Venice in the news.  Here's a piece I wrote in my travel series ages ago after visiting.


The Consequence of Water

Who doesn´t have an impression of Venice garnered from film or television? Or better yet, our own images taken  from novels, be they romantic works or classics of the gothic genre?  Few places possess its allure or are as photogenic.  The city alludes to romance or mystery.  Death in Venice mist rises as we stroll narrow streets bordering canals or as we imagine Don Juan illicitly meeting his lover.  Venice is where Woody Allen filmed part of a  musical  and the two young men in Brideshead Revisited consolidated their love while touring the city.

            And looking forward to romance  I travelled with my boyfriend on a no frills airline from Barcelona, giving the experience the feel of bus travel rather than the important bustle of a big city airport. We arrived in Italy at a tiny military airport with only one runway with Venice nowhere in sight.

            Finally arriving by bus to the edge of the city, we got on a vaporetto, the loud drone of the engine blocking out everything except the presence of water.  I hadn´t expected the Grand Canal to be so big.  I was rapidly discovering that there was altogether too much water. Somehow I´d always believed that being a water sign in astrology gave me a special affinity to the sea though I have to admit I don´t swim well and I´m afraid of sailing.  Too much water and too many people and this wasn´t even the height of tourist season.

            It was true.  Tourists were everywhere. I can´t say I hadn´t been warned but I took it as a given.   For any kind of travel in Europe, one expects to see tourists but not that many and not the type I found here. Here they appeared to be the ¨If this is Tuesday we must be in Luxembourg¨ type who moved in large groups and from the bits of conversation I caught, were very concerned about regular mealtimes. 

We walked along the narrow streets on the canals to encounter the masses at each turn.  At one bridge they were getting onto gondolas docked there waiting for passengers.  The crowd paused, snapping away(or whirring with digital cameras) at three heavy set African-American women squeezed onto a gondola.  For added value, the gondolier belted out O Solo Mio.  I tried to look away but was fascinated by this strange play on what constitutes a tourist attraction. 

            We arrived at The Rialto bridge, and found more people at another spot with gondolas.  As a gondolier waited for customers, he was leafing through a racing car magazine.  He like I was dreaming of terra firma. I couldn’t bring myself to get in a gondola, not even the ones Venetians use to get across the Canal, standing of course, so as to never appear like tourists. It made me feel pure, that although I was visiting the city, I had set my own limits. Fortunately for the gondoliers it didn´t seem like anyone else felt that way and they adeptly manoeuvred their boats passing each other in the narrowest of canals.

In the evening with the departure of the day trippers, the city settled into an eerie calm. A vaporous film rose from the canals. Venice has no night life to speak of and it is quite pricey so it excludes lager lout and teenage tourism. There are plenty of stylish restaurants and some bars looking as if they´d been conserved intact from the 16^th century.  Other than that, the city is its own entertainment. 

My boyfriend claimed he had a good sense of direction as we wandered in the back streets of San Marcos looking for our hotel for what seemed to be an eternity. A walk led to circles, following the roundabout directions of the canals.  There are no straight lines in the city.   Maps were of no help but the walks were pleasant with no sense of concern. There is no crime to speak of since a criminal wouldn´t be able to get out of Venice without being caught.  The only way out is by water.  You weren´t the only one lost as there were the inevitable others looking for San Marcos as a reference point to get back to their hotel or to find a particular restaurant. 

            Having a nose for the authentic, on the second day I finally found a real neighborhood.  At dusk Venetians were filling the cafes and shops, sitting on benches, their children shrieking at play.  Everyone looked happy and why not?  They inhabit a beautiful space with no cars, tranquillity, and once they get away from the crowds, their own private world. I didn´t want to invade their space, considering they´d given up quite enough of their city so I just sat and observed. It was a scene reminiscent of television ads which try to create a happy neighborhood setting except that in this case it was real. 

            Prices were about half of what they were anywhere else in the city.  The bars were filled with men like in many parts of Italy.  I entered anyway and had a macchiato.  There was the unmistakable feeling of clearly being an outsider. There is no way to disguise it like you could in a Parisian café by sitting with your head bowed over a French paper. Often there are no women anywhere in sight so as a woman you could only be a foreigner. Perhaps they are too busy for such indulgences.  But there was no sense of discomfort like on my first visit to Italy over thirty years ago when I had the impression women stayed at home and you were fair game if you set foot in a bar at night.

 These wonderful places are also self contained.  Your history would be everyone´s; there are few secrets in a city with no escape route. So a city that was once an empire can be as provincial as a small town in America.  

