Annalisa & Marco Mengoni’s “Piazza San Marco” Is a Timeless Portal of Beauty, Memory, & Longing

Annalisa and Marco Mengoni have created a timeless portal that speaks to all of us throughout the ephemerality of our existence in their song “Piazza San Marco,” capturing a palimpsest that bears endless traces of beauty, memory, and longing within the infinity of Venice – La Serenissima.

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Stream: “Piazza San Marco” – Annalisa ft. Marco Mengoni

Annalisa’s stunning new single “Piazza San Marco” (feat. Marco Mengoni) leaves one in awe of its wonder –

– reflecting on the significance of how one song can crystallize moments of profound transformation within the world’s most beautiful city unlike any other on this planet earth.

When one stands in the vast expanse of the insufferable beauty of Piazza San Marco in Venice on a winter night, when one is fortunate enough to experience the all-enveloping fog – the nebbia – there is the overwhelming feeling that one is cast adrift from one’s own recognition of self in becoming immersed within the memories of doges and marginalized and creative commoners that created the most remarkable city in the world in this uncanny floating portal between East and West.

Piazza San Marco - Annalisa ft. Marco Mengoni — Piazza San Marco – Annalisa ft. Marco Mengoni

Venice, for me, often expresses two simultaneous emotions, as I’m continually caught between outward forms of exuberant ecstasy of being continually immersed in beguiling beauty and dark mystery, as well as being stricken with deep and intense forms of reflection on my own mortality in my disappearance from this world as those very doges and marginalized and creative commoners experienced centuries ago. Venice has the continual capacity to overwhelm the self and how one reflects on human experience. The marvelous writer Jhumpa Lahiri ruminates deeply on this precise aspect in her captivating memoir, In Other Words:

“Over the years Venice has had an increasingly unsettling impact on me. Its devastating beauty pierces me, I’m overwhelmed by the fragility of life. I’m enveloped in a passionate dream that always seems about to dissolve. A dream that’s truer than life. Crossing the bridges again and again makes me think of the passage that we all make on the earth, between birth and death. Sometimes, crossing certain bridges, I fear I’ve already reached the beyond.”

Annalisa & Marco Mengoni "Piazza San Marco" music video screenshot — Annalisa & Marco Mengoni “Piazza San Marco” music video screenshot

If one deeply resides within Venice for weeks on end, time begins to produce this overwhelming sensation that one has indeed “reached the beyond” of how existence can be experienced and how the textures of the world can be sensed.

It is almost as if one has disappeared into a portal of the past wherein human life could be felt in a more passionate form that is in a sense free of the trappings of the modern world. The usual sentiment of time is suspended as one learns to dwell within the wonders of Venetian life which is freedom in itself of vehicular traffic, and if one knows how to inhabit spaces off of the touristic path – an entirely new way of living on planet earth can be intimately forged within its hidden passages that are abundant with beautiful and unconventional ways of living.

The Venetian writer Carlos Gondoni expressed Venice in this manner in his memoirs:

“Maps, plans, models and descriptions are insufficient; it must be seen. All other cities bear more or less resemblance to one another, but Venice resembles none.”

Venice does indeed resemble no other. In their song, Annalisa with Marco Mengoni describe Piazza San Marco as a place of such immense beauty that is difficult for the human mind to process as to how it overwhelms in a manner that provokes dread, or more particularly as Jhumpa Lahiri expressed its beauty is devastating – which is precisely because it is so utterly sublime. When one stands in the Piazza San Marco, it is sublime because of the feeling that one has reached infinity as one’s vision onto the lagoon stretches time beyond itself, and so in a sense one experiences a sense of fear through the reversion of knowing one’s own self. In Venice, and particularly on a late and solitary winter night on a forlorn fondamenta enveloped in nebbia, one can encounter the liminal sense of levitating outside of consciousness.

Annalisa & Marco Mengoni "Piazza San Marco" © 2025 — Annalisa & Marco Mengoni “Piazza San Marco” © 2025

In this manner of thinking, Javier Marias incisively expresses a marvelous way of thinking about Venice and how this is experienced through his perception, as he writes in his memoir Venice: An Interior:

“It means that it is self-sufficient, that it has no need of anything outside of itself and that this same self-sufficiency is what creates that ‘endless imaginary fragmentation’: the narrow becomes wide, the near becomes far, the limited becomes infinite, the identical becomes distinct, the timeless becomes transient.”

Through the perspective of Marias, it is possible to consider how this reversal of self-knowing occurs in the lagoon as one’s usual habitat of thinking experience and the world has become suspended. Within an extended winter stay in La Serenissima one reflects on one’s existence through the captivating and overwhelming sense of infinity which leaves one in a state of ultimate awareness of the fleeting sense of life within the graft of centuries past. In Venice, and when one walks in Piazza San Marco, there is the experience of a design of overwhelming wonder in standing before the sea, the world, and time itself which continually murmurs within its own echoes.

Annalisa and Marco Mengoni have created a timeless portal in their song “Piazza San Marco” that speaks to all of us throughout the ephemerality of our existence, capturing a palimpsest that bears endless traces of beauty, memory, and longing within the infinity of Venice – La Serenissima.

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