Venice: What’s it like there in winter?

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“What is it like there in winter?”

I thought of telling them about acqua alta, about the various shades of gray in the window as one sits at breakfast in one’s hotel, enveloped by silence and the mealy morning pall of newlyweds’ faces; about pigeons accentuating every curve and cornice of the local Baroque in their dormant affinity for architecture; about a lonely monument to Francesco Querini and his two huskies carved out of Istrian stone similar, I think, in its hue, to what he saw last, dying, on his ill-fated journey to the North Pole, now listening to the Giardini’s rustle of evergreens in the company of Wagner and Carducci; about a brave sparrow perching on the bobbing blade of a gondola against the backdrop of a sirocco-roiled damp infinity...

I said, “it’s like Greta Garbo swimming.” ^{Note 1} Watermark by Joseph Brodsky. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York. 1993