Lunch at the Biennale and then Pizza With Friends

How fortunate we were to be vacationing in Italy during the Biennale Arte 2013 exhibition! This exhibit is held every 2 years (in the odd-numbered years) alternating with an architectural exhibit (in the even-numbered years). This exposition could be accessed from Lido easily at two stops off the vaporetti (water taxis):  Giardini (The Gardens) and Arsenale (arsenal) stops.( On our way back to Lido that night, we inadvertently found a third stop in San Pietro which we hadn’t realized we were even close to, seemingly miles out of our way and ‘way ‘way off the beaten track). 

We toured art exhibits from all over the world, held in individual pavilions. It was impossible to see everything – the buildings were spread out over two main locations of acres and acres and acres of displays –  but we did manage to visit pavilions showcasing works from the US, Italy, Hungary, Egypt, Japan, Great Britain, Korea, Russia, France, and China, to name just a few. I had been expecting an afternoon of traditional art; I can honestly say that this was not it. This art was a little “different”; for example, the art from Hungary was titled “Fired But Unexploded” and featured multimedia depictions (photos, videos, hands-on exhibits) of exactly that…bombs that had been produced but not exploded. An entire building’s worth. A country’s entire exhibit. Our favorite building was the Great Britain pavilion where collections of arrowheads were displayed and complementary hot tea was served on the balcony at the conclusion of the walk-through.

We stopped at the cafeteria for lunch and were pleasantly surprised with our choices. We ordered focaccia sandwiches of tomatoes, mozzarella and spinach along with a bottle of acqua minerale for a grand total of 7 euros apiece. The focaccia bread was delicious and the sandwich was quite generous in size…more than enough to fortify us for our continued walking tour of the pavilions.  For cafeteria-style food, it was much, much better than we had expected it to be.

We finally found the Chinese exhibit at the very end of the day – at the very, very end of a long, long walk through the Arsenal – which turned out to be an end-of-the-world futuristic cartoon video. We had walked endlessly through many other exhibits in the arsenal building in order to find the Chinese exhibit and in our effort to locate the shuttle service which we had hoped would drive us back to either the Giardini or Arsenale vaporetti stops, we accidentally stumbled right into the midst of one of the Italian exhibits. The rooms for the exhibit in the arsenal building were sectioned off into long warehouse-type spaces. You could walk from one through to the other without opening or closing any doors. And there on the wall in this particular exhibit was a collage of perhaps 20 or so photos of a young woman at first fully clothed, but then… gradually unclothed. And there in the front of the room was the exact same girl in the photographs going through all the exact same moves depicted in each of the photos, step by step, in very slllllowww motion. At first, she was dressed in a white top an