JoAnn Locktov’s latest book on Venice completes only the second genuine trilogy I have ever read. The first volume was a wonderful introduction to Venice, one that was well named because, I swear, I have dreamed of a trip to that enchanted isle ever since I read Dream of Venice. But that was one aspect of the city: the many ways people have come to love it over the centuries.

Dream of Venice Architecture was a joy and a fascination all its own because in it Locktov assembled some three dozen international architects and architectural writers who explained the many difficulties overcome by those Italians who chose to build a city of gargantuan stone buildings and site them on mud flats. So that was a second aspect of Venice: the miracle of its birth.
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And now we come to a third aspect of Venice, the element that makes it a true trilogy. Why Dream of Venice in Black and White in a world awash in color photography? It’s because Locktov is examining a third aspect of the city, and doing so in a classic trilogy format. It’s not a single narrative broken into three parts; it’s one subject examined from three entirely different viewpoints. In examining these three aspects of the city we have gone from admirers to architects to eyes, but different eyes this time, eyes that look closely, that examine, that seek to understand the intricacies, which so many of us dismiss as the commonplace. They’re photographers in search of what is sadly becoming a rarity—the people who actually live in Venice.

The first two books had numerous short pieces from a wide variety of people, but this time Locktov elected to use only an Introduction by Tiziano Scarpa, an Italian novelist, playwright, poet, and native son of Venice. She explains, “In this book my goal was to reveal what it is like for a Venetian to be living now in Venice. I knew that to explore this revelation the writer would need more than 300 words. So, I asked Tiziano for 3,000 words to help us understand his life.”

Venice is different from any city I know, both the sheer beauty of the city itself and the way in which it was built. I never really read on it without learning something fantastical, and Scarpa’s Introduction was no different. From it I learned that the squares that are such a sociable part of Venice were originally not designed for that purpose at all. A city built on wooden pilings in mud flats has no natural wells, but the ancient Venetians got around that most ingeniously. Scarpa explains that rain water was originally gathered in those squares and then transported to a sand-filled cistern for filtering and cleaning, and eventually to a central well that supplied the city with fresh water for centuries before the advent of an aqueduct.
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But, mostly, that Introduction is a personal insight into how it feels to be one of just 53,000 people who still actually live in historic Venice—and that’s by design. In discussing the Introduction with me later, Locktov said, “There are erudite articles and even books about this precarious time for Venice, but what I wanted was for Tiziano to share with us what it feels like at this critical juncture to be a resident of Venice, confronting her conflicts. In his inimitable style he writes of the new inhabitants while weaving in history and unimaginable beauty. We never lose sight of the fact that Venice is a place where both the sacred and the profane co-exist.”

Scarpa cannot help lamenting the very nearly tragic crush of tourists that now invades the city. I suppose there are kinder words to use, but seeing how the city has been transformed over the last few decades one cannot help wishing Venice had better custodians. Scarpa starts with that very issue because he is a citizen of Venice, and when he moved to his present home he tried to strike up a conversation with his new neighbors. He was a bit disconcerted to realize that they spoke only English—American tourists, there for a weekend, then to be replaced by another in a long line of tourists. Just one face in many he has come to see in that single abode. It only looks like a home; it serves as an inn now.

“I live next to tourists,” Scarpa writes. “I live alongside them. What I mean is: I don’t just meet strangers on the street; tourists are my neighbors. I live here, and I am always the same. They change. My continuity borders on their impermanence.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the very rich are different from you and me, but really, they’re not. They’re just greed writ large. The ones who are different from the rest of us are the truly creative. Photographers, the really good ones who point their cameras at the commonplace and create a masterpiece, are able to see things the rest of us can’t.

These master photographers are often black and white photographers because of what they’re striving for. They will tell you there is realism in black and white photography that simply cannot be had in color. There are artistic reasons for choosing black and white over color at times. Without the distraction of color the photographer sees light differently and finds it easier to emphasize emotion. It amplifies the use of negative space, highlights shape, form, and pattern in the image, and because those qualities have been brought to the forefront, they help focus on composition.

