries, reflects on the 1500 victims of plague and leprosy, buried in the communal trench that divides this minuscule island where the word ‘quarantine’ was invented (click to read more).
If ‘Walking in Circles’ is about confines and boundaries, then islands by nature have edges and limits. One image that unites this island of multiple parishes and co-existing communities into a single, coherent vision is de Barbari’s woodcut map ‘Venetie’ (Click to read more)
The residents of the courtyard followed the example of their predecessors and added dates to the inscription, imploring the Madonna for safety during enemy shelling, firstly from Austrian bombs, then in WW1. It brings to mind that story in ‘Fever Pitch’ by Nick Hornby…
An estate agent, bent on rushing Marika and I to the next floridly overwritten apartment on sale (una chicca signori!) took the short-cut from Celestia into the heart of Castello via the Sotoportego Zorzi. A transformation occurred (Click to read more)
A short distance away from these objects of inauspicious birth I begin to see images of death: a more present force in infancy for those foundlings than today’s generation, but nevertheless still twisted into the same umbilical thread. Ti Morti: You (re) Dead (!). (Click to read more)
Google Translate gives us a damn sight funnier and less threatening version than the original curse on all parents that placed their infants on the foundling wheel. The carved plaque was originally adjacent and in clear sight of the desperate. It obliged them to pay (Click to read more)
The alley wall of the ritzy Metropole Hotel is a strange place to begin this blog feed about walking between life and death but all is not what it seems…(Click to read more)