“It’s, it’s…” We hear that the vaporetto-seated Serge Simonart is almost speechless with emotion. “It is, yes, what shall I say, one big petrified fossil, it is an everlasting aesthetic orgasm. Oh, Venice. Here humanity is at its best. Here she shows that she is capable of something. You immediately feel it when you arrive here, everything falls away from you. With us everything is too bright, too fast, too loud, too clumsy and too vulgar, all that is not the case in Venice. Everything here consists of architecture from between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. Every later building is a pimple on a beautiful face.” Everything, absolutely everything, intensifies, poetizes, when Simonart is in Venice. The Flemish writer and journalist is our guide in the podcast With Serge Simonart through Venice.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 29 January 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 29, 2022
