venice

There’s a thing people say in Venice. It echoes through the narrow streets and jumps across bridges like a call to arms.

Get lost.

There is probably nothing better to do here. And even when you’re not trying to, you do it. In fact, my strongest advice to a Venice hopeful would not be to get lost. It would be more like, do not, under any circumstances, attempt to avoid being lost. Firstly, because being lost on holiday is excellent a lot of the time (take it from someone who has a lot of experience with the issue), and secondly, because an attempt to follow a specific route to a specific destination in Venice will result in anything from mild confusion to shuddering rage, depending on factors like your personal temperament and navigational ability. Oh, fortune, how kind: my predisposition for getting lost is offset by an inability to actually care about being lost. Venice suits me well.

This isn’t all to say it’s hard to find things. On the contrary, it’s hard not to stumble upon something interesting every few steps (a few steps being the average distance between you and the nearest possible street corner at all times). This is a city of hairpin bends and shadowed archways. Following tiny, seedy alleyways between walls of crumbling plaster -- these to an Australian girl scream rapedeathandhorror -- is often the best way to find the square or the marketplace. Little gems of bakeries and mask makers' stores hunker in shade cast by the buildings. Washing is strung window to window like flags. It’s impossible to tell what areas are wealthy and what areas are not, because all the buildings flake their paint and grow skirts of salty weed. To get lost in the streets here is to spend hours marvelling at the roots of houses disappearing into the ocean.


It's a delicious thought, that the houses grew this way. Grow this way, if the analogy of the organic persists. Like great hulking crustaceans, these homes and businesses rose from the salt water over centuries. They accumulated. Seagulls land on them like they're rock cliffs and we've bridged the gaps between them like we tackle the challenges of nature. It seems I've decided Venice is a marvellous collection of mutant crustacean-covered-rocks, and that's that.   

 

The brightest and busiest place in Venice is Piazza San Marco, which is all sunburnt kids and fake Gucci laid out on blankets. Billboard James Franco watches over it like a god. We carefully avoid its daytime crowds and steamy heat in favour of the cool streets behind. We pass through on our first day, sizzling without the shade, working up to a trot, dodging loud women in white pants, shielding our eyes from the hellish white sun. My desire for shade is positively vampiric.




 We return to Piazza San Marco at night and the square is cool and dimly lit. Outside two restaurants, quintets of piano, accordion, clarinet, and violin take turns playing sets of waltzes. Illegal rose sellers press blooms into our faces. Here, like in Paris, men wander the crowd with light-up token toys and glow sticks. The best ones are the helicopters, sent spinning into the sky with elastic. Showing too much interest causes a flurry of offers, so I watch them in my peripherals.We catch the night vaporetto home.

There are more than four hundred bridges in Venice. They make a pattern across the canals like railway sleepers. Under the bridges, gondolas sweep quietly through the water (except those sporting a duet of guitar and tenor – those sweep rather loudly). I developed a stalker-ish taste for photographing the gondoliers' striped shirts and toothpick oars.

Gondolas are a beautiful plague of sleek half-moons on the city. The gondoliers call out to us as we pass. Gondola ride, Bella? We can’t afford it, but I won’t deny wishing we could. Instead we take vaporettos at midday, when the crowds are at lunch, and sit on the back in the wind, and I pretended I'm sailing. The unhealthy grinding of the engines and the clonk of docking make it hard. I picture the driver in a striped shirt.

 

 

I don't know if you 'believe' in global warming (like it's witchcraft?) or the rising sea-level or what, but if you've been to Venice as it is now (which is how I suspect it was thirty years ago too, and a hundred) it's easy to picture a Venice consumed. In my mind I see the windows and doors all half submerged. It's easy to hear the empty creaks of the poles that strain to hold rotting boats against the current. The wood-rot and old oil smell with the salt, and the seagull cries and the hum of my Venice Ghost Town Tours boat against a summer wind. I think of these things as we cruise on our vaporetto and discuss what happens at a good king tide (the answer is yes, it floods, apparently -- occasional hazard of trying to, like, tame the ocean).

Venice isn't the quiet and backward little picture of my imagination, and it didn't grow, literally, from the rocks and weeds beneath the surface. But it's still very much not-of-this-era. It floats on the line between the turn o' the century paradise I imagined and a modern city where fantasies of Bond-style boat chases seem perfectly within reach. Mask makers aren't hard to find attaching feathers in their workshops, but there are also the five euro mass-produced replicas on every corner. The canals are flocked with gondolas but they're also motor-loud thoroughfares. It rings with modern noise but it's got an ancient charm, and no matter all the high-tech boats, the canals would still get a novice nice and lost. It's a bit thriving and a bit stagnant. It's perfect that way.

marseille

There’s a drummer who sits every day at the old port in Marseille. He wears socks without shoes. Not because he doesn't have shoes, though. His drum rings above the shouting of the crowd and the seagulls and the engines of small boats coming and going. Vieux Port is a hot, heaving splash of colour on the shore. The sun beats down with the sound of the drummer’s drum on the back of my skull. In a kind of thrilling, exotic way, a way I like. It’s midday and the restaurant umbrellas shade crowds from the sun. The masts of moored boats pierce the cotton clouds.

