For centuries the painters of Venice have seized
and made their own the objects they loved most in
this wondrous City by the Sea. Canaletto, ignoring
every other beautiful thing, laid hold of quays backed
by lines of palaces bordering the Grand Canal, dotted
with queer gondolas rowed by gondoliers, in queerer
hoods of red or black, depending on the guild to which
they belonged. Turner stamped his ownership on
sunset skies, silver dawns, illuminations, fetes, and
once in a while on a sweep down the canal past the
Salute, its dome a huge incandescent pearl. Ziem
tied up to the long wall and water steps of the Public
Garden, aflame with sails of red and gold: he is still
there--was the last I heard of him, octogenarian as
he is. Rico tacks his card to garden walls splashed
with the cool shadows of rose-pink oleanders dropping
their blossoms into white and green ripples, melting
into blue. As for me--I have laid hands on a canal
--the Rio Giuseppe--all of it--from the beginning
of the red wall where the sailors land, along its
crookednesses to the side entrance of the Public Garden,
and so past the rookeries to the lagoon, where
the tower of Castello is ready to topple into the sea.

Not much of a canal--not much of a painting
ground really, to the masters who have gone before
and are still at work, but a truly lovable, lovely, and
most enchanting possession to me their humble disciple.
Once you get into it you never want to get out,
and, once out, you are miserable until you get back