About fifty years ago Mary McCarthy remarked that after fifteen centuries of intense representation in words and images it had become impossible to make an original observation about Venice. Including, presumably, that observation. As one might have put it in the jargon of PoMo, Venice exists always and already in the condition of a representation, which it shares in greater or lesser degrees with most cities. To know a city is to know it through representation first; to address it artistically is to come to terms with its representations. If successful, to turn them back upon themselves squeezing a (last?) drop of new meaning from them…