The Fortuny Museum, Venice

In which I visit the home and studio of the glorious Mariano Fortuny, and secretly wish they would let me move in.

But I hear that a Venetian artist, called Fortuny, has recovered the secret of the craft, and that before many years have passed women will be able to walk abroad and better still to set at home in brocades as sumptuous as those that Venice adorned for her patrician daughters, with patters brought from the Orient.

-Marcel Proust

{Venice, Italy}

The light in Venice is dazzling.

During the day, the sun shimmers on the Grand Canal, and fills the vast Piazza San Marco with an airy brightness. It illuminates white stone churches and elegant palazzos, and reflects off of the sunglasses of the city’s many tourists.

Behind the sunlit facade, though, there are the in-between spaces: little alleys and sidewalks, endless up-and-down stone staircases and narrow canals…spaces in which throngs of people and skilled gondoliers jostle for position, cool and shadowy spaces with dark corners that fill with fog in the morning, and mysterious spaces that - despite the sun - never seem to get fully bright during.

It is these spaces, the Venice of shadows, that Mariano Fortuny seems to belong.