In the middle of my life I found myself, quite unlike Dante, in the middle of a vast and luminous lagoon dotted with floating little islands, each covered with airborne displays of women's work. The first thing a New England woman with a Puritan heritage coming to Italy is aware of is that she is in a culture where women are venerated.

With a year in Venice in front of me, I felt like Belle in Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête: doors kept springing open in front of me, inviting me to experience I knew not what.

That year and during many subsequent sojourns in Venice, a desire grew in me to understand why older Italian women, (they were the repressed objects of the Male Gaze, house-arrested victims of the Patriarchy, were they not?), exulted in their own identities.

I got a Gladys Klebel Delmas Foundation grant to interview and videotape Venetian casalinghe, traditional Italian housewives, & I return to Venice each year and photograph them & their art of hanging laundry.

A casalinga is a woman who finds pleasure, meaning, & purpose in creating a home that nourishes those whom she loves. She can also be a sibyl.

Sibyls were ancient Greek prophetesses who understood how the world works. Far from being evangelists, they kept their knowledge of the past, present, & future in secret books, and they would impart their wisdom only to those who journeyed to seek it.

From the Middle Ages on in Italy, the mythology of the Sibyl ripened & deepened. She could be a mysterious sage like the Queen of Sheba, a seductive witch like Circe, a loving mother like Saint Anne, a wrinkled & muscular virago like Michelangelo's Cumaean Sibyl on the Sistine ceiling.

Sibyls always had a story to tell, whether or not anyone was listening. In the realm of the psyche, their power was immense. In the public sphere they were often invisible.

This portfolio is about some Venetian Sibyls.

For more about symbolic female power and its connection with hung fabric, please visit my Manifold Laundry web pages.