There is something fantastical about Venice.  A city without roads, a great historical power built on pontoons, an island of islands… the city of St Mark, one cannot help but feel, should not exist in this world.  It should be in Middle Earth, or Earthsea, or Westeros, and there the Doges in stately robes would reign still.  But here it sits, in our world in our time… and really, I’m very ambivalent about it.

 

When I walked down the steps from the train station I was truly swept up in it.  Fizzingly excited.  The water laps at the steps of the pavement!  It comes right up!  🙂 This is Venice, uncontrollably pretty in the setting sun, with sleek slim wooden-hulled boats passing clunky water taxis as tourists dined and drank in side streets.  And that… vision… of Venice did indeed persist for me throughout all four days, but only intermittently.  So from time to time upon rounding a corner onto an utterly deserted backstreet, nothing but canal and moored gondolas and window boxes overflowing with flowers… yes, it is achingly beautiful, a watercolourist’s dream.  Everywhere there are specks and sparks of genuineness and loveliness; in the wrought iron of a barrier, in the flickering standard lamps of a pavement cafe reflected in the rippling canal at twilight.  The view back to San Marco from the Lagoon, or over it from the Campinile.   And certainly in the art and the real history, all of which was humbling in its scale and magnificence.

 

But overlaid across it all, like the faintly soiled sheet which sours an otherwise luxurious hotel room, is tourist Venice.  The place where the waiter’s face makes it clear that “and a glass of tap water, please” sounds uncannily like an admission of vile and twisted depravities performed upon the corpse of his dear departed grandmother.  The two hundred shops selling Chinese-made carinvale masks.  The place where spaghetti carbonara, a meal which must cost all of 80p to make, costs E15 to eat.  A place of gondola rides which in the flesh are simply the stupidest, naffest things I have ever seen – stripey shirts and straw boaters and gurning tourists trying to pretend they’re having a romantic time while the sweaty, bored, cynical Italian with the punt shouts over their head to other canal users whose wake threatens to drown the whole enterprise.  E12 or more for every single museum or gallery, and even the churches charge admission.  Everyone in Venice wants your money, and all of it, and everyone who works in Venice knows you have no option but to part with it.  That’s it.  Finally.  I have been looking for the right paradigm for this for literally weeks: A mark.  That’s what I felt like in Venice.  A conman’s mark. I’d retitle the post A mark in St Mark’s Square now, but I like the Doc Brown quote too.

 

So that’s Venice for me.  Picturesque, otherworldly, at times achingly romantic.  But grabby, swivel-eyed, presumptuous and arrogant.  I think also, Venice is a place for lovers, or rather, Venice is a place for the in-love, which doesn’t have to be the same thing at all.  Case in point: I was joined for this leg of my trip by a fearsomely bright and very lovely young psychologist named Zoe, a friend and sometime lover, and while we had a very enjoyable time together, that is not I think a dynamic best suited to bring out Venice’s charms.  The city requires a total suspension of disbelief towards it, and total immersion in each other; not the friendly sarcasm and caginess of the ill-defined relationship.  Nonetheless, as I say, we had a lovely if rather expensive time and it’s a place truly unlike any other.

 

I arrived accidentally, thinking the train was going to deposit me off the island (where I’d booked a hostel), so my first night in Venice was spent making it up as I went along, chatting and drinking with some pretty Americans, and eventually sleeping on the street.  I must say, if you’re going to sleep on the streets – and I’m not an expert – a quiet backstreet in Venice in late June, with music playing in the distance and, beneath you, the teasing water slapping playfully against the crumbling foundations of its longsuffering partner, is not the worst hardship a man can endure.

 

The bus ride to and from the airport was, however, more comfortable even than the quayside, and the hotel Zoe had booked in San Marco was a fantastic little find – once we actually found it.  “Labyrinthine”, “warren”, “maze”… none of these quite capture the Stygian experience of trying to navigate the pathways and canals of San Polo and San Marco when you have some place to get to.  When you don’t, it’s a delight.  You wander this way and that, laughing, admiring architecture and bridges and waterways, eating gelato in the sunshine.  When you do have to be somewhere, and worse still by a certain deadline, you don’t meander hand in hand by the canal, you threaten to push each other in it.  You don’t drip gelato down your shirt and laugh playfully, you sweat right through your shirt and grimace.  You don’t get joyously lost in tiny picturesque alleyways, you just get lost.  Oh, here’s better vocabulary with which to describe Venice’s streetplan: A. Fucking. Nightmare.

 

Anyway, the hotel was right off St Mark’s Square and it was lovely, a phenomenal bargain.  That day we splurged on a glass of prosecco in the shadow of the Basilica, toured the Doge’s palace, had a canalside dinner and experienced acqua alta in St Mark’s Square as a lightening storm ravaged the sky.  The highlight of the Doge’s Palace for me were undoubtedly the council rooms, rather than the Bridge of Sighs; to be honest I found the latter rather uninspiring both inside and out.  But the vast rooms of real power within the palace, the Collegio, the Sala Consiglio dei Dieci, and the Sala della Bussola, made me exclaim aloud.  These are cavernous chambers where councils would meet, audiences would be granted, where Dukes and Cardinals would plot and scheme and plan.  Their gilt-framed ceilings and walls overwhelm you with vast scenes of metaphor and history, countless works by Tintoretto and Veronese gazing down from amidst flowing lilac robes and radiant golden skin.  This is the apotheoses of Venetian art framing the zenith of Venetian power, and it succeeds in humbling the visitor.

 

That evening, after dinner, we tried to walk back to our hotel and couldn’t.  Between us and our destination, across the whole width and length of St Mark’s, the waters of the Veneto had come up in a brazen attempt to reclaim the land, and submerged the square to a height of six inches.  This tidal phenomenon is called acqua alta, and while severe events are rare and can be disruptive and even dangerous, this was just a delightful and unexpected experience.  We took off our shoes and splashed through the tepid water while overhead, roiling greyblack clouds were picked out and pierced every two seconds by spear after torturously branching spear of forked lighting.  In one of the square’s restaurants, the orchestra played classical music culminating in Nessun Dorma, and with our backs to the Basilica we were enclosed on three sides by the thousand lightbulbs of the balconies and collonades of the square: three brilliant unbroken lines shining down on us and three shimmering wavering reflected rows beneath our feet, glittering back up in a myriad angles in the wake of a hundred feet.  We took two dozen photographs, none of which came out.

 

The storm lasted all that night and the following day, so we stayed indoors and toured the Basilica and Il Frare.  I am choosing not to be upset by scaffolding, because it’s that or hang my head in my hands.  At the time of writing, extraordinary sights which have been at least partially marred by renovations include: the Duomo in Milan, St Mark’s in Venice, the Duomo in Florence, the Collusseum and the Trevi Fountain in Rome, and the Parthenon itself.  So you simply have to look past it.  There is a reason these places all look so good and are all still in once piece [or as many pieces or fewer as they were in fifty years ago], and if you have any kind of imagination at all, you’re only using what’s in front of you to recreate what was there hundreds or thousands of years ago anyway.  If my mind’s eye can add walls and a roof, it can erase some iron pipes.  Nonetheless, the outside of St Mark’s Basilica was particularly hard to visualise as it would look in its pomp, since opaque netting covered the scaffolding in front of the domes at centre and stage-right.  Inside was a different story: extraordinary gilted mosaics and that much-sought-after sense of space and lