The American poet Cynthia Zarin was 19 when she first travelled to Venice. The trip was a summer sojourn of sorts with “a boy I thought I might marry”, and the city turned out to be hot and expensive to room in. Zarin and her boyfriend stayed in a grotty boarding house in Padua and took the train to Venice one morning, planning to meet another friend of Zarin’s, who was also making a day trip from Florence. The couple ate veal sandwiches and idled around the steps of the Santa Maria della Salute, but Zarin soon wearied of her boyfriend’s chatter (“I did not want to hear any more about Savonarola”) and ended up arguing with him. Later, the boy was rude to Zarin’s friend from Florence. “To annoy me,” Zarin writes, “because I would not listen…”
In the opening essay of her new collection, In Italy, Zarin recalls this first encounter with Venice halfway through another visit. She is older now, of course, and travelling alone: “Perhaps it is better for me to come to Venice alone; there is no one with whom I have been to Venice that I am now on speaking terms…” Back in New York, Zarin had been seeing a man – “a friend of friends” – already entangled in a complicated relationship with another woman. He refused to accompany her on the trip, but can’t resist love-bombing her with texts every few hours: “It is evening and raining in New York. You are very close.” Oceans away, Zarin attends a book party, makes a pilgrimage to the poet Joseph Brodsky’s grave, wanders into a pavilion or two at the Venice Biennale – but she can’t help witnessing everything in the city with her lover’s eyes.