There is often a deeper, more profound reason for a photographer like Gianni Berengo Gardin almost always choosing black and white for his photography: veritas. That’s a ten dollar word for truth which I chose to use, not because it’s Harvard University’s logo or even because it’s a ten dollar word but because it brings us closer to the underlying concept. Truth. But not just truth. Absolute truth, that which is there whether we are aware of it or not. “I chopped down the cherry tree is a truth,” but veritas is a deeper truth, the type of thing that philosophers seek out in their many books, and some people go in search of with a camera. 

Locktov has rightly dedicated this book to Gianni Berengo Gardin, not because he is a famous Italian photographer, but because he is a marvelous photographer she has long admired. As she put it, “I’ve known about Gianni Berengo Gardin’s work for a long time because his images of Venice are compelling and quite famous. So he’s been on the periphery of my consciousness for a while. It wasn’t until his exhibit of the big ships (Venezia e le Grandi Navi) in 2015 that I started to study his life work as a photographer. The big ships exhibit was not the first time that Berengo Gardin has exposed a nefarious situation; his work documents the ugly and the beautiful.”

Berengo Gardin has focused most of his attention on photographs of people because, as he put it, he does it “to tell their story, but underneath it all was a basic need to defend their dignity. That’s what really interests me.”

Those who admire his photography often describe his photographs as beautiful, but that has never been his goal. When he was very young he spent some time with an older, renowned photographer, Ugo Mulas, who taught him, “Beautiful photos might be aesthetically perfect and well-constructed, but they don’t say anything. A good photo tells you things, stories… it communicates something. Beautiful photos communicate too, but what they communicate is useless.”

Locktov naturally looked for this very quality when she gathered the photographs used in this volume, but then she went them one better. She took away the safety net. There are no captions on these pictures, no profound thoughts, nothing to tell us what to look for in these photographs, no added verbiage of any kind. As she put it, “I decided to isolate the photography without text, so it existed solely on the strength of the image. Part of the beauty of black and white is that it documents life without the distraction of color. I felt any additional text (more than identifying the photographer and a title) would minimize, rather than add to the narrative inherent in the images.”

What we are privileged to see in these sublime photographs is a Venice altogether different, not only from that depicted in the first two volumes of this series, but one that is sadly different from what one sees if one visits Venice. Which is both good and bad, I suppose. Good in the sense that it exists, bad—or more precisely, sad—that what we see in these photographs is so different from what we see in the summer months with the cruise ships and the noise and the tourists. Here is the other Venice, the real Venice if you will. 

Like the two books that preceded it, every detail in Dream of Venice in Black and White has been carefully considered. In that respect, it’s like one of those Japanese wood puzzles made of a myriad of wooden pieces, all precisely joined into a whole.

The photography more than lives up to Locktov’s vision for the book, but you will note that I have not described any of the photographs, and I will not do so now. This is not a book to be casually leafed through. It’s a collection of brilliant photographs that will reward those who take the time to study them, the kind that makes one itch to frame a print for one’s home.

Any professional photographer pays attention to composition, but those who eschew color photography for black and white have a tendency to pay particular attention to the many separate parts that become the whole. And that, in turn is why Locktov followed up her bold choice of black and white photography with another: no captions or descriptions. It will surely seem odd for one who clearly pays so much attention to words to say this, but she’s right. There are times when you don’t tell people the truth. You let them find it.

I am fortunate enough to be a man with one love and two passions: my wife Christine, writing, and woodworking. The woodworking has always been driven by old concepts: integrity, quality, and time-honored joinery and woodworking techniques, some of which have been used for thousands of years. The writing came first and will come last, the alpha and omega of my life. I once came across a novelist who stated that writing was a tactile experience to her. If she could, she said, she would carve her novels out of wood. I feel blessed to have worked in both mediums.

