Are you lookin’ at me…. I said, are you lookin’ at me?

To paraphrase a comedy skit from Saturday Night Live, being in the circus business was berry berry good to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey. The head honcho of the bunch was John Ringling and at one point in time he was one of the 10 richest men in America. So, what to do with all that money? Well, one thing you can do is build a spectacular house. In Sarasota, Florida he built his version of a Venetian palace and he called it the Ca’ d Zan, Venetian for House of John. It is located on the waters edge of an inlet from the Gulf of Mexico and is, to put it mildly, quite a sight. But buying a lot and putting up a fancy house wasn’t all he did. He literally bought all the land visible from his house… all up and down the coast as far as the eye could see and all the barrier islands off the coast. Must not have liked having nosy neighbors. Today Margaret and I toured the house, gardens and nearby art museum and it is quite an experience. The house was designed to resemble a Venetian palace, both inside and out. Walk into the front door and you are transported back 500 years to the golden age of Venice when it was one of the richest and most powerful city states in the western world. Art, furniture and household furnishings all bespeak of a level of wealth unknown almost anywhere else at that point in man’s evolution.

As interesting as the house was, equally nice was the art museum. Name just about any famous artist and at least one example of their work was on display. At one time, he had what was considered the best collection of Rubens in the world. There is even an exact copy of the statue of David by Michelangelo. The current featured artist is Duane Hanson who creates life-sized, realistic looking statues of ordinary people in ordinary situations. Round a corner and you see a painter painting a wall. Except that the painter is a statue. Enter another room and you see a couple sitting on a bench looking at a painting on the wall. Dressed in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, with a cameras hung around their necks, you do a double take when you realize that they too are statues, not real people. The janitor with the broom and trash barrel? Yep, another one. But no matter how many times you look at them, they are so life like that it just totally creeps you out because you expect them to blink, turn towards you and ask “What are you looking at?”.

All in all, the visit was very interesting and I would highly recommend it to anyone who happens to visit the Sarasota area. More photo's in the gallery.