This is a ring filled with golden shimmering history and hopes; an accretion of images from time immemorial, glinting, emerging and submerging though space and memory. 

A bright yellow ring designed by NASA engineers, based on the Apollo spacecraft's flotation collar, sustains and supports objects which refer to Venetian history as a crossroads of all history, through the present to the future.  It is at once an archeology emerging from the deep and a capsule splashed down.  It is the sea, its parts and secrets.

Golden Byzantine columns float among angels wings and manhole covers and putti and crowns long lost.  Capitals and wall fragments, a sea dragon and toucans, all golden, toss up and under the waves.  Tritons, tiaras, golf balls, books, a plate from Harry’s Bar, a mask of jokers or the four winds might emerge at any time.  Swords and a seahorse link with a Crusader’s axe, Kublai Khan’s lanterns and a Renaissance picture frame.

The pieces are sings and symbols, the dragon deriving from Carpaccio, angels wings of San Giorgio, the columns of San Zaccaria, the swan of myth, Brancusi and all children.  A large crystal ball floats among them.

The ring is a symbol of the "Sposalizio del Mar," 1 as humanity and the sea are wed through civilization and nature.  Some of the Sabbadini Edict of 1553 is written on an inflatable shell.  (Sabbadini was a philosopher and Minister of the Water in the Venetian Republic.)

Venetorum urbs,

Divina disponente providentia

Aquis Fundata

Aquarum ambitu circumsepta.

Aquarum ambitu circunsepta.

Aquis pro mura mumitur

Quisquis igitur

Quoquo modo detrimentum publicis aquis

Anferre ausus fuerit

Hostis patriae judicepur

Nec minori plectatur peoma

Quam qui sacros muros patriae Violasset

Hujus edicti jus ratum perpetuvmque Esto.

The city of the Venetians

With the aid of divine providence

Was founded on water

Enclosed by water

Defended by water, instead of walls.

Whoever in any way dares

Damage the public waters

Shall be declared an enemy of the State

And will not deserve less punishment

Than he who breaches the sacred wall of the State.

This edict is valid for ever more.

From a waterproof tape deck comes stories of the Lagoon, told by fishermen, shop workers, ferry boat drivers, a man who sells artichokes, a woman who sells squid … This includes some history of the Lagoon and its development, particularly by Counts Cini and Volpi   -- the story of Cini’s incarceration in Dachau, his release, and later his desire to dismantle the bridge he had constructed.   People speak in a variety of languages, all voices mingling with the lapping of the tides.

Susan Kleinberg

Venice, May 1995

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1The “Sposalizio del Mar” is the mystic marriage of the Doge to the sea.  Begun in the year 1000, this ceremony, in which the Doge, now the mayor of Venice, tosses a bejeweled ring into the sea, symbolizes the interdependence of the Venetians to the sea.