I am seated at one of the outdoor tables in the Caffè Florian at dusk in Venice’s famed San Marco Square. The pigeons are still on their mission to search for fallen breadcrumbs, and a small orchestra, with its accordion, violin, bass, and clarinet soloists, has been serenading Florian’s customers with soulful renditions of the theme from Cinema Paradiso and a lively “Allegro” by Antonio Vivaldi.
It seems as though every piece is taking me back in time to a still-fresh memory from my life of travel and music. The musicians start to play Marcello’s “Adagio,” the same beautiful melody I had recorded in 1979 in London with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, years before he had been knighted. I remember carefully writing out the score and making sure I had wound some well-worn bass strings onto my Ramírez guitar so that my fingers would not make too many squeaks while changing fretboard positions. It seems a lifetime ago.
Now the orchestra breaks into Armando Manzanero’s “Ésta Tarde Ví Llover,” and I am back in my beloved San Miguel de Allende, slow dancing with my Mexican teenage boyfriends, in the late sixties. Édith Piaf ’s “La Vie en Rose” instantly evokes my penniless student years in Paris; then “Someday My Prince Will Come” leads my mind to wander to the studio sessions in Nashville when I recorded an instrumental version of that song with the legendary country guitarist Chet Atkins. Would my own prince ever come, I wondered, or am I now destined to navigate life’s journey on my own?
It is July, and I have chosen to come to the most romantic of all cities as a birthday treat to myself. Strangely, I do not miss having a companion this particular week and am happy simply living out of one small carry-on tote in my little hotel on a narrow street called Calle degli Specchieri. I have a ticket tomorrow to the famed opera house La Fenice, where I am going to hear a Beethoven symphony, and this morning, after the clanging seven a.m. bells from San Marco’s cathedral awakened me, I called in at the famous open-air market where I touched a velvety octopus and bought a kilo of wild strawberries.
I spent yesterday exploring the Giudecca, having been transported over the blue waters to the island by the Cipriani Hotel’s private launch that I breezed onto as though I were one of their guests. Once moored at the dock, I accepted the outstretched hand offered by a handsome Italian attendant, made my way along the pathway, and settled into the cushiony softness of a couch overlooking the bay, where I was soon sipping a delectable fresh peach cocktail. Later I made sure that one of the ripe peaches, growing in their private orchard, somehow found its way into my handbag. Ah, I had not really changed since 1972 when, along with a fellow student of Maestro Alexandre Lagoya, I had taken the overnight train to this magical city and mischievously swept into our knapsack an orange from a distracted merchant. Was I still that same girl, bubbling with wanderlust and ambition that had taken me around the world? How had I survived all my international adventures, my gypsy lifestyle, my trail of broken hearts, and my recent roller coaster years struggling to reinvent my career?
Today I had lunch in the Hotel Rialto, where thirty years ago my mother and I had stayed after a Mediterranean cruise aboard the Royal Viking Sky, on which I had given a concert. Even though we had no hotel reservations anywhere, I had promised her a couple of nights in Venice and a gondola ride. Luckily, Fortune smiled upon us that evening. Today the hotel café was jammed with tourists, but a young family from Pamplona offered me a seat at their table and, after we started chatting in Spanish, brought me over a caffè macchiato for which they refused to let me pay — ah, Europe, and the spontaneous generosity of random strangers that I well remembered from my youth.
After lunch, I strolled by the Hotel Danieli, where in the nineties I had stayed with my parents before we boarded the Seabourn Pride cruise ship that took us to Istanbul and the Black Sea. At dusk I called in for a drink in Harry’s Bar, that renowned watering hole of the international set where I had once chatted with the famous Colombian artist, Fernando Botero. As evening cast its long shadows along the canals, I passed the bobbing wooden gondolas and took a leisurely stroll along the seafront.
What had lured me back to Venice? Why did I keep returning to this special city? “Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go,” Truman Capote once wrote. Yes, for me Venice had always been a visual and sensual feast, but much like my beloved San Miguel de Allende it was also a familiar place where I felt safe wandering around on my own.
I thought back to the three crazy days in 1998 when I had flown here with my Hungarian videographer, Adam Soch, so he could film me playing Vivaldi’s “Allegro” and Albinoni’s haunting “Adagio.” We were seeking an unusual image for a scene, and in a moment of artistic inspiration I had purchased an inexpensive guitar to float in the Grand Canal. This we did, to the consternation of my fans, who had been horrified to see a fragile classical guitar drifting out to sea. They believed I had tossed one of my instruments along with my music scores into the waves! After fishing it out of the water and drying it off, Adam and I had donated the guitar to a local music school, which had gratefully accepted our gift.
Yesterday Ludovico de Luigi, one of Italy’s most renowned painters and bronze sculptors, someone I had met years ago with my former husband, had invited me into his chaotic, dusty art studio, a place where Tomaso Albinoni had once lived. He later walked with me over the bridge to Campo San Barnaba and the candle-scented church in which the composer of one of my favourite pieces of music was buried.
Venice had been home to so many timeless composers, from Albinoni to Marcello, from Cimarosa to Rossini, and of course to Antonio Vivaldi, who had founded a music school for orphaned girls. How connected I had always felt to this city’s rich musical past.
The Caffè Florian orchestra was now paying homage to Ennio Morricone, one of Italy’s greatest film composers, whose score to The Mission had inspired “Concerto of the Andes,” which I had commissioned from the talented Québécois composer Richard Fortin, who for a decade had been my musical assistant. After that came Bacalov’s magical theme to Il Postino, a film about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who in 1973 had drawn a little flower in my poetry book and whose cliffside house in Isla Negra I had later visited.
This was followed by Carlos Gardel’s “El Dia que me Quieras,” an Argentinian classic to which I had often danced tango in Miami and once in Buenos Aires. “The Girl from Ipanema” could not help but remind me of my steamy afternoon spent on Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro and the previous unforgettable day when my concert hall had caught on fire!
My Rio memories fade as the orchestra begins to play “La Paloma.” The melodic strains take me back to my rendering of that beautiful song, which I played in Ottawa for the President of Mexico, José López Portillo, who waxed poetic that he had “not been listening to the hands of a guitarist, but the wings of an angel.”
Today a mish-mash of tourists sit drinking aperitifs or having dinner. Visitors have been coming here since 1720, when Caffè Florian first opened. Over the centuries the world’s literati, painters, sculptors, and sightseers have flocked to this particular café in the huge square that Napoleon had called “the world’s greatest living room.” Nijinsky and Diaghilev had lingered here, savouring pastries while observing the Italian officers who paraded past, their black capes catching the breeze. Casanova used to frequent the café in search of beautiful women while Goethe, Marcel Proust, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens had come to the café to sip coffee, exchange gossip, read the morning papers, and admire the Venetian signorinas.