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.