Between 1957 and 1958, the sole (for a short time) British member of the Situationist International (SI), Ralph Rumney, produced a psychogeographical study of Venice: The Leaning Tower of Venice. Playing on a famous landmark in another Italian hotspot (Pisa), The Leaning Tower of Venice sought to smash through the Spectacularization of a Venice Rumney identified as ‘N.Adriatic honeymoon town’, prey to the sentimental projections of hypnotised tourists. Rumney recruited Beat-poet Alan Ansen as assistant and the two made a series of dérives through the labyrinthine streets of the city documenting, in the form of the fotoromanzo, its lesser-known locations to critique the city’s two-dimensional cultural / holiday marketisation.
In 2019, the Museo del Camminare set out upon a valiant quest to retrace the route Rumney and Ansen took: the results can be found on other pages of this website as ‘Re-iter: Ralph Rumney – Psychogeography of Venice’,1 with accompanying essay ‘Ralph Rumney and His Dérive in the 1950s’ by Irma Delmonte.2
Little-known but of central importance to Rumney’s life and work in Venice is his marriage to Pegeen Vail, daughter of sculptor Laurence Vail and notorious art-mogul Peggy Guggenheim. As Delmonte says in her essay, Rumney’s psychogeographical study was delivered late to the Situationists, costing him his membership in the collective, due to important happenings around the birth of he and Pegeen’s son Sandro (named after Sandro Botticelli, yes); and after its publication not by the SI’s journal Internationale Situationniste but Ark: Journal of the Royal College of Art in London, things became increasingly complicated and, in 1967, Pegeen died of an overdose of sleeping tablets and whiskey.3Details of the emotional trouble caused by Peggy Guggenheim leading up to and in the wake of this tragic event can be found in Rumney’s heart-wrenching (auto)biographies Le Consul (1998)4 and The Map Is Not The Territory (2000).5
This short itinerary tells a small something about Ralph & Pegeen – who fell in love at first sight and struggled for their relationship until they no longer could – through five discrete locations: I. Palazzo dei Venier Leoni, II. Campo Sant’Anzolo, III. Fondamenta San Lorenzo, IV. Foresteria Valdese, and V. Ristorante Al Colombo.
Image A: Campiello Barbaro telefono-photographed by Amy Grandvoinet.
Here is a little garden just beyond the entrance to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum Venice (other branches in New York, Bilbao, and soon Abu Dhabi), or Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (map), where perhaps Pegeen Vail escaped to meet Ralph Rumney whenever she could. Peggy Guggenheim – having divorced Laurence Vail and then Max Ernst – moved to Venice and set up her collection here in 1947 when Pegeen was in her very early twenties. Incrementally throughout her life, Pegeen (as Vail, as Rumney) was kept at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni against her wishes. Now, in a small white room in there is held a display of Pegeen’s beautiful and tortured works in pastel and oil-paint and glass and crayon and gouache and gold-paint on canvas and paper and upon plinths, their reproductions available to view online.5 See below, for example, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (1950s) pastel-on-paper with ladies being transported by gondoliers down the Canal Grande and out into the wide ocean. In Le Consul, or rather its English translation,7 Rumney recounts Peggy Guggenheim ‘offered me fifty thousand dollars in return for agreeing never to see her [Pegeen] again. I told her to go and fuck herself. When I told Pegeen, she said I was an idiot. She claimed I should have accepted and we could then have run off and enjoyed ourselves’.8
Image B: Pegeen’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni as displayed on the Peggy Guggenheim Museum Venice’s website.
Image C: Campo Sant’Anzolo looking South-West of the città telefono-photographed by Amy Grandvoinet.
Cross Ponte dell’Accademia and through Campo Santo Stefano to Campo San’Anzolo (map) – the Square of Angel – and you will find Rumney’s leaning tower, campanile (bell tower) even, not of Pisa but Venice, as featured as the first image of his fotoromanzi sequence The Leaning Tower of Venice.9 Ansen is pictured in that Rolleiflex-camera shot, but Rumney must have come here with Pegeen too? Fotoromanzi typically depicted young men and women cavorting around post-war Italy having romantic adventures!10 As well as Rumney’s own mémoires, scholarship on the Situationist International today is interested in the gender dynamics between psychogeographers and their associates. Ruth Baumeister, for instance, wonders about chauvinism dynamics between men and women of the milieu.11 Rumney, surely though, and as various witnesses attest, was a progressive gentleman. On their strolls around La Serenissima, there is no doubt that Rumney and Pegeen took it in turns to buy for each other delightful drinks, especially Campari Spritzes, at the bars they both loved to frequent together (Rumney refers to the dérive as a pub-crawl).12
Image D: Aperitivo time via Instagram Reel screen-shot at popular UK-based Venetian bar Bacaretto, 13 Church St., Cardiff.
