Holly Smith Pedlosky, Photographer

Signora Bertarello's Sheets

In the middle of my life, I found myself, quite unlike Dante, not in the middle of a dark forest, but on a luminous Lagoon, on which floated hundreds of islands, each covered with what the poet Shelley called "fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven." Shelley was talking about lace-like Venetian architecture, but everywhere I looked, I saw laundry suspended from the sky and dangling in front of walls:

(please click on the small images below to see a larger image)

"Ah," she would say, "If you think I am good, you should have seen my mother! She was a real Casalinga" (Italian for "old fashioned housewife").

So, I learned Italian and spent a year wandering around Venice talking to casalinghe and photographing their laundry displays.