What image comes to mind when you picture a “dying city”? If it's not a group of scantily- clad people eating pizza in the street, nor a noisy bunch of joyful travelers disembarking from a boat, nor a rowdy group of teenagers trotting through the town with open beers sloshing in their hands, then you must not be picturing Venice. I'm sure no one thinks of “degradation” while admiring the paintings of Titian and Tintoretto. And, I agree that dangerously decaying stucco does, in fact, look beautiful here. So why would any visitor to Venice think of this as a degraded and dying city? How would they know? ​

Here in Venice, death looks like candy, multi-colored pasta, and dried lavender. It looks like both designer and discount clothing, with absolutely nothing in between. It looks like a brand new five star hotel, plus five or six new bed and breakfasts. It looks like take-away pasta and, also cocktails to take-away. It looks like souvenir, schotsky and t-shirt shops whose windows strangely do not change with the seasons. It looks like signs announcing “limited time” sales that mysteriously never end. It looks like the fish mongers must actually be models for all the cameras pointing at them. And, it looks like we shall have to go to mainland to get XYZ.  

All of which is to say that the death of Venice looks like an on-going Carnevale which sucks up and discards everything relevant to a living community and replaces it with trinkets that are really only appealing to people on holiday as it rolls on its deep-fried and sugar-coated way to the next “historical” festival to which locals are only invited as performers.

Death is adorned with identical window boxes, or spindly succulents, or shutters with the paint peeling off, and it never needs to hang its laundry out to dry. There are lots of ways to identify a house where no one really lives.

​Death wears no uniform and answers no telephone. As the number of residents in Venice dwindles, so do public services. And while there may be some vacationing fools out there who gleefully jump off of bridges knowing that no one is coming to stop them, they would do well to remember that, should they fall off of bridges instead, no would come to save them either.  

There is something enchantingly beautiful about the crumbling stucco walls and wave-worn stones that adorn Venice. But, make no mistake, Venice is experiencing both physical and moral degradation. Both the supports and foundations of Venice are degrading. Meanwhile, Venetians are responsible for the disposal of the massive amounts of unsightly and unsanitary waste produced by visitors to the city. This is a very visible degradation, particularly as this waste so often finds it's way to the steps of monuments and into the doorways and windowsills of private homes; A stinking insult to the dignity of both Venetian history and living Venetians.

But, don't think that degradation always looks like filth and rot. It also looks like glittery plastic carnival masks, faux Murano glass, and, now also “gastronomic souvenirs” which are actually mass-produced imitations of Italian specialty foods. It is terribly emotionally, culturally and financially degrading to helplessly observe the spread of this mockery of traditional Venetian products right here where the original products were created.  

Degradation is also a picnic, a picnic to which Venetians are not invited. While thousands of tourists settle themselves in the streets, on the bridges, along the canals, on vaporetto docks, and in the squares for lunch “al fresco” every day, a Venetian family was recently fined for “illegal occupation of public space” for making so bold as to throw a child's birthday party outdoors in a public square. Is it not degrading to be told that there is just no room for you and your children in the public spaces which your taxes pay to keep clean?  

Degradation is the enactment of a special law without any consultation of the community. It is also the unquestioned, un-researched and utterly false reporting of local events. And, of course, it is very degrading indeed to be told by those entrusted with the care of the city that those who don't like it should just leave.

Degradation is a hiss, a long sigh and a shove, intended for the millions who don't speak your language nor care about your manners, but very often also landing on one of your few remaining neighbors as a slight that will prevent you from forming a polite relationship with them either.

I was at home overseas the first time that reality of what my Venetian friends had been telling me for years suddenly became clear to me. I was equal parts outraged and deeply saddened, empathetic and guilty. For, even then, I was a foreigner who regularly took up space here. Now, I am a foreigner who lives here, who was married here, who does her shopping here and greets her neighbors here. And, in my darkest hours I imagine that we are among the last families who will ever really live here, though I really couldn't say for how long we'll keep at it.

It was one thing, to analyze the Venetian reality from the distance. The lack of housing and lack of skilled jobs are easy enough statistics to verify online. It is something else to live the day-to-day death and degradation of this city that I continue to love and admire so much even as I too slowly become one of those who issues the long-sigh.

