Dusk was setting when I first stepped foot on Venice, armed with my laptop and a suitcase full of books. It was January 2022; I was one of the first tourists to arrive post-pandemic. I clambered off the Vaporetto water taxi to see gulls cutting circles in the sky, bellies lit gold by the day’s last breath.
I rented a tiny two-bed cottage with low ceilings and diamond-cut windows, craning my neck out of them each morning to glimpse the frost-blue overhead. But I didn’t wait to settle in – not on my first night. I dropped my suitcase at the cottage, bolted the heavy wooden door and ran straight through the labyrinth for the lagoon.
A few minutes later I tore out onto the promenade. Ahead, a glittering plate of water, shadowed with islands. I gave myself just a moment to take in the splendour: the domed Basilica Santa Maria della Salute to my right; a woman making music by running her fingers over Murano glasses filled with water to my left; Marangona bell tolls haunting the air above. Then I turned around to face what I had run for.
The Metropole hotel. An imposing stone building with green shuttered windows, it was closed still, the front doors gated off. But that didn’t matter. I was staring at what was once the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage that gave girls a musical education and helped them to become some of the finest musicians of the 18th century. An orphanage where the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi had spent most of his career teaching.
And, crucially for me, the life-long home of Anna Maria della Pietà, an abandoned prodigy who became Vivaldi’s favourite student and biggest rival. I was here to write my debut novel, inspired by the life of Anna Maria and her remarkable orphan sisters.
I tugged off my gloves and fumbled through my phone for the playlist I’d created before I arrived. I picked Vivaldi’s Gloria to listen to – a piece composed by Vivaldi during his time at the orphanage that was stuffed with shades of splendour and rage.
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I put my earbuds in and imagined the girls at their first performance, many of them visibly disfigured, missing eyes and toes and scarred from the pox, and yet here, at the turn of the 18th century, in the most powerful place on earth, performing for their lives. A grin spread across my face. It was like I had stepped into my novel; stepped onto set. I had arrived not only in Venice, but in the Republic of Music, and I was already beginning to discover its secrets through its music.
In his book Vivaldi: Genius of the Baroque, Marc Pincherle writes that by the 18th century there was a “mania for music” in Venice. Day and night, Venetians sang in the streets and on the canals, each guild offering its own tune. “There was neither a time nor a place where music was not present,” he wrote.
Indeed, Venice was considered to be one of the most advanced places in the world during this era, having enjoyed centuries of economic and political stability, and a government ruled by a mix of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy rather than the church. It gave citizens the freedom to cultivate art like nowhere else; Venice became the destination to compose, to perform, and for audiences to come and listen.
I’d return to the Pietà many times during my trip, visiting the museum in Church of Santa Maria della Pietà next door and learning chilling details. For example, orphan girls were branded with ‘P’s on their arms, and a hole in the wall was the only entry point for admission; they had to be young enough and small enough to get in. Afterward, I stood in the passageway where that hole in the wall once was. I played Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt and thought about the mothers who dropped their girls here in the hope of giving them a better life.
It was hard to tear myself away from a setting so steeped in love and pain, but I needed to see musicians at work – not just performing but practising – so I booked a tour of the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, a Venetian music school training the next generation of Anna Marias. Housed in a grand palace in the Palazzo Pisani, I explored the elegant concert hall – a pillared room with velvet seats and an intricate painted ceiling. Note: it hosts free concerts here on Fridays.
A few floors above, I reached the finest rooftop in all of Venice – a setting that’s reimagined in Agatha Christie’s A Haunting in Venice. I stared out at the terracotta rooftops with a cacophony of instruments pouring out of the windows below me. I imagined that I was Anna Maria, conducting to the sounds of the city as notes lifted up and melded in the air. The scene would later work its way into my novel.
I headed for the Grand Canal next, passing San Vidal, a former church where they host The Four Seasons concerts. On Accademia bridge, I watched the water flowing beneath me while listening to Juditha Triumphans, which premiered at the Pietà in 1716. The orphan girls performed all the roles – including the male ones – and it was created to celebrate the Republic’s victory over the Ottoman Turks in Corfu. The energetic melody, frenetic voices and rushing canal made for a powerful combination: I found that I was crying.
On my way back to my cottage, I dropped in to the Museo della Musica to see instruments like the ones Vivaldi and his students would have played, and heard about Teatro San Cassiano, a project to rebuild Venice’s first public opera theatre and recreate musical experiences as they were during Vivaldi and Anna Maria’s time: imitate and candlelit. The modern Republic of Music doesn’t only do classical of course. It’s possible to spend many a happy evening sipping Campari spritzes at the Venice Jazz Club. The Bieannale Musica, a festival of contemporary music, is also held in Venice each year.
I developed a habit of blasting the third movement of Summer from The Four Seasons on my headphones and running through the knotted streets each morning, the rapid twists and turns of that piece powering my steps. Audiences were frightened when they first heard Vivaldi play his music. It was different: much faster and more intense than anything they’d heard before.
I was starting to understand everything that led to the most famous piece of classical music in the world. Innovation and wealth, education and drive. Vivaldi with this breeding ground of talented girl musicians to explore and invent with. Pieces by Tartini, Corelli, Albinoni and Maddalena Lombardini became my companions. I’d pair them with a foggy night in St Mark’s Square, or a gondola ride through the maze of crumbling buildings.
My time was drawing to a close, but I couldn’t leave without experiencing Venice’s magnificent opera house, the Teatro La Fenice. I watched from the upper levels as a kaleidoscope of guests in cloaks and silk dresses poured through the doors. On stage, Hilary Hahn raised her violin and spun a web of sound so vibrant the notes were almost visible, fizzing in the air. I had to tug my notebook out, hungry to capture her movement, her mastery. I scribbled away, drenched in darkness, as the words raced out and overlapped on the page.
It wasn’t until mid-February that the world finally discovered my secret: Venice was open once again. I wanted to keep this liquid land all to myself, but I knew as the posters for Carnevale went up and the tourists began to flock back that it was time for me to leave. I returned to Venice the following May and got a true taste of the over-tourism it faces: cruise ships moored along the lagoon like monstrous alien twins to the ships that once sailed here, piled high with salt and spice.
We over-love this land, and we do not seem to be able to stop. So we must learn to love it better, deeper; by reaching hundreds of years into history and hearing what once was. To discover Venice through its music is to develop a richer, more colourful understanding of The Republic. To begin, we simply need to listen.
