Foreword. The first thing to do in order to cope successfully with a city is to transform an ideal image made of streets, squares, houses, churches, buildings, in a mental image composed by parallel and perpendicular lines or concentric circles. Once this little step forward has been made, one can move without maps, plans or compasses other than his own mental image. It happens this way almost everywhere, but not in Venice. Who would ever want to transform the real image into a mental one, won’t be able to take a system of lines or circles, but he will have to use all his knowledge, suggestions, memories, in order to try to work out an inextricable tangle, a maze in which he will find the archetypes of psyche and conscience, of unconscious and culture.
This book. Giuseppe Sinopoli will try to do that with this book: he is a celebrated orchestra conductor and Venetian citizen who one night, after having tried Parsifal at the Fenice theatre, gets lost between the calli and houses and tries to get through this city which escapes every abstraction. It is a maze and each maze has a centre from where to start. Nietzsche blamed Wagner and his Parsifal exactly this: to have an open and recognizable centre, to which everyone could refer to solve the work, a work too far from the fragment’s illumination, too easy to rationalize, too outdated. And this centre was the parable of redemption.
Sinopoli. Parsifal and Venice. Parsifal and redemption. Venice is the place where lands and waters meet, is the presence of water giving life, of the sea of its kiss exchanged with Mother Earth, of the proximity with primal elements from which life originates. But water is also death, is – writes Sinopoli - «the moment of the Eraclian “death of water” which becomes “earth”» (p. 63). Venice is a city of the return to maternal body, and of death, and again rebirth from the mother, like for the Fenice, where the path begins. But the parable of life-death-resurrection is the parable of Christ, of Christ Redeemer: even there from death originated life: «From the blood of the Redeemer fallen at the cross’s feet originate plants and herbs healing all injuries; their officinal effect derives from the redeeming power of Christ’s blood that redeems through his death» (p. 34); and again: «When they pierced Christ with a spear into his chest, blood spattered on the cloth of Pilato’s wife and got everywhere, so she ran home to wash her cloth but, fearing Pilato’s rage, she run into a vineyard and digged and buried the cloth under a peach tree, and the grapevine grew full of grapes» (p. 61).
Me. I read and try to transform the real image of Venice into a mental one. I realize it is not a system of lines but rather of myths, beliefs, archetypical images. But in a few time it will be the Feast of the Redeemer, Venetians feel it, they are getting ready for it: the feast has a central role for the city, it is clear. Still, the church of the Redeemer is at the Giudecca, how can one think that the centre of the city, the centre of the maze is out of it? Unless the meeting between water and land in every corner of the city isn’t itself an image of redemption and thus the centre is everywhere, and for this reason impossible to find. Or one should hypothize that the centre is not in space but in time, is not a place but a day, a feast, the feast of the Redeemer that the city has been waiting all year long.
Sinopoli:
«The initiation has taken place.
The mystery can be understood.
Time becomes space.» (p.103).
Me: If time becomes space, one day it will become the centre. The feast of the Redeemer can be the city’s real centre, that’s why it slips many people who don’t know it. But I say, Sinopoli, I am not convinced, it cannot be just this, there is also a system of forces, a geometry, the double spiral of the Grand Canal.
Sinopoli. Sinopoli’s pilgrimage goes on and reaches a point where sense seems to suddenly throng and everything seems to fill up with meaning:

«Fondamenta dei Ormesini
Campo del Gheto Novo
Ponte dei Lustraferi
Ponte dei Servi

I was petrified: the first two sounds of each name, read in order, resulted in OR-GHE-LU-SE: the woman of the desire for love, of temptation and sin, the Eve of the Knight of the Graal»
Me. Parsifal, the Graal, the mythology of redemption converges in this point where we find the symbol of sin, the woman to redeem. On the opposite side of the city, on the island of the Giudecca, there is the Redentore. If we imagine a line going from sin to redemption, this would cross all the city and pass exactly over the “S” of the Grand Canal, and right over the boats’bridge that each year is built for the feast on the Giudecca Canal. The spatiotemporal centre of this city is to be found in the sin-redemption pair that comes true each year in the feast of July.
The sly reader. But Sinopoli wasn’t properly talking about this, because other, more complex lines crossed Venice, other centres and other spirals.
Me. But, dear reader, Venice is of everybody, and surely there is not just one centre: give every man his due.