D. The City as Practice

In this section and in following chapters, I propose to use the term "practice" in a relatively loose manner that includes both perceptions of physical realities and the behavioral adjustments produced by these physical constraints. In Venice, visual and kinesthetic practices are deeply rooted in the city's shape, if not necessarily totally unique to Venice. They evolve from the basic elements of which Venice is composed: water and islands.

Venetians were used to the sight of water as an amorphous substance, surrounding solid land. Conversely, the land itself was a collection of islands, separated from each other. In the previous chapter, I mentioned that many sources from the Cinquecento viewed the city's canals as a circulatory system. The canals were likened to veins and arteries, fluid mechanisms for getting around the city. Water does not simply permeate the city, but, like blood, is an active element with an agenda of its own. Pumped to the heartbeat of the tides, it ebbs and flows from wider canals to narrower rii and then back out again. As in any such system, there is an element of containment: Venice's canals contain the tides in the same way that veins and arteries contain the blood. The analogy is not exact, for there is an openness to Venice not present in the body's circulatory system; the tides go in from the ocean and out to it, while blood normally is contained within the body at all times. Still, when a gondola on the canals leaves them for the lagoon, the relationship of boat to transport medium is changed: the boat and its passengers are no longer travellers within a city, but have embarked on the open sea. Venice itself therefore is a relatively closed system. The corollary to this perception of Venice, set in the middle of a watery lagoon which, although permeating the city was nonetheless different from it, was the idea of Venice as a place to be navigated and traversed. Self-contained, it had entrances and exits, points of destination and departure both internal and external. Once inside, a traveler, whether on land or water, had to take active measures to reach his destination.

The shifting boundary between water and land is echoed in the late medieval Venetian characterization of the city's situation: "sopre le acque salse," or "above the salt waters." The word "sopre" is somewhat problematic; it is variously defined in Italian as "above," "over," "on top of," and "beyond." The range of definitions is, perhaps, a key to the wide variety of potential relationships between Venetian land and water. For the Venetian city fabric, in that characterization, is seen as separate from the water; the city is made distinct from, and does not include, the salt waters that flow through or beneath it. The city itself is the land that sits above, but it is still defined in acknowledged relation to the water over which it is placed. Other possible relations to the water include that posited by Francesco Sansovino, the son of the architect, in which Venice is in the middle of the water, an indication that although separate, the land is yet somehow of the water. [1]

An island is a topological structure; it forces an awareness of the boundedness of the viewer's physical situation. [2] In contrast to other medieval cities where the outer walls were created as borders between town and surrounding space, so that they began with an unbounded situation and then drew boundaries, Venice began with a number of ready-made borders. The primary concerns of city development became the increase of the land area contained within those borders, and the linkage of the separate small bounded areas into one generalized entity. Thus, there were three main impulses arising from the Venetian situation: production of more island space, a compulsion to link things together, whether physically, visually or figuratively, and an urge to create routes via those linkages and to follow them to their endpoints.

The drives to link and to route subsumed several perceptions and behaviors involving bridges, which were one of the two main methods of linkage. First, bridges were seen as being in some senses equivalent to dry land: they represented travel that was not in the water; therefore they were on terra even if it was not necessarily firma. Land-based routes included bridges; by taking these routes, the pedestrian not only avoided the switch from one transport system to the other, but emphasized a continuity in his travels. A corollary of this was that the traveler's choice of routes depended on the locations of bridges--the more bridges, the easier it was to get around Venice by land.

At the same time, there was also a kinesthetic perception of bridges as being different from dry land. "Solid ground" in Venice was essentially flat, while almost any bridge in Venice involved some sort of change in height. Further, bridges were generally narrow constructions, many of them without railings. This differentiated paths over bridges from those on dry land. If travel went through a campo, the area around the pedestrian was wide open. In a calle or passageway, the path was narrow, because walls rose around the walker, up to several times his height, thus providing an entirely different physical sensation from that of being on a bridge, where he was on a narrow path, but with no surrounding walls, with the possible exception of railings reaching only to the waist.

The historical change in the number and kind of bridges intensified this perceived kinesthetic differentiation, and brought with it perceptual patterns of its own. The shift from parity between wooden and stone bridges to a predominantly stone regime made the changes in height experienced on a bridge even more pronounced; now the bridge itself was doing all the raising. The increase in bridge numbers, while making it easier to get around Venice, also increased the number of times that the pedestrian had the experience not only of leaving solid ground, but of being suspended over canals. By using an extension of one transport network, he was both thrown into contact with the other network and reminded of how different travel on that extension--bridges--was from using the rest of the land-based network.

An interesting sidelight on the relationship between foot traffic and bridge development involves the so-called "wars of the fists" in which two geographically-based proletarian factions battled in a stylized fashion for control of "turf" within the city. Originally, the battles took place in various obscure campi; after the growth in bridge-building, they began to take place on bridges--still relatively obscure ones--with the first documented bridge contest occurring in 1421. [3] It is interesting that the final shift away from campi as a locale for these altercations took place in concert with the final "big push" in stone bridge construction and wooden bridge replacement. Sanudo mentions campi battles, but the officially-sanctioned contests staged as spectacles for important foreigners were always scheduled for bridges. The object of these "battaglie sui ponti" were "the two pieces of paving stone known as the `crown of the bridge' (`piazza del ponte')." The concentration upon this particular spot in the middle of the bridge appears to have had no parallel for campi in dispute. [4] The development of this whole complex of behavior would therefore appear to suggest a growing consciousness of bridges and of their effects.