            I made the mandatory visit to the Academy where Venice is its own star, serving as the backdrop of painting after painting. The city looks virtually unchanged though there were new churches constructed since the 1700´s that altered the city´s ever present outline of domes and gondolas half shrouded in mist. 

Then onward to Peggy Guggenheim´s palace converted into a museum.  She was buried in a corner of the property along with her dogs.  That made me stop short. There was an unmistakable sensation of isolation here; this heiress famous for living the high life, inhabited a remote corner of Europe and amassed art. How often did visitors come?  What could the Venetians have thought of her?  Is it ever possible to become a part of a place that is so obviously not yours? Perhaps her money worked its magic and erased all those boundaries.  But the visit left me sad. 

            Churches shimmered in the distance on their separate isles though once water equalled sickness and plagues. Santa Maria de la Salute was built on an island dedicated to the Virgin who saved Venice from yet another plague in the 1600´s. It´s hard to believe that the places we revere were once insalubrious and remained so for centuries.  Even beaches didn´t become desirable places until the last century when Coco Chanel first sported a tan.

            We made our way north past the headstone shops and quays where I had a cherry ice cream, its sweet flavor immediately transporting me back to the ice cream stand in the local dairy of my childhood.  Italy was the first place I learned to love food.  At nineteen I visited Florence and discovered the delights of pastas and sauces, simpler then in those days but nonetheless leaving their impression.  I still remember white grapes bought from a street market so intense each one tasted like wine. And even now I can marvel over salads and meats eaten in Rome on a winter visit.   In one family restaurant the owner presented me with a gift she gave her customers for New Year´s, a wooden cutting board.  And Venice doesn´t disappoint either with its seafood.

From the docks we took a boat to Burano.  It´s the same one that stops in Murano, leading to inevitable confusion as tourists mispronounce the two Murano, Burano, where are we going?  An Italian woman on board passed her bag of tomatoes to her companion to smell the perfume, as she called it in Italian, so much more romantic sounding than saying, smell this.  It was an intimate gesture, offering the scent of tomatoes warm from the sun.  

             The Burano boat on its northern trajectory passed the gated cemetery isle which explained all the gravestone shops.  I shivered even in the heat of the sun bouncing off the flat expanse of water all around. I couldn´t distinguish between water and sky, both were absolutely blue and still. I breathed deeply, almost frightened by this stillness all around me. Tourists got off at Murano to visit the glass factories to buy more glass as if the shops in the city didn´t contain enough.   We stayed on for Burano with its multicoloured houses and lace.

            And the hot trip by boat recalled so many others.  There was what we called the pirate ship in Pie de la Cuesta near Acapulco,where sweaty day visitors were taken all around the lagoon and given lunch on a hot beach. Then there was the ferry to Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay.  I grew suspicious when I discovered no one on board was a repeat visitor but I am lured into yet one more trip. I never remember the discomforts.

 Burano has charm but once again, it is a tourist destination par excellence.  There seemed to be even more tourists per square meter than even in Venice. And it was much hotter.  Even in March the sun burnt without reprieve.  The houses are painted in bright discordant tones of turquoises, reds, and oranges but the bright sunlight lessens the impact.  Lace abounds in the large number of shops in all the squares though one wonders how many of the inhabitants are dedicated to producing it these days.  As an added attraction the bell tower of San Martino leans. 

            Not only does water surround Venice  but it also  rises.  When I saw the platforms all around the city I assumed they had to do with Carnival which had taken place just a few weeks before. Most visitors put them to good use by using them to sit and rest or to have a snack.  In fact they are to walk on when the aqua alta or high tide floods the city. The level of water rises so high that the squares flood. Newsstands sell pictures of the Piazza San Marcos with gondolas and tourists with their pants rolled up to their knees trying to make their way across. This was beyond comprehension for me. Already the dampness of the canals  had penetrated my body on sunny days ; in an aqua alta I would be writhing in arthritic pain.

            Nowadays tourists complain that Europe is converted into a kind of Disneyland where scenes of real life become harder and harder to uncover.  In Barcelona where I reside, I see the tourists are relegated to certain areas they rarely penetrate beyond.  This arrangement suits everyone though there are inevitable complaints about the crowds on certain bus lines that go past certain attractions.   When  I returned from Venice it was with a slight sense of disappointment; perhaps I´d been just a tourist like the ones I had such disdain for at home.  But Venice surprised me. 

            At night I dreamt I couldn´t get to my bed without crossing a body of water like the many canals I´d seen.  Venice had directly penetrated my unconscious leaving me with the notion that this will be the future that awaits us, one in which we are immersed in water.