When I go to Milan, to fulfill that town's dream of a cultural centre, you should come. An interesting city. It's huge - and full of very ugly, common, repulsive people.
-- Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

that night I slept at Carlo's, after more talking and boasting and drinking and walking around Venice, meeting people in bars, following girls down the calli, ending up us alone and stoned and bitter sitting on the steps of a deconsecrated church turned into a art gallery or a gym and talking about foolish things now forever sunk into a oblivion thicker than the waters of the canals of Venice. And I had that dream sleeping on a pallet on floor, a portion of a dream I still remember, where girls leaned on a table looking at fashion pictures in a magazine, whispering things in the ancient-looking room by a high ceiling but not large (just like a room of a old palace of Venice) and outside of a window, invisible to me in the corner of the dream was the world of the future that I was anxiously about to see but couldn't and couldn't and couldn't until I woke up.
I was in Carlo's garret. Looking up at the backside of the roof, wood and terracotta, atrocious white light entering from a squared hole through a opaque glass pane. Pigeons walking and talking above and not so far, the early boat acoustic signals said it was a foggy day. My disappointed snort for the bad weather. The rattling of the garbage trolleys going up and down the bridges.
I had slept too little, and felt absurdly awake in the sleeping house, bad taste in dry mouth and dizziness-- eyes hurting.
I got out without saying goodbye walking softly amid the snores, the streets were so cold, I could hear the noise made by my steps against the hard pavement stones. The streets were dark to the openings of the skewed squares, wide in comparison and filled with more white light under the low unfriendly sky, quiet, dirty of a nightly high tide now dissolved in a grainy film of stickiness made of guano and salted sea.
I was looking for a bar, at that time I still had the veneration for the italian bars and their stinking coffees and croissants with no imagination, that what Parise so beautifully wrote about, and I think I found one just down the Ponte de Maravegie. It's the bar with the colorful glass panes, not the osteria nor the pastry shop (that lane down the bridge being the typical italian three-bars-in-a-row) and so little room inside against the counter. A radio was certainly playing, but not loudly. The croissants were warm and good, the coffee probably good. Nice the people. I didn't know any better. It felt reinvigorating and so I extended my walk to the aimless route of the fondamenta along Canale della Giudecca (aka fondamenta degli incurabili) once again fantasizing of being Corto Maltese (before my brother robbed me of that fantasy too) or Brodskij (before my russian friend explained it all to me). Enjoying the procrastination of the coming back home, where more rest and the long awaited solitude were.
The humid sadness of the city in the thin fog, its casual beauty appearing and disappearing and morphing, the large unsteady waters of the canal and their uniform color fading out in nothingness, the few, walking the fondamenta like me with their hands well protected in the big pockets of their dark dark dark cappotti, and my eyes still hurting-- the day had begun but without a move, wanting to be admired in its pointlessness, it was quite beautiful to be there and alive.
It was near the end-- one of the last months in Venice, before coming back to Milan. And I thought I had had enough of Venice back then. I didn't know anything.

-- in picture above: waters, venice, etc.

(...) her dark skin shines in the shade of the room as I enter, the morning light pours in from the side of the open roof, I see parts of her legs and shoulders, her beautiful face half turned against the pillow, the eyes closed in a peaceful sleep; this happen two or three times, especially when I get up early because of montezuma's revenge, and silently getting back to the room, every time I stand bewildered for a second at the vision of the sleeping beauty, my heart beating faster and harder, almost immediately a hard-on forces me to undress, I long to undress and lay next to Martina again, make love to her again; this mexican girl looks a india and a japanese and a thailandese at the same time; she's from the city, and very emancipated, lively, superstitious-- keeps saying she went to work when she was fourteen to be independent-- when she smiles she looks like a kid, in a way that strangely reminds me of my stepbrother when he was a kid, ages ago-- so enthusiast of the company-- we don't have a language in common, so it's all about me trying to speak spanish and missing the words, failing the grammar. Martina smiles at my mistakes, strokes my leg, I long for her mouth, for another slow dance-- outside the sea of mazunte keeps roaring against the long uneven beach-- all the rest is quiet-- unfulfilled warnings of a hurricane approaching-- when Martina and myself separate in the bed, I am sweating, and panting, the bed is full of sand, our fingers meet, we try to tell another story; in the silence of the last moments before the usual sneaking out, desayuno on the solitaire terrace deserted by the low season-- I wonder if I am in love now, and if so, what proportions this disaster will take, if any. ¿Can I bear the idea of spreading pain and tears once again? ¿is it a hastened dream? Soon we separate, with a warm smile, the same way we will separate on the last day, she going to el d.f., I going to oaxaca. It is possible necessary that we meet again in the city in a few day; so she runs to the back of the camioneta-- I go back to the beach for a last goodbye to the unsteady waters of mazunte-- the restaurants are playing the languid musics to the sea, the stray dogs populate and play on the foreground of the scene; the response, that it is necessary to meet again, to reach her body and smile again-- might be lost to the waves or to some other equally distracting, hypnotic phenomenon, and the residual forces are needed to pick up my sandals -- shake the sand away for the last time, and leave.

One thing about beauty is that it can't be planned. Or at least it shouldn't. What I believe happens, is that beauty comes about despite planning, and more often than not, beauty is in the unplanned accumulation of elements that are not meant to be essentially beautiful as much as they are meant to be useful and used. So is for elegance, and for writing (words about things and not the other way around), and so is for architecture.
Venice is the perfect example, the product of a sort of irrational individualistic development, never planned, where structures like the houses for the Arsenale's workers, the churches of the monastic orders, the street markets, the palaces for the aristocracy all stand next to each other, in a sort of awesome conversation that nobody saw coming or wanted to happen in the first place.
And so obviously is for New York, whose beauty is really in the palimpsest of growing and decaying and renovating and reusing and reinventing that made the colors and the solid forms of this incredible urban island. And I know that every word about the city is trivial and has been said already so many times.

I am into its changing light today, the confused feelings of a guilty morning in my steps getting back to the hostel, thoughts of wrong doing and unrelated worries, the day of the reading closer and closer, not prepared, not deserving, not prepared. I am amazed by all the roofs and the tanks against the moving clouds, and by the faces and bodies of the people walking with me. We drive the trucks and we wash the windows and we sing into the iPods and we bite the bagels and we drag the dogs away and we swear, we are humanity, and we don't have a clue, that's what we are. Beauty isn't there for a reason and into this unasked answer is all I ever wanted anyway.