Someone among you has made a New Year's resolution to make the big move to Venice! Congratulations!  What do you need to know before you take the plunge? Surely, you already know that you absolutely can not ever actually take a plunge into the canals. And, if you're really considering moving to Venice, surely you can deal with a some unpredictability in the little things in life such as how, when and whether-or-not your mail is delivered. You probably get a little kick out of unpredictability, you have the patience to work through petty annoyances, and you enjoy a little challenge in your everyday life. So, lets not talk about the flexibility, patience and pivotability needed in order to survive the mysterious twists and turns of life in Italy. Lets focus instead, as OG Venice often does, on those aspects of everyday life in Venice that are so obvious that many people neglect to mention them.

“Humid” is far to weak a word to describe Venice' weather. We don't live “by the water”, “near the water”, nor “on the water”. We live in the lagoon. Here in the World Heritage Site of “Venice and The Lagoon”, water comes from everywhere. When it rains, it comes from above. When a winter high tide coincides with a full moon, it comes from below. When it's windy, it comes from the sides. When there's a storm, it comes from everywhere all at once. And, it comes for all of us. When the stucco walls in your stairway have become over-saturated by humidity, they will crumble at a thunder clap. I've seen it happen.

During the hottest days of summer, you will feel as though you've been locked inside of a sauna from which only God can release you. During the coldest days of winter, it will feel as though the fog is actually composed of an army bearing trillions of minuscule ice-spades capable of penetrating whatever armor you choose to don against them.

However, if you can manage the Venetian climate on its extremes, and you like a humid climate otherwise, Venice will reward you with some truly unique and beautiful lagoon weather phenomena. My favorite is “fog-from-the-sun”, when the blanket of fog sits so low over the city that, though one sees the surrounding buildings shrouded in fog, one also sees blue sky overhead and feels the warmth of the sun. Venice' fast moving summer storms can also be spectacularly beautiful when dark clouds race across the sky and their reflections chase them across the water. When such storms approach the city, the facebook pages of local people always abound with dramatic photos and warnings that we all need to run home and close our windows.

No matter what your origins, age, socio-economic status, personal interests, or opinion about your own sense of style, there are two pieces of basic equipment that absolutely everyone in Venice has: A wheeling cart and a pair of rubber boots. Sound unglamorous? They are! But, they are absolutely essential to comfortable living in Venice. 

Why the wheeling cart? Well, how much can you comfortably carry and how far can you carry it? The main island of Venice is the largest pedestrian-only urban center in Europe. The only interruptions to pedestrian streets, aside from canals, are the more than 400 bridges that we pedestrians must walk over in order to proceed with our walking. On a day-to-day basis, this means that transporting supplies from place to place can be rather physically demanding. A small wheeling cart takes a lot of weight off of the shoulders and, if you're super organized and very lucky, it might even help you get all your groceries home in one trip!   

Now, about those rubber boots...  

Before you scoff at these, remember that in some parts of the world they are considered fashionable foot ware. They are practical shoes popular with hunters, fishermen, Queen Elizabeth of England, and lots of other people who like to keep their feet dry. The difference here in Venice is that the need for wellies is not limited to sportsmen. The phenomenon of acqua alta – the high tides which occasionally rise up above street level in Venice – dictates that we all need rubber boots if we expect to go about our daily lives with dry feet. This is especially true during the winter months when the levels of the tide tend to be more extreme. ​​

So there you have your two, unglamorous, pieces of essential equipment for life in Venice. I will only add that it is highly inadvisable to place yourself in a situation where you need both of these things at the same time. It doesn't work that way. You can imagine why.

Moving to Venice?  Congratulations!  Your carbon footprint is about to virtually disappear!

“Slow living”, in Venice, is not a personal socio-environmental choice any more than it is a label on a plastic bag full of quinoa that's been shipped half-way around the world. Nor is it something that we here in town ever really discuss. It is far too obvious to mention. Choosing to live in the historic center of Venice means that you are choosing to live without regular access to a car. You are choosing to physically carry anything that you purchase for yourself. You are choosing to rely on your own two feet and public transportation for 90% of your transportation needs. And, you are choosing to consume primarily that which is made available to you locally, which will be largely locally and domestically produced. Meanwhile, any tendencies that you may have towards over-consumption of energy, shopping or even just collecting of anything will likely be curtailed by the simple fact that it takes a major commitment of time, energy and space to do such things in Venice.  

