announced my presence and the people of Venice goggled to see the dogaressa’s daughter, back from her convent education to prepare for marriage. On my afternoon excursions my mother would always accompany me, talking constantly, but always of the city, never of us. I heard one phrase again and again—”Stato del Mar,”
“Stato del Mar.” The phrase was forever on the dame’s lips, a musical phrase washing in and out upon her breath like the tide itself. She wanted me, it seemed, above all to grasp the concept of Venice as a State of the Sea, and to know that the sea gave everything to the city. We went everywhere in the city together, dressed almost alike in our fine gowns, cloaks of coney to keep out the freezing winds, and chopines, shoes built up from the sole to elevate the feet above the inevitable floodwaters. All that separated us was my mother’s gold mask. I learned that she had above a hundred masks in her chamber, made by the finest craftsmen in Venice. All different, but all gold, and all depicting the face of a lioness, with no mane. Though many of the citizens went about masked in the winter, I never saw another lioness and I wondered if it was my mother’s special privilege. The She-lion, rampant, showed me her city.
She taught me first of our home, the Palazzo Ducale. I half listened to her description of this center of government, of the privileges and restrictions due to the doge for his short term of office, an office strictly rotated to deter corruption. Instead, I looked up at the white lace palace and was interested to note that when you took a closer look, the brickwork was not white but patterned with ornate diamonds of pale rose, inset with sapphire blue. Studded as if with the looted jewels on which the Stato del Mar was built. Like everything in Venice, if you look closer, nothing is as it seems. My gaze continued upward. Set in the middle of the loggia were two pillars that differed in color from their snowy neighbors, like wine-darkened teeth after a glass of good red. My mother followed my eye and explained that these twin pillars had been stained with years of blood as traitors to the republic were drawn and quartered between them. I understood her well, and the whisper of a threat built into such a beautiful façade.
Obediently I learned the names of the sestieri, or “sixths,” that divided the city and repeated them as a child does her catechism—San Marco, Castello, Cannaregio, Dorsodoro, San Polo, and painfully, Santa Croce, a district named after a demolished church that shared the name of Brother Guido’s former home. In a few short weeks I began to know every calle, or canal, every palace on the Grand Canal, the great S-shaped waterway that cleaved through the city.
S for Serenissima, S for Stato del Mar, said my mother.
S for She-lion, thought I.
At each great house I had to name its owners and their antecedents, following their families back to the Crusades, learning by rote as my mother instructed me. I knew every church spire and every bell that gave tongue. I could name the boats that crowded the mouth of the canal, their wares and whence they hailed from. I learned of trade routes as we visited the Arsenale and watched the ships under construction, each with a proud lion poised on the prow. My mother talked endlessly, as if she perversely enjoyed my company. As if she were cramming sixteen years of lost conversations into these first weeks together. Yet her discourse never strayed into the personal. She would speak of a particular painting or fresco that we were going to see, or the mass we would attend, or of the pointed shoes we were to buy in the best leather botteghe of the Rialto district. Once she got me up early to take me to the fish market, a place of strange dead shoals with staring glass eyes, and a stench like a rabbit warren. She showed me the Jewish quarter, where the infidels were sequestered for their protection and, she said, the city’s. She took me to the island of Murano, where Venice’s foremost export is made—glassware. There I watched leather-clad craftsmen working at their furnaces, and making miracles from hot amber globs of molten sand. With their long iron poles they blew bubbles of saffron glass that cooled to rose, to be