Details no.22

We had been looking forward to this break for sometime and to leave ghastly weather behind only to find the sun, made it feel all the more like an escape. My visits to Venice had varied from day trips to a week-long university hustle around every ‘chiesa’, palazzo and luckily Irish karaoke pub going, this time we were very fortunate to do it in style.

This is the Danieli hotel. And it really is as spectacular as it looks and that’s before cocktail hour – woo woo! We’ve since learnt that it features in Moonraker, and after viewing the floor below it’s pretty easy to see why.

There is something glorious about Venice, because it stands still. As visitors and tourists alike scurry over bridges, circle buildings and wave from boats the Venetians go about their day and little seems to change. But this visit was full of bright, refreshing modern and contemporary art and architecture and by jove are there places to visit! Find of the holiday was the Prada Fondazione, showing The Small Utopia, a multi-disciplinary exhibition housed over three floors. What started with Dadaist magazines, soon became an Yves Klein LP then a record of Pop Art, Duchamp, in fact you name it and yet it felt coherent rather than shambolic.

Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes sat adjacent to Litchenstein’s 3D work, while downstairs we lost several hours to primitive computer/digital art, the most memorable was to a soundtrack of The Beatles at their most psychedelic.