I TOOK A train from Florence to Venice to meet Peggy Guggenheim. Paul Bowles suggested I visit her, since I was going to be in Italy, as a possible sponsor of Antaeus, the literary magazine he and I had just started in Tangier.
I had the letter of introduction he wrote to her in my pocket.
I took a vaporetto to a stop near her palazzo on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro sestiere. The palazzo was originally called Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, and I eventually found my way there.
I've since read up on the Guggenheim villa. Built in 1749, its first resident was a woman not so unlike Peggy, a Luisa Casati, in the first decade of the twentieth century. Equally wealthy, also a patron of the arts, and maybe even more eccentric, Luisa was said to be the lover one of Italy's great literary lights, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and maintained an interesting menagerie, which included snakes she wore as jewelry, a pair of cheetahs she walked on a leash, and, according to Christie's Magazine, “a flock of albino blackbirds that she would dye different colors to suit her mood.” When she died she was buried with her stuffed Pekinese dog.
I knocked on Peggy's door—or maybe there.”
