Venice

Venice appears as a city first glimpsed from a distance and claimed through its defense before it could be entered. Seen across the lagoon from the road, it gathers landscape, wartime memory, and Richard Cantwell’s sense of belonging into one image: a place he fought for as a young man, later saw rising from the sea, and still calls his own.

Geography and Approach

The approach to Venice is defined by water and distance. From the canal road, Cantwell looks across winter-brown marshes whose reeds bend in a strong north wind. He can make out the squared church tower on Torcello and Burano’s leaning campanile; beyond them, the sea is slate blue, with twelve sailing barges running before the wind toward Venice. He expects the view to become clearer after the crossing of the Dese River above Noghera. The city is not presented as an immediate arrival but as the far point of a shifting prospect, gradually distinguished from marsh, islands, and open water.

The lagoon’s islands make the view a lived-in landscape rather than a distant panorama alone. Burano is described through its crowded population, lace-making women, and men who make toys and work in glass factories on nearby Murano. After work, people cross home by vaporetto; at night, some hunt ducks along the marsh edges with punt guns, whose shots carry across the lagoon on moonlit nights. From beyond Murano, Cantwell finally directs Ronald Jackson’s attention to Venice itself. He says there is more he could show him, but urges him to take a good look at this view, from which, he says, one can see how it all happened—a vantage point that, in his experience, people seldom use.

Wartime Defense and First Sight

Cantwell’s claim on Venice begins in war, not residence. As a boy, he fought along the canal in winter to defend the city, despite having insufficient command of the language. He remembers that they fought for Venice without seeing it. On one later return to the area, he reached as far as Noghera on a clear, cold day and saw the city across the water, but still did not enter it. In another recollection, he connects his first sight of Venice with a journey back to have a small wound dressed: the city appeared to him rising from the sea. The delayed vision makes the place both the object of a military effort and the reward of a belated encounter.

That defense remains a source of pride, though Cantwell questions how much it explains the welcome he receives. At roughly fifty, he says the Venetians know he fought for the city and treat him well; privately, he wonders whether they value that service or merely see him as a colonel on the winning side. He hopes the latter is not true. His uncertainty does not undo his attachment: he insists inwardly that Venice is his city because he fought for it when he was young, even though he never entered it during that campaign.

Belonging and the Preserved City

Cantwell’s affection for Venice is active and practical. He loves the city, is glad he helped defend it, and remembers that his unit did well at the junction. He imagines walking through it as a way to learn its difficult, intricate layout: moving from one part to another is, in his comparison, better than solving crossword puzzles. The prospect of knowing the city thoroughly becomes something he could possess through attention and experience, even after his wartime connection had first been formed at a distance.

The city’s survival is part of this attachment. Cantwell regards it as a credit to his side that they never struck Venice, and as a credit to the opposing side that they respected it. His wish that he could fight it again, this time with the knowledge and equipment available later, immediately meets the recognition that the enemy would have those advantages too; the essential problem would remain, except for who controlled the air. Venice therefore anchors both an old memory of defense and a sober reflection on how warfare changes while its central dangers endure. In the present, Cantwell watches the polished, brass-striped boat cut through the brown water and negotiate the small traffic problems, while the city remains ahead: at once a place in view, a remembered cause, and a home he claims without having first possessed it.