And, please also forget that saying you've heard about having a boat in Venice being the equivalent of having a car elsewhere in the world. I have yet to meet the Venetian who uses her/his boat to take the kids to school, stop bye the market, drop off the dry-cleaning and then run to the hardware store. There are no docks at the school, the market, the dry-cleaner or the hardware store. Here in Venice, boats are used for work and recreation.

Welcome to slow living! Grab your wheeling cart.  Start walking.

Moving to Venice on your own? Don't worry! Venice may be a labyrinth, but none of us is invisible within it. It may sound contradictory to the sophisticated image of the city that hosts the International Biennale D'Arte, but Venice is a very small town by number of residents and the community is highly interactive. Through the sea of tourists, even regular visitors who come once or twice per year are remembered. If you move here, everyone in your neighborhood will quickly come to recognize you.

When you leave the house in the morning, everyone who happens to be out at the time will greet you and expect a greeting in return. Everyone. The ladies in the bakery, the neighbor out walking dog, the guy who begs on the bridge, the workmen restoring the house on the corner, the guy who rents the storeroom downstairs, the lady who sells vintage Murano glass, even the neighbors' kids will mumble “Ciao” as they scurry past on their way to school.

This does not mean that you'll become bosom-buddies with everyone in town. Venetian's are human people who form friendships on the same basis as other human people. (Things like shared interests and experiences help a lot.) Nevertheless, because your newly adopted pedestrian lifestyle and the unique topography of Venice mean that you will encounter your neighbors often, and because as a new-comer you really never know with whom you might strike up a friendship, and because your neighbors know the answers to all of the questions that you will eventually have about Venice, it certainly behooves you to be pleasant in your interactions. Don't worry too much if you do not yet speak Venetian. In my experience, that will not stop anyone from trying to speak to you.

Venice is perfect for you because you just can't get enough baccala mantecato, gelato, spaghetti with clams, steamed squid, paper thin slices of prosciutto and artichokes so fresh and sweet that one can even eat them raw. Right? Let's hope so! Because, like every region of Italy, the Veneto has a deeply engrained and highly pervasive food culture.

​In every day life, you will run into chefs at the fish market, see the vegetable boats from Sant'Erasmo dropping off crates for your neighbors and your neighborhood trattoria, and smell the scent of fresh bread as a baker wheels bye with a cart full of deliveries for the bars and restaurants. There really isn't much not to like.  

There is only one real challenge when it comes to adapting to the Venetian food world of sea-foody-with-four-seasons-of-vegetables freshness and that is this: If you're moving to Venice from another urban center, you will have to say goodbye to having easy access to all other kinds of international cuisine. Here, you go out for Venetian, or you cook for yourself. We have a few decent international restaurants - the Middle Eastern and the Japanese are very good - but absolutely nothing approaching the variety you'd find in a big city overseas. As an expat, you will begin experimenting with cooking your favorite ethnic dishes, and comfort foods from home, in your own kitchen. (Fortunately, you'll be blessed with exceptional Italian produce to use as your base ingredients.) Meanwhile, like the rest of us, you will shop the back corner of Giacomo Rizzo, and you will treasure any international condiments that anyone is kind enough to smuggle into the country for you.

I get it! You're trying to fit in and you'll never learn Italian if no one ever lets you practice! Nevertheless, and this should probably be expat-in-Venice survival rule number one: Do not take it as an insult when people in Venice speak to you in foreign languages. Keep in mind that the very vast majority of their clients and visitors are, in fact, foreigners. Venetian's are constantly making an effort to communicate with people in foreign languages. It might even be as nerve-wracking for them to speak English to you as it is for you to speak Venetian with them. So, please consider that before feeling insulted that someone (correctly) assumed that you are from out of town. As an expat in Venice, you will certainly find more complicated issues to contend with.

