Venice

While the Florentines concentrate almost entirely on their artistic heritage, the Venetians are clearly fans of art both modern and historical. Possibly this is because in most respects Venice is trapped by its history – it can’t change its architecture or industries without ruining its unique character, but that unique character makes it ideally suited to embrace the avante garde art scene and still remain itself.

I’d like to think that Peggy Guggenheim realised this, which is why she set up her modern art museum in her Venetian palazzo, which is now the Peggy Guggenheim Collection that we visited this morning. It’s a glorious collection that only a ridiculously wealthy art collector and patron could amass, featuring amazing works by Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Vasily Kandinsky, Rene Margritte and Ray Calder.

That was just the permanent collection. The museum had just opened a temporary exhibition based around the Dadaist artist Jean Arp, which was surprisingly intelligible and engaging. The Dadaists challenged the prevailing assumptions about art a century ago in ways that can look obvious and therefore amateurish now, but that work was groundbreaking, and the best of it, as included in this exhibition, still looks exciting and beautiful today.

But the high point of the visit came when we overheard an American woman, with the penetrating voice of her kind, drawl loudly to her friend, “Who is this Kandinsky person? I’ve never heard of him, but he seems to have a lot of pictures around here.”

It would have been interesting to ask her how she came to be in a modern art museum when she’d never heard of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, but by then she’d stumbled across the Marino Marini sculpture of a man with a large erect penis sitting astride a horse with a large erect penis, and she was lost for the remainder of her visit in delighted hysteria.

We had a quick break for gelati, then walked across the city to the Ca’pesaro Museo, first for lunch on their gracious waterfront patio, then for a wander around the museum.

The Ca’pesaro isn’t one of the premier art galleries of Venice, so it isn’t on most tourists' agendas, yet it is home to Gustav Klimt’s beautiful ‘Judith II (Salome)’ and also one of the handful of editions of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ (he cast 22 in total).It's well worth a visit.

Of course, there was the obligatory renaming:

Jean-Luc Picard’s Final Portrait at Starfleet Academy, Scipione, 1933

Her Worst Tinder Date Yet, Antonio Donghi, 1963

Werk it, Gurl!, Constantin Meunier, 1905

And Benny got himself into trouble, as usual.

The Ca’presaro is a clearly well-funded art museum, but it still suffers from the same dilemmas of all Venetian buildings; it’s very old, it weighs a ton, and there’s only so much that ancient wooden pilings can do to support it. It’s alarming to walk over to view an Arturo Martini sculpture and find yourself drifting to one side because the floor sags, or standing at the bottom of a grand stone staircase and realising that the left side is markedly lower than the right.

At least Benny found a series of paintings inspired by outer space, which made a perfect backdrop for him to recover from being chased by a killer baboon.

As afternoon merged into evening, I made the obligatory journey to St Mark’s Square. Here the tourists throng as thickly as they do around the Duomo in Florence, taking selfies and buying souvenir teatowels. I’d already purchased my ticket to climb the cathedral’s bell tower, and was rewarded when I found I could skip past the hundred metre long queue like an ersatz VIP. But then it turned out that nobody climbs the tower: they installed an elevator. So I rode to the top with a dozen tourists and an Italian lift operator who looked like he was one whining French backpacker away from killing himself.

The view from the top was magnificent, revealing Venice with all of its slightly leaning towers, sinking palazzos, tourist cluttered piazzas and unique, surreal beauty.