It is important to remember that many of the perceptions of Venetians were based upon use and function. The customary uses of the streets for perambulation and of the canals for travel and transport could change when there were unusual circumstances, such as a procession or spectacle, so that the "normal" conceptions of these spaces and networks could suddenly shift. For example, Robert Davis describes the short-term perceptual changes in the landscape that occurred when a pugno or "battle of the fists" was in train:

[T]he city's well-known features take on a different valence, change their names, alter their functions. Ordinary bridges become tournament fields, their central step an arena, or arengo; canals change from watery thoroughfares into grandstands for spectators, while balconies and even rooftops end up as crowded as city streets; marketplaces turn into a kind of no-man's-land, and city squares become the sites where artisan armies muster. [5]

The practice of building bridges led, naturally, to the practice of crossing them once they were built. Once a bridge is in place, there is a sort of "transportation imperative" to make use of it in all situations where it might be convenient. [6] The Venetian inhabitant was thus habituated not only to the sight of but to the use of linking structures; things should be, and were, connected where possible, as part of the expansion on the urban frontier. Visually, this meant that if a connection were not in place, a Venetian's eye was likely to behave as though it were linked, following a notional, if not actual, path or route.

As we have seen, the island situation also leads to behaviors focusing on nodal points. Island development, running from the outside in, left a central undeveloped area as the focus of communal and public activities not directly requiring access to water. The node-related implications of the Venetian attitude toward the recording of local spatial cues, as seen above, are fourfold. First, locations in Venice were seen as nodal points. They were destinations. If they were places to be passed by but not "destinations," they were not important, at least in the context of that particular journey. Second, nodal points, as destinations, were perceived as scenes of action or performance. One went to a nodal point because something was going to happen there. Third, it was the sequencing or ordering of actions, rather than the process of passing through actions, that was important. Finally, emphasis on nodal locations implies that it was the specificity of the location that was important; the location acted as a theater. As we shall see in successive chapters, such a nodal emphasis corresponds with two primary Venetian spatial metaphors, the mesh and the maze.

Venetians were, at the same time, acutely conscious of borders and boundaries. As Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan has documented, a great deal of city works, legislation, and litigation dealt with the matter of drawing or maintaining spatial boundaries, whether between individuals, neighborhoods, or public and private spaces. [7] Spaces were there to be crossed, or entered; at the same time they were also to be maintained as individual entities. There were, in addition to spaces that were specifically public or private in nature, other spaces whose structure and associations were more nuanced. Generally these spaces related to one or more classes of society, so that there were parallels between physical space and social spaces; perhaps the most complex and interesting of the spatial divisions was the one made between male spaces and areas that were specifically female. [8]

The two transport systems, land and water, were seen as both separate and connected. This allowed Venetians to hold more than one mental notion of space at a time, which may be an additional factor in the Venetian fondness for multiple perspective in their pictures. Which concept of space was actually in use depended upon context; if the destination required both locomotion on land as well as travel on water, then the traveller could switch between them as the need arose. The interfaces between the two systems, water entries to those canal-side buildings that also had land access, and public water stairs, involved a change in level. Thus, the land system could be seen as overlaid on the marine system, a perception that was enhanced both by the much later completion date of the land system and the fact that portions of the land system literally sat on top of the watery one, an observation that could be made any time a bridge was crossed. The two systems of transport also produced an even more acute awareness of borders. Land-based property relationships were apt to be configured by water-based boundaries, rather than by the far more notional property lines found in other late medieval urban areas.

At the same time as each component of these systems and spaces--land and water transport, public and private spaces, gendered spaces, and other spatial oppositions--were seen as distinctly separate from their counterparts, such oppositions also were seen as permeable. The emphasis on the definition and maintenance of borders is an indication that such divisions were in actuality extremely complex; no ongoing effort is required to define and maintain a simple dividing line, but when the boundaries are seen as constantly shifting and flexible, then the maintenance of those borders becomes a requirement. The perception of permeability in Venetian spaces ranged from the ongoing battle between the land and the "menacing" waters to the constant "incursions" of the private space upon the public. Water penetrated into houses sited on land, both through the necessity of the tides and by designs that allowed the water entrances and the land entrances to occupy the same communal space. [9] Public space penetrated into private, as seen in the "tunneling" phenomenon of the public sottoporteghi that ran under, between and even through private dwellings. Some of these spatial divisions were quite open and fragile, while others managed to maintain their integrity even as the individual components were forced into an ever closer physical proximity.

All of these perceptions, as experienced and described by Venetians and others, led almost inexorably to a profound phenomenological condition that was the result of the originating spatial, visual and kinesthetic experiences. The quality of liminality, of being in a state of transition, is one that was daily forced upon Venetians in numerous ways. Any time a Venetian crossed a border or threshold, he was placed in the liminal state until the crossing was completed. Sometimes the crossing was almost infinitesimally brief; other crossings were prolonged. The sheer amount of crossing activity engaged in by the average Venetian had the cumulative effect of sensitizing him to the liminal state, and, ultimately, of making this state, which has the potential to be profoundly disturbing and disorienting, seem like not only a normal, but a desirable and expected situation.