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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. There are also exhibits around the city plus there are additional exhibits that have no formal relationship to the Biennale; they are here to take advantage of the large audience for art coursing through the alleys and canals of the city. Our strategy for tackling this abundance of art is a day or so at the Arsenale, another day at 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 currently¹ using the app Maps.me to create walking routes. It requires no internet connection, something Google maps (no walking routes when offline) and Citymaps2go² (no longer supports offline maps on iOS) cannot. Of course tech being tech, these software observations will probably go stale as quickly as a baguette. Alternatively, you could get a local SIM and be online all the time. Why did I not do that?

I'll post Biennale photos over several days. Later 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, Lightroom, and faster internet.

¹ Maps.me is now subscription, which is fine, more power to them, but in future I'll see if I can get by with Apple or Google maps and a local SIM.

² Citymaps2go seems to be a dead product.