The boys were in a fluster. I couldn't explain it. Stunned, sweating all over and lying 
limp at the base of a column, I listened dully as they explained to me in Greek that this 
church was only part of all I had seen. Why should it frighten me so? Yes, it was old, 
yes, it was Byzantine, as so much in Venice was. "Our ships have traded with Byzantium 
for centuries. We are a maritime empire." I tried to grasp it.
  
  What came clear in my pain was only that this place had not been a special judgment 
upon me. I had been taken from it as easily as I had been brought into it. The 
sweet-voiced boys with the gentle hands who surrounded me, who offered me cool wine to 
drink and fruit to eat that I might recover, they did not hold this place in any terrible 
dread.
  
  Turning to the left of me, I glimpsed the quays, the harbor. I ran towards it, 
thunderstruck by the sight of the wooden ships. They stood at anchor four and five deep, 
but beyond them was enacted the greatest miracle: great galleons of deep ballooning wood, 
their sails collecting the breeze, their graceful oars chopping the water as they moved 
out to sea.
  
  Back and forth the traffic moved, the huge wooden barks dangerously close to one 
another, slipping in and out of the mouth of Venice, while others no less graceful and 
impossible at anchor disgorged abundant goods.
  
  Leading me stumbling to the Arsenale, my companions comforted me with the sight of the 
ships being built by ordinary men. In days to come I would hang about at the Arsenale for 
hours, watching the ingenious process by which human beings made such immense barks that 
to my mind should rightly sink.
  
  Now and then in snatches I saw images of icy rivers, of barges and flatboats, of coarse 
men reeking of animal fat and rancid leather. But these last ragged tidbits of the winter 
world from which I'd come faded.
  
  Perhaps had this not been Venice, it would have been a different tale.
  
  In all my years in Venice, I never tired of the Arsenale, of watching the ships being 
built. I had no problem gaining access by means of a few kind words and coins, and it was 
ever my delight to watch these fantastical structures being constructed of bowed ribs, 
bent wood and piercing masts. Of this first day, we were rushed through this yard of 
miracles. It was enough.
  
  Yes, well, it was Venice, this place that must erase from my mind, at least for a 
while, the clotted torment of some earlier existence, some congestion of all truths I 
would not face.
  
  My Master would never have been there, had it not been Venice.
  
  Not a month later he would tell me matter-of-factly what each of the cities of Italy 
had to offer him, how he loved to watch Michelangelo, the great sculptor, hard at work in 
Florence, how he went to listen to the fine teachers in Rome.
  
  "But Venice has an art of a thousand years," he said as he himself lifted his brush to 
paint the huge panel before him. "Venice is in itself a work of art, a metropolis of 
impossible domestic temples built side by side like waxen honeycombs and maintained in 
ever flowing nectar by a population as busy as bees. Behold our palaces, they alone are 
worthy of the eye."
  
  As time passed he would school me in the history of Venice, as did the others, dwelling 
on the nature of the Republic, which, though despotic in its decisions and fiercely 
hostile to the outsider, was nevertheless a city of "equal" men. Florence, Milan, 
Rome-these cities were falling under the power of small elites or powerful families and 
individuals, while Venice, for all her faults, remained governed by her Senators, her 
powerful merchants and her Council of Ten.
  
  On that first day, an everlasting love for Venice was born in me. It seemed singularly 
devoid of horrors, a warm home even for its well-dressed and clever beggars, a hive of 
prosperity and vehement passion as well as staggering wealth.
  
  And in the tailor shop, was I not being made up into a prince like my new friends?
  
  Look, had I not seen Riccardo's sword? They were all noblemen.
  
  "Forget all that has gone before," said Riccardo. "Our Master is our Lord, and we are 
his princes, we are his royal court. You are rich now and nothing can hurt you."
  
  "We are not mere apprentices in the ordinary sense," said Albinus. "We are to be sent 
to the University of Padua. You'll see. We are tutored in music and dance and manners as 
regularly as in science and literature. You will have time to see the boys who come back 
to visit, all gentlemen of means. Why, Giuliano was a prosperous lawyer, and one of the 
other boys was a physician in Torcello, an island city nearby.
  
  "But all have independent means when they leave the Master," explained Albinus. "It's 
only that the Master, like all Venetians, deplores idleness. We are as well off as lazy 
lords from abroad who do nothing but sample our world as though it were a dish of food."
  
  By the end of this first sunlighted adventure, this welcome into the bosom of my 
Master's school and his splendid city, I was combed, trimmed and dressed in the colors he 
would forever choose for me, sky blue for the stockings, a darker midnight blue velvet 
for a short belted jacket, and a tunic of an even fairer shade of azure embroidered with 
tiny French fleur-de-lis in thick gold thread. A bit of burgundy there might be for 
trimming and fur; for when the sea breezes grew strong in winter, this paradise would be 
what these Italians called cold.
  
  By nightfall, I pranced on the marble tile with the others, dancing for a while to the 
lutes played by the younger boys, accompanied by the fragile music of the Virginal, the 
first keyboard instrument I had ever seen.
  
  When the last of twilight had died beautifully into the canal outside the narrow 
pointed arched windows of the palazzo, I roamed about, catching random glances of myself 
in the many dark mirrors that rose up from the marble tile to the very ceiling of the 
corridor, the salon, the alcove, or whatever beautifully appointed room I should find.