Integrating into a foreign society will be challenging wherever you go. But, Venetian society, unique in all ways, may be especially challenging because it is a culturally, socially and environmentally endangered society whose woes are largely due to the city's unique appeal to foreigners. You are moving in, but the foreigners who bought the apartment upstairs, the one downstairs, the one on the corner and the one across the street did not. They did a quick renovation and immediately handed the house keys over to a rental agent. You care about the condition of the school, the maintenance of the bridges, the accessibility of the market, the cleanliness of the streets, the erosion of the mudflats in the lagoon, the over-crowding of the public boats etc... But, the other millions upon millions of foreigners who flood the city, however much they may admire Venice, do not care about those things at all. They strut around in the streets half-naked, act haughty and entitled, never try to speak Italian, and leave garbage behind everywhere they go. You're fed up with them too!

Once you break through that frustrating language barrier, you, as an expat and a new friend, will become a sounding board for all of the wrongs done against Venice by other foreigners. By far your biggest social and emotional challenge as an expat in Venice is to figure out how to listen attentively and act sensitively without internalizing all of the guilt for all of the wrongs that all of these other foreigners have done to your adopted home. I'm not going to lie, this is difficult. There are even frequent visitors who begin to wonder if they need to make the ultimate sacrifice, staying away, in order to avoid harming their beloved Venice.

Some encouraging things to remember when these emotional crises strike: 1. Venetians will only discuss these things with you if they believe that you are receptive and helpful. They are not blaming you. They are inviting you to empathize. 2. Frequent visitors are recognized, welcomed back and, incidentally, have the most positive impact on the street-level economy of any of the millions who visit each year. 3. Becoming "Venetian-by-choice" by moving to, and actually living in, Venice is a huge positive investment in the City.  

OK, “famous” may be too strong of a word. But, there is something about the fascination of Venice that makes even the dullest among us here fascinating as well. You, filling your water bottle at a public fountain, are so enchanting that someone will make a video of it. You carrying a shopping bag with some celery sticking out? Enthralling! You sitting alone reading the newspaper and sipping an espresso? Irresistible! You helping your grandmother off of the vaporetto? Heartwarming! The only way to avoid being photographed in Venice is to avoid being caught doing anything normal in public. The same goes for doing anything abnormal. So, either stay home or hitch up your wellies and say "cheese"!

If you live a quiet life, and do not run a business, do not volunteer, do not participate in group activities and do not work with the public at large, your fame may end there. But, probably not. Venice is universally fascinating and, because there are so few people living in the lagoon, sooner or later someone from the press, or a blog, or a publishing house, or a tv station will come around asking you too to comment about something to do with Venice and/or the lagoon and what you're doing in it. On these occasions, I'm sure that most people consider it an honor to be asked and then do their best to reflect well on their beloved Venice.  

While it's true that moving to Venice means that you yourself will no longer be a tourist, it does not mean that the other tourists are going to go away. On the contrary, in means that rather than meandering joyfully among or away from them, you will now have to contend with them and find ways to pass either through or around them on a daily basis. You will be frustrated by overstuffed vaporettos. You will stand in lines twenty-deep of people who are buying only one thing at the grocery store. You will begin to avoid all of the places that you once considered to be the "center" of Venice during their busiest hours of the day, days of the week, or months of the year. When you see a large tour group approaching across a bridge, you will rapidly recalculate your route in order to circumvent it. You will learn every alley, back and side street between your home and the places you visit most often.

​You too will begin to recognize not only your neighbors, but also the people who visit your neighborhood most often. And, you will be so glad to see those familiar faces in the midst of what, on the most crowded days of the year, sometimes looks and feels like a zombie invasion.  

The most encouraging words I can offer about living with the crowds are that, 1. It's behavior is highly predictable which makes it avoidable much of the time. 2. It is, though it won't always feel like it, actually composed of human people.  Most of those people will behave themselves and a precious few might even become friends.  

​One of them might even be you.