The world's oldest modern art exhibition, the 2022 instantiation of the Venice Biennale was organized by a New York-based Italian curator Cecilia Alemani. This is the first Biennale to be administered by an Italian woman and the first with a majority of woman artists, 192 of 213.

The Biennale is big, and it spreads well beyond its two large, dedicated spaces, the Arsenale and the Giardini, as shown on the map below. There are also exhibits around the city that have no relationship to the Biennale; they are here to take advantage of the large audience for art that is coursing through the city. So we have a strategy for tackling the abundance of art: start with the Arsenale, then the Giardini, then the on-site country exhibits, and finally the off-site exhibits.

Venice is small but getting from place to place is slow; it requires navigating a maze of narrow walkways, some barely shoulder-width, and ascending/descending pretty bridges that span canals. We are using the Maps.me app to create walking routes. It requires no internet connection, something Google maps (no walking routes when offline) and Citymaps2go (no longer supports offline maps on iOS) cannot. Of course tech being tech, these software observations will probably go stale as fast as a baguette. Alternatively, you could get a local SIM and be online all the time, which might be what I do in the future.

I'll post some of my favourite Arsenale photos over several days. Then I'll add comments; text clips from the guidebook; photo captions and artists; and additional photos when I am back home, at my desk with my big monitor, the wonderful Lightroom software, and, most important, fast internet.