Beyond blue

I've just watched a wonderfully evocative television documentary on the colour blue (the second part of a series written and presented by James Fox on the history of art in three colours: gold, blue, and white; do watch it if you have a chance). It starts on the Venetian lagoon with the story of the arrival of lapis lazuli, a thousand years ago, and the way a stone that looks like a fragment of the sky was turned into the intense pigment of ultramarine that transformed the paintings of Titian and Giotto.
All of which reminded me of the magical few days of our honeymoon in Venice -- staying on Torcello at the Locanda Cipriani (a place that inspired Daphne du Maurier, Nancy Mitford, and Ernest Hemingway; I had known the Du Maurier connection, but not about Mitford, whose photographs are still on the walls, and who spent several months writing there). Just across the water from Torcello is Burano, where I took these pictures of a rainbow of houses (and a handful of Murano glass marbles), including the brightest blue I've ever seen, like the heavenly clear sky above...