Swimming the stream

Think "stream of consciousness," my friend advised when I said I had been assigned to do a blog at work (honoluluadvertiser.com, go to Taste link, look for My Island Plate).
Today, my stream of consciousness is flowing toward the Rio della Fornace and the Fondamenta Soranzo in Venice, where I will arrive Tuesday calling out to the Contessa, "Ciao, Mama, io sto a casa!" (Which, I hope, means, "Hi, Mom, I'm home!"). And if I get it wrong, I think Il Cane Webby (Webby the Dog) is bilingual and I speak passable dog.
One of the joys of traveling is leaching the pleasure in either direction from the itinerary — in advance and after the return — by means of the printed page.
My first choice was James H. S. McGregor's "Venice from the Ground Up" (Belknap/Harvard University, 2006). It's an architectural, anthropolical, cultural and social history of the city that begins with the frightened Mainlanders who fled to the protection of the Venetian islands in advance of the barbarian hordes in the sixth century, and brings the reader to the current day.
Being an 18th century kind of gal, my most profound impression upon closing the book was, "Napoleon has a lot to answer for."
I've long been rather a conflicted fan of Napoleon. His wife, after all, inspired the empire waist, whose (as Georgette Heyer always termed them) "clinging draperies" flatter us rounded curves type women. I've read much of the Battle of Waterloo (I'm a Wellington junkie, too).
But what his defeat of Venice did, stripping La Serenissima of its singular power and of many of its most important works, which McGregor says formed the heart of the Louvre's art collection, that, I cannot readily forgive. (And when he was done, he left it to the Austrians to finish the job. Many of the works have never been repatriated.)
I look forward eagerly to touring Ca' Rezzonico, the art museum of the 18th century.
Reading about the history of a place, and in particular its cultural and social history, always adds depths to the colors and shapes around me as I travel. I recall looking up from a book as I glided down The Thames for the first time in a hotel boat, realizing that the water meadows, stately homes and historic places I was seeing in real time would be familiar to people who had lived in the times of which I had just been reading.
The alpha and omega of my travel experiences came when visiting Castle Howard in York (setting for the original "Brideshead Revisited"), standing on the eastern steps of the Temple of the Four Winds and looking out over a rolling landscape of tilled fields and woods. "Quick!," I said to my best friend, another 18th centurian, "which century is it?" "I. Don't. Know," she responded in tones of wonder. Due to peculiarities of the landscape, no paved roads or other modern structures were visible. There was no modern machinery in the fields just then. We might have been in any time since agriculture was invented.
For the history-minded, a consummation devoutly to be wished, and one that cannot be planned, only courted.
I'm courting such moments in Venice, and recalling a few I experienced in 2007 — laughing as my friend's hair flew out behind her as we clung to our hold on a speeding water taxi and distant Venice took on shape at the far den of the lagoon; listening to the slap of the waters against the greasy stones or the sound of my footsteps' echo in a dim sotoportego (a tunnel in which the building above are joined over a narrow passage); breathing in the scents of butter and vanilla in a bakery in Murano while my excited friend, who had trained in patisserie, spoke to the baker in halting Italian; kneeling at Mass in a church off the Zattere on a Saturday night, bathed in prayers in (to me) unintelligble Italian, knowing that others were listening to the same words in their own language the world over.
"We read," a character says in "Shadowlands," "to know we're not alone."
We travel, perhaps, for the same reason.