Marseille is a place of noise and movement. Sometimes it's hard to tell if the noise outside is a gory riot or a football game. Before dawn (yes, I did witness this, twice) doors are opening and the pavement is swept and tables and wares set out for the day. The homeless start to stir. By mid-morning the streets are heavy with people. There are kebabs-and-pizza shops, three on every block it seems, always with men sitting in their personal clouds of cigarette smoke outside. I will always associate felafels with this place.

We take an afternoon trip to the Castle at If. I know I have to go there from the moment I hear the name. I thought castles couldn’t get more whimsical than they get by simply existing. Oh, but they can. Call the castle If. You’ve done it.

The Chateau d’If seems to grow from the rock. It was used as a prison until the end of the nineteenth century, and the high stone walls on the upper levels speak of the important prisoners once held within them. They used an excellent fund-your-own-incarceration class system. Because wealthy criminals have more rights, you know. The cells are cavernous and cool and echo our footsteps; here and there a dark corridor twists away through the wall. These tunnels are barred with rusted grates, a fantastic move by whoever was trying to make the castle as creepy as possible in the brightness of the afternoon. It is far too easy to imagine a rotting breath coming from within, to picture an emaciated hand grasping from the dense dark. Shiveringly good. Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo walks the line here between story and legend and true history. The tale is laid side by side with the facts, and each seems as important as the other in the reality of If.

The views from the top battlement are worth the ten euro ferry just on their lonesome. Marseille sprawls along the coastal cliffs. The buildings look like they might crumble into the still sea. Away from the land, other dusty islands sprout the remains of the fortresses that once guarded the bay.

In Marseille, for some reason I feel close to history. More so than in the huge halls of Belgian cathedrals or burrowed beneath the city walls of Luxembourg. Here I can feel the reality of this place’s past: the invasions and revolutions, the gruesome heroic deaths, the smell of fish markets in peacetime. They're still kind of here. Something to do with the grotty, vibrant streets and the ocean.

The Musee des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Mediteranee (MuCEM -- a much-needed acronym) is free for under 26s and worth the visit on a quiet morning. After a bit of a brain-filler we strolled through the narrow streets of the old town all strung with washing lines and windows flung open. There's all manner of old-town-ish things like lanterns and soap shops that smell cleaner than I have in a month.





All roads lead to the port road here, and we find ourselves back there. My favourite place is inland along La Canebiere. In the hot squalor of the main street it's a small relief. The kind of place you don't need to worry about the three things that worry me a lot in Europe: gluten, meat products, and smokers. At Green Bear Coffee, real, chunky-with-good-stuff salads and cakes sans gluten are served in cardboard with recyclable wooden forks. This probably warrants about half the word count I've given it but, cake. Cake. (Please see the photo below, which I dub 'speechless'.) You'll forgive me. And the floral couches apparently deter teenagers and men with cigarettes. I wanted to carry the darling owner around in my pocket for ever and ever.



We take a bus from La Canebiere to a popular beach (the kind of beach that I couldn't tell you the name of, only that we took the bus along the coast 'til we saw it). Tanned bodies cover most of the sand. Here are the people who couldn’t fit by the lake in Bled. The crystal water is stirred to a sparkling brown broth. It's passable because the day's hot.

We find our private beach at the Calanques to make up for it. Before you go on, I think you need to know t's pronounced like 'kalonks' and I can't even think the word without thinking of Kronk from Emperor's New Groove. Unfortunate, as the place is so breathtaking and deserves a more elegant mental image.

Before dawn we take a bus to Luminy and hike with the rising sun down a path between the white cliffs on the Calanque de Sugiton. We are alone on the dusty path. We sit on the pebbled beach and watch the sunlight crawl across the bay towards us, lighting the water brilliant turquoise. When the light is close we swim out to meet it. By ten-thirty or so others are arriving and we discover our secret is no secret. This is a popular Calanque hike, and by midday the beach will be thick with people scaling the rocks to jump into the ocean. We make our way back in the stinking heat and I try to keep only the picture of peace in the early morning and the white dust on my shoes.

 

The growing tourist industry in Marseille attests to its charm. The grubby, dilapidated city is oozing character, more than clean white walls could. The ocean is that Mediterranean blue of all your beach-related dreams. There are cathedrals and history, gory prison castles, dirty beaches, clean beaches, white cliffs to hike, and shovelfuls of felafels to spare if you’re willing to get a little gritty and embrace the rough-as-fish-guts culture of a vibrant old port town.