Grachten Tour (Canal Tour)

A punt carries two passengers through a dim, cracked canal world, a bare-chested boatman with a cow's head, and a passenger in a long-beaked mask reading his paper. That beak is the medico della peste, the 17th-century plague-doctor mask whose nose was packed with herbs and dried flowers, believed to filter out the "bad air" thought to carry disease. It survives today as a favourite of the Venice carnival, and the whole scene has the masked, exposing wit of James Ensor. Wiedijk drops this mask of sickness and disguise into a sleepy canal tour, the most familiar Amsterdam cliché there is, and turns it into a small, unsettling theatre where the masks reveal more than they hide.