Image E: Speculative home of Rumney and Pegeen on Rio di San Lorenzo telefono-photographed by Amy Grandvoinet.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live together in the kind of world where we belong?.13 These lyrics from the first song on The Beach Boys’s hit album Pet Sounds (1966) seem apt: after Rumney and Pegeen got married they ‘rented a large flat in Castello, next to the police station’ and could have a chance at some space.14 Walk east from Sant’Anzolo skimming San Marco Piazza and you’ll find it. The exact property is a mystery, but somewhere opposite Campo San Lorenzo on Fondamenta San Lorenzo (map) along Rio di San Lorenzo is an educated guess. One of the SI’s favourite slogans was ‘Under the paving stones, the beach’, meaning let’s not work let’s party, and in Venice beneath the paving stones was very much not beach but mudflats studded with wooden stilts keeping the whole city afloat. Whilst this perhaps connotes the precarious mode in which Rumney and Pegeen had to exist in a Venice whom for them was haunted for personal familial reasons, it is also pleasant to consider the happy times shared by them at this location both alone and in company – Rumney reminisces on joyeux hosting with Pegeen here as well as in Paris on the Île-Saint-Louis where they also lived too.15 Many bells ring out in this district, back to Rumney’s ode to angelic campaniles where he and Pegeen had courted.
Image F: Other speculative homes of Rumney and Pegeen on Rio di San Lorenzo telefono-photographed by Amy Grandvoinet.
Image G: Foresteria Valdese just around the corner from Fondamenta San Lorenzo telefono-photographed by Amy Grandvoinet.
Intriguingly, it seems efforts to excavate submerged news of Rumney’s psychogeographical efforts have been numerously located at Foresteria Valdese (map), along Rio San Severo and between Ponte Cavagnis and Calle de la Madoneta. And just around the corner from Fondamenta San Lorenzo – get there by taking a left at Calle Larga San Lorenzo and then a right onto Ramo Secondo de la Madoneta and then onto Calle de la Madoneta and arrive just before il ponte. The SI cruelly publicised Rumney’s failure to complete his The Leaning Tower of Venice à l'heure for them in a tract titled ‘Venice Has Vanquished Ralph Rumney’ in 1958.16 Stewart Home, a twenty-first century human, cites organising trying to redeem Rumney from Foresteria Valdese in the late 90s and continue the psychogeographical fight in Venice and beyond, particularly targetting corrupt and abusive institutions.17 He returns to the subject in the early 2000s.18 But nothing of his texts note the centrality of Rumney’s and Pegeen’s story in the debasity of modern or post-modern or post-post-modern, et cetera, art-world and civic power structures! In Foresteria Valdese, a haven protected by Waldesian protestants of the Calvinist tradition commited to serving the marginalised and promoting social justice and advocating for religious diversity now part of the Union of Methodist and Waldensian Churches, on a table in a foyer there are serene pink peace lilies casting their good spell over the city’s troubles past present and future.19
Image H: Peace lilies at Foresteria Valdese analogue-photographed by Amy Grandvoinet with accidental passiflora double-exposure.
Image J: Inside Ristorante Al Colombo in the Corte Teatro very near Ponte Rialto telefono-photographed by Amy Grandvoinet.
It is leaked via the Instagram profile of Sandro Rumney, in a post he is tagged in, that some of Ralph Rumney’s paintings hang in Ristorante Al Colombo (map), a restaurant popular with celebrities in Corte Teatro very close by to the famously romance-inspiring Ponte Rialto (and key to The Leaning Tower of Venice).20 Rather than exhibiting his artworks in galleries, Rumney always liked the idea of exhibiting his art-work in restaurants, and talks about a prospective project that never quite came to be along such lines in both of his memoires.21 How remarkable that, in spite of their separation, Pegeen’s and Rumney’s paintings now exist to each other across the Canal Grande! Walk through Campo Santa Maria Formosa and along Salizada San Lio and left down Marzarieta Due Aprile and soon you can see for yourself. Do they at Ristorante Al Colombo know about the tale of Ralph and Pegeen? Why not ask them and find more mythos. There is not one but two paintings by Ralph Rumney there, quite similar to the example given below taken from the web-catalogue of Italian art auction company Martini Arte which is going for €3,000 to €4,000.22
Image K: Ralph Rumney’s painting Untitled (1957) mixed media and oil-on-paper displayed on Martini Arte’s website.
In conclusion, it may become apparent that Love Conquers All and in spite of the sabotage Peggy Guggenheim inflicted upon the happiness of Ralph and Peggen their tenderness together continues in dialogue across the heart of Venice for all to feel if not see. Whether taken in their complex laguna or Paris isola or temporally elsewhere, find below a photograph of Ralph Rumney lovingly taking a photograph of Pegeen Rumney, so too signifying their forever cosmic endurance.23 Find out more about this story in a modest upcoming anti-novella – Venezia Amoré – soon!
Image L: Ralph taking a photograph of Pegeen at an unknown location as reproduced in Le Consul / The Consul.
A special note: this contribution to the MdC was completed at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie, very close by to Ralph’s and Pegeen’s maison parissienne. Repose en paix . . . and santé!
1. Chiari, Gian Paolo, ‘Re-iter: Ralph Rumney – Psychogeography of Venice’, Museo del Camminare, 2019 [https://www.museodelcamminare.org/progetti/re_iter/rumney/rumney_en.html], n.p
2. Delmonte, Irma, ‘Ralph Rumney and His Dérive in the 1950s’, Museo del Camminare, 2019 [https://www.museodelcamminare.org/progetti/re_iter/rumney/delmonte_en.html], n.p. .
3. Ibid.
4. See Rumney, Ralph and Gérard Berreby, Le Consul: La nouvelle révolte des artistes – autour de l’Internationale situationniste, Vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1999). Later translated by Malcolm Imrie as The Consul: Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and Its Time, Vol. 2 (London: Verso, 2002).
5. See Rumney, Ralph and Alan Woods, The Map Is Not The Territory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
6. See ‘Pegeen Vail’, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2026 [https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/artists/pegeen-vail/].
7. Rumney, Berreby, Imrie, The Consul, p. 90.
8. Andrew Hussey also attests to the role of Peggy Guggenheim in Ralph’s and Pegeen’s difficulties: ‘The world had collapsed around Rumney on 8 March 1967 when his wife Pegeen Guggenheim killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. The marriage had never been stable, not because of Pegeen’s depressive tendencies, but rather because Peggy Guggenheim, who had been suspicious of Ralph from the start, was determined that her daughter should not marry this impertinent and feckless Englishman. The night that Pegeen died was only the beginning of the nightmare for Ralph, who found himself accused by the Guggenheims of aiding and abetting her suicide. Their prestige, reputation, money and lawyers made it impossible for Rumney to overcome slurs’ – see The Game of War (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 297-8.
9. Rumney, Ralph, ‘The Leaning Tower of Venice – Pt. 1’ in Ark: Journal of the Royal College of Art 24 (1958). See also Ralph Rumney, The Leaning Tower of Venice (Paris: Silverbridge, 2002).
10. See Elisa Mozzelin, ‘The Psychogeographic Fotomanzo as an Urban Affective Mapping Practice: Notes on Ralph Rumney’s The Leaning Tower of Venice’, European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes 6.2 (2023), p. 218.
11. Baumeister, Ruth, ‘Gender and Sexuality in the Situationist International’ in The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook (London: Pluto Press, 2020), pp. 118-37. See also Worms Magazine 4 (2018).
12. Rumney, Woods, The Map Is Not The Territory, p. 186.
13. Boys, The Beach, ‘Track 1: Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, Pet Sounds (1966).
14. ‘May 1968 Graffiti’, Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), p. 449.
15. Rumney, Woods, The Map Is Not The Territory, p. 46.
16. International, Situationist, ‘Venice Has Vanquished Ralph Rumney’, Internationale Situationniste 2 (1958), pp. 27-8.
17. See Home, Stewart, ‘Ralph Rumney’s Revenge and Other Scams: An account on the psychogeographical warfare in Venice during the 1995 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Arts’ in Mind Invaders: a reader in psychic warfare, cultural sabotage and semiotic terrorism (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), pp. 76-83.
18. See Home, Stewart, ‘Cannibal Hookers from Beyond The Grave Meet the Art Crazies At Zombie Island aka Ralph Rumney’s Victory in Venice Revisited’ in Art, Money, Parties: New Institutions in the Political Economy of Contemporary Art (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), pp. 55-73.
19. Wikipedia, ‘Waldensians’, Wikipedia, 2026 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians].
20. @pc_schaefer, ‘Discover a hidden gem in Venice’, Instagram, 9 Aug 2025 [https://www.instagram.com/p/DNH52dcoWAR/].
21. Rumney, Berreby, Imrie, The Consul, pp. 103-6; Rumney, Woods, The Map Is Not the Territory, pp. 174-5.
22. ‘Auction 61 / Session 1: Lot 124 Ralph Rumney (1934-2002)’, Martini Arte Italia, 2026 [https://www.martiniarte.it/en/auction61-works-of-art/ralph-rumney/lot124-senza-titolo-4].
23. Rumney, Berreby, Imrie, The Consul, p. 92.