Next-door to Vuitton

This was over two decades ago when I was an undergraduate studying English Language at the Bayero University in Kano.  The title of my essay had been ‘My Favourite Dreamland’ and it was my response to an assignment given to our class by one of our lecturers Malam (now Dr) Aliyu Kurfi.The aim of the […]

This was over two decades ago when I was an undergraduate studying English Language at the Bayero University in Kano.  The title of my essay had been ‘My Favourite Dreamland’ and it was my response to an assignment given to our class by one of our lecturers Malam (now Dr) Aliyu Kurfi.
The aim of the exercise was to test our skills at using connotations. We were specifically instructed to write about a place or thing we liked very much or hated strongly, using the best adjectives we could think of to convey our feelings for it. After marking our essays, Malam Kurfi had summoned me to his office and asked me to honestly say whether I had written this essay myself or had copied it from somewhere. I replied that the essay had been a 100 per cent my effort. Then how did I know all those places that I described so vividly and in such positive terms, Malam Kurfi had asked.
I replied that I had just finished reading a novel that was set in Venice, ‘The Pigeon Project’ by Irving Wallace, and that was how I got to know the names of the places I said I wanted to see in the essay. What I didn’t add was that I had been nursing a wish to visit Venice, not as a result of reading Wallace’s novel but ever since I saw the city in the movie version of Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’ and in the classic Hollywood comedy ‘Casanova’s Big Night.’ It was in the comedy, more than in the Shakespeare film, that much of the unique city is shown. Late ace comedian Bob Hope, played Casanova, though he was only ‘Pipo Papelino, a miserable tailor’s miserable apprentice from Venice’ because the real Casanova had gone into hiding.
Bob Hope gave us a ride through the legendary city in his dangerous but hilarious adventures. One really can’t help but marvel at how a complete city can exist virtually on water, where even movements of any significant distance can only be achieved in water taxis. This was the amazement I tried to capture in my undergraduate piece, all those years ago, and for which I got a ‘B’ for my pains. You won’t know what an accomplishment this ‘B’ score was until you hear that getting an ‘A’ was a rare feat indeed in our department.
Suddenly I found myself in Venice, early this week. Everything about Venice was as I had seen in the movies and in travel magazines. From the moment we drove from the train station to the city centre in our speeding motorboat, I had a heady sense of being in a dream. Only the beautiful rays of the sun gleaming against the clear waves of the wide lagoon, bordered on either side by the city’s breathtaking ancient buildings and palaces, convinced me that I was indeed awake and finally in my dreamland.
Walking down the narrow alleyway to our apartment hotel and viewing the numerous small bridges that connect the hundred small islands which form the city of Venice, further informed me that this was real. The only surprise to me was the designer invasion. I had no idea that all the big names in the fashion world had descended on the quiet natural beauty of the Venetian coast line, until we made our way to lunch after dropping our luggage in our apartment hotel.  There, right on our doorstep is the Louis Vuitton showroom. It is there the moment you step out of the building.
You see our accommodation was a 19th century four – storey block that comes complete with its ante-room and courtyard. It was built in 1829 according to the date inscribed on its tiled stairway and has no elevator   because such an old edifice can probably not contain the rigours of an elevator working day and night. This meant that guests occupying the last floor, like us, will have to ferry our tired bones up and down those several flight of stairs in order to live in Venice.
 Having Louis Vuitton at our door-step however doesn’t make their stuff ‘touchable.’ And as you move down the alleyway towards the city center or San Marcos square, you will continue to stumble upon all the other ‘biggies’ Gucci, Prada, Guess, Sisley, Bvlgari etc. Though I dared to step foot into the other showrooms, my experience with Louis Vuitton’s products in Rome, a few days earlier, had taught me to steer clear of that ‘untouchable’ brand.
We were walking along the streets near the Vatican City when I suddenly saw the Vuitton signboard and decided to go in and buy a bag. The moment I said so my husband had said, ‘Good, I hope you can afford it.’ We walked inside and I asked the price of two of the bags on display. Each of them costs close to a thousand dollars. I simply walked back to where he stood and said to him the bags were ‘untouchable’ (not in the Indian sense). Even if I had a thousand dollars to spare I am very sure buying a single hand bag with the amount will not be the thing I’ll do.
How does one walk when wearing a thousand dollar bag? I asked jokingly. Of course I know that there are women who can comfortably buy them, especially those married to our federal legislators and their brother-governors. But to each his/her own, so I simply turned my back to Louis Vuitton, even when I found myself living next-door to ‘him’ in Venice. In any case, I ended up seeing the same bag on many women’s shoulders both in Rome and the island city of Venice. My husband’s simple answer was that those were the Chinese duplicates.
And true to type we ran into these designer copies on the streets and alleyways of Venice. They were being touted by the Malian and Senegalese vendors who proliferate the island. These ‘copies’ go for less than 5 percent of the price of the original and are hard to distinguish from a distance.  They may not last as long as the originals, but they will certainly serve the purpose for which bags are created, and that is enough for some of us.
Over ten years ago, in a BBC World documentary I had seen something about the Islamic Heritage of Venice. I looked around the squares, the markets and the city center without seeing anything with which to make an Islamic connection. Unless you count out the Moroccan restaurant steward who, on seeing my covering veil offered us the ‘salam’ and invited us into their restaurant to eat what was both Halaal and a ‘good deal’ that first day when went out to look for lunch. Of course it wasn’t lost to me that Othello, the Moor of Venice, another of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, had been a Moroccan. But this still didn’t help my search for that Islamic link to Venice.
In the end, it was to the Gondola driver that I turned. The Gondola is a beautifully decorated traditional canoe that can carry up to about eight people around the lagoons in a guided tour of Venice. Its cruise is one of the city’s main attractions. It was during the Gondola ride that I asked the young driver where we could find any of Venice’s Islamic sites. He regretted that I hadn’t spoken earlier, claiming that we were now very far from the one site he knew and with time not on our side, because the sun was about to set, he couldn’t start ferrying us in search of the town’s Islamic relics. I told him I understood. We couldn’t arrange another site-seeing tour the next day because we were to leave Venice the following morning, our two-day stay was over.
But still interested in finding the link I had stumbled on in the BBC documentary between Venice and Islam, I did an internet search and found the following.
Founded in the seventh century and built upon more than 100 islets in a lagoon off the northeast coast of the Italian peninsula, Venice grew to be one of the largest cities in Europe and the capital of a great trading empire whose reach extended far into the eastern Mediterranean. Venice initially had strong political ties to Byzantium, and in the tenth and eleventh centuries Venetian merchants obtained trading privileges from the Byzantine emperors.  As Byzantium gradually gave way to Islamic caliphates from the eighth century onward, Venetians increasingly came into contact with Muslims and their ideas, culture, and way of life. As a result, Venice became Christian Europe’s most important interface with the Muslim civilizations of the Near East.
The artistic consequences of the dynamic relationship that Venice forged with its Islamic trading partners, especially the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria, the Ottomans of Turkey, and the Safavids of Iran, were felt over nearly a thousand-year period. The same merchant galleys that carried spices, soap, cotton, and industrial supplies from the bazaars of the Islamic Near East to the markets of Venice also brought with them luxurious carpets, velvets, silks, glass, porcelain, gilded bookbindings, illustrated manuscripts, and inlaid metalwork. Not surprisingly, these and other portable works of Islamic art, which were often superior in quality to what was available in Europe, made an indelible impression upon artistic taste and production in Venice. From the medieval to the Baroque eras, Venetians acquired Islamic art and adapted and imitated its techniques. In turn, albeit to a lesser extent, the arts of Venice became of interest to the Islamic world.