Menino conhece Menina, wedding photographers in Venice in time of Covid19

Menino conhece Menina, wedding photographers in Venice for a day and photographers of the impossible for a week.

It was 2020, Carnival. We went, as wedding photographers to Venice, to celebrate the love of Vitor and Grasiele in the streets (the canals, I mean). We found, as we expected, the crowds, the gondola rides, the storefront (just the storefront!) of Caffè Florian and the wonderful view of the Grand Canal drawing an S shape into the dense urban mesh. We wandered with our bride and groom through the streets and canals, among the traditional Carnival masks: the Bauta, the Colombina, the Moretta, the Harlequin... and the Plague Doctor, premonitory.

It was February 2020 and we were hearing about this new plague. Covid19 was the topic of all conversations, still unknown and unexperienced, but poured in the form of concerns and doubts, at every sentence.

After finishing our work as wedding photographers in Venice, we had extra days to enjoy the Carnival (and the ravioli and gelati). We woke up to the Volo dell’Aquila in Piazza San Marco, which was crowded, fed by a continuous flow of masked people, arriving through all the arteries of the city to that heart. The Eagle, heir to others who flew over the square since the sixteenth century, "infects all with joy, emotion and beauty" – so it was proclaimed.

But Covid19 erupted!

Someone had experienced Covid19 and the concerns became concrete, they gained a face, a name and became fear.

The Eagle did not fly. The Carnival had been canceled, they feared that the infection would not be from joy but from the mentioned plague. The flow reversed and, through the same arteries, in a flash, the people and the joy were gone. The square was emptied. It was as if the crowd was drained with the waters of the lagoon.

For us, it was a kind of frightened dazzle. We were afraid like the others but, at the same time, we were amazed by the crazy atmosphere and that apocalyptic scenario of a deserted Venice. It was extraordinary: we, wedding photographers in Venice, by a twist of fate, witnessed, in that singular and delightful city, the sprouting of this event that would change the world and mark all living people.

And how photogenic that was... Like heaven for a street photographer, as we love to be!

We walked all the streets, all the bridges, every corner.

In the scarce faces that still roamed the streets, to the Carnival masks, surgical masks were added, in a burlesque and laughable redundancy – in fact very appropriate to Carnival. And even those faces ended up disappearing. There remained the doves and seagulls hopping on the pavements, the chairs piled up on the terraces and the tranquil reflections of the waters in the canals where, in those days, no gondolas would pass.

There is something extraordinary and unrepeatable about these days, as if we had traveled to a time before the invention of the tourist and the selfie. Empty and silent Venice. Our Venice. Only our Venice!