Unlike this wacky guy, Jane had a limited travel window, so we traveled together with a plan. From the airport in Trieste, Italy, we would take the train to Venice. From there, Verona, Bologna, Rimini, Florence, Rome.
Even though it’s not super relevant to the modern world, everybody knows about Venice. It’s the city with the canals, right? I’d heard that. Well, Venice makes a living off of the fact that you’ve heard that. Its strangeness is perfectly preserved, just modernized enough to function. If you live there, you’re either super rich or you belong to an old family that’s been there forever. But most people don’t live there; it’s a tourist hub – the kind that I’m okay with, because for the most part it’s kept its original charm intact.
It was only when our train veered off of the coast and thrust itself straight out over the sea, its destination far off in the watery horizon, that I realized just how marine Venice is. It isn’t waterfront, it’s actually in the water. No one told me that!
There are a few other canal-heavy cities out there in the world, but none are so thoroughly Italian. Which Italy, you may ask, and it’s a great question, because there are so many distinct waves of Italian history overlapping each other. Venice was founded during the decline of the empire, survived the dark ages, and flourished as a medieval and Renaissance city-state when that was the cool thing to be in Italy. Most of what there is to see is from the last 500 years, when it had its most prosperous times, amid the rises and falls that befall any European city given enough time. All this to say, the combination of Old Italian city and canal city is striking.
There are pedestrian sidewalks on the islands, of course, but no streets, no cars, no buses. To get around, if you don’t want to spend insane amounts of money to be chaufferred by an iconic gondolier, you wait at the vaporetto stop until the little water bus lurches up. Then you scan your ticket and hop on, sitting in rows of seats or standing on the deck, holding on tight as the vaporetto blasts its way over the water, clanking and groaning and splashing with exertion. Half of the passengers will be tourists – European, Asian, American even – and a few will be young couples having romantic moments. But the most interesting ones are the locals – old women with big purses and a tiny dog on a leash, a crew of tanned high school boys with edgy European haircuts and cool faraway stares, even professionals in business dress who somehow ride the vaporetto for their daily commute. Somehow, even though Venice is an intense hub of tourism and its property values are insanely, prohibitively high, there are still locals who seem to be living normal, albeit uniquely Venetian, lives. After you’ve people-watched for a few minutes and felt the mist of the canal on your face, the boat will unceremoniously slam into a dock, workers will secure it with heavy ropes, and passengers will step off onto dry land.
Everywhere you look, someone is doing a routine task in a totally foreign way. With no roads, no cars or trucks, of course a restaurateur has to transport two dozen wooden chairs by boat, out in the sun in his work uniform, stacking the chairs delicately on the little cargo boat’s shifting deck. And of course every restaurant spills out onto the sidewalk so people can drink their Aperol spritzes while watching the seagulls flapping and cawing.
However, Venetians haven’t worked out every kink in the system. Given the city’s inevitable success as a tourist destination, I guess they can’t really be bothered to. As we would observe in many ways in many Italian cities, “good enough” seemed to suffice in terms of public infrastructure, service, efficiency, et cetera. It hit us hardest on our first morning in Venice. We were staying at a hostel in Giudecca, a narrow island south of the main ones, supposedly a quiet place where lots of locals actually lived. We slept in, as I was still getting over my funny tummy from Spain, so it was almost noon when we got to our vaporetto stop, ready to explore the city. But there was nowhere to buy a ticket – no attendant, no machine, no instructions. Just a closed gate that required a ticket for entry.
There was, at least, a vending machine for tea and coffee. Jane is British and hadn’t had tea in days, so she desperately fed it a few coins, only to have the machine spit hot coffee into a paper cup that promptly dumped itself into the machine as she tried to maneuver it out of the jagged chasm from which it was presented to her. I’m amazed she had the strength to go on after that.
Someone who spoke English told us that a nearby tobacco store sold vaporetto tickets, so we went there to check it out. But they were closed, very closed, and not just a little “away for lunch, be right back” situation – they were closed until 3:00 in the afternoon. Yup, this little smoke shop seemed to be closed for most of the day. We walked the whole length of our island, checking out other vaporetto stops and gathering information, only to conclude that from Giudecca one can only buy tickets at tobacco shops, and somehow all of them are closed during the daytime. There was absolutely no way to take the only means of public transit off of the island for three solid hours unless you’d bought a ticket in advance. This would never fly in America. Not in the UK. Definitely not in Germany, or really anyplace else I’d visited so far, other than maybe Spain. But this was Italy, and the system was unapologetically ridiculous.
But we had a good afternoon, if a belated one. We took the vaporetto to Murano, one of the outlying islands Jane hadn’t visited on her last visit to Venice. It’s actually a closely packed series of islands, but much of it is residential. There’s one island that people tend to explore, and it’s known as a hub for glassblowing. There are lots of cool little shops selling the fanciest, classiest glass artwork, all smooth curves and brilliant colors, between which are interspersed the usual cafes and pizzarias and gelaterias of Italy. We sipped drinks at a table on the sidewalk and watch boats and tourists pass slowly by, a row of groomsmen take pictures on a bridge, happy children and busy shop owners going about their days. Of course we had ice cream. On a whim Jane stepped through door in a nondescript brick wall, which entered into one of the most beautiful non-cathedral churches I’d ever seen, San Pietro Martire. Venetian churchgoers prayed softly in pews and beside statues while we quietly awed at the vast, arching ceiling, ornamented in gold, and the walls housing enormous original Renaissance paintings. And there was barely a sign on the door. Italy!
Later we took the vaporetto to the main island and explored the San Marco area, effectively Venice’s city center. The Piazza San Marco, St. Mark’s Square, is the vast, beautiful main square, filled with people at any time of day or night, walled in by huge, sprawling buildings bearing hundreds of tall columns and arches. The square is big enough that two fancy outdoor restaurants with full, live, amplified jazz bands could exist simultaneously at opposite ends without occupying the same sonic territory.
Everything in Venice is picturesque. Something about the lack of streets, the abundance of canals and bridges, and the way everything is old and kind of crumbling and packed together but still colorful and proudly unique, lends itself to a rich aesthetic unity. Anyone could be a great travel photographer in Venice, I think. I didn’t have the chance, as I’d left my phone charger in Spain and hadn’t gotten a new one, but I borrowed Jane’s for the purpose of this post, and you’ll see she did a fine job. Instead of finding broad panoramic views, you weasel around little alleyways until you emerge into a wider square or a cool street or a bridge with a long view down the canal – always something new, presented as little vignettes. That’s how we spent our late evening, after passing the fanciest designer-fashion shopping area, passing quirky little Venetian mask shops and other oddities, ending up quickly in a quieter part of town, where streetlights cast warm halos over every little scene.
An accordion busker was playing “What A Wonderful World” in the peaceful silence, to a plaza all empty but for his song and a couple couples. It was a perfect scene in a city full of perfect little scenes. Jane tipped him gratefully.
No Cynics On The Road 