The Peggy Guggenheim Collection was a destination on a bright day in Venice during the visitors’ September 1977 trip. They looked through the collection, but the hoped-for visit with Peggy Guggenheim did not take place: she was sick and declined to receive them. The diary gives the refusal a dry counterpoint, adding that the visitors had not really wanted to see her either.

A Planned Visit in Venice

After a storm overnight, the morning of September 14 dawned beautiful. The group set out to visit the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. A photographer began taking pictures of the diarist in a lobby and continued during the trip back across the Laguna, an interruption that accompanied the day’s movement through Venice but is not described as part of the museum visit itself.

The Collection and Its Reception

At the collection, curator John Hornsbee asked Peggy Guggenheim whether she wanted to receive the visitors. She declined because she was ill. The diary records the decision without turning it into a confrontation: the visitors looked around at everything, while the diarist’s aside—that they had not really wanted to see her anyway—makes the missed audience seem less like a disappointment than a social formality that neither side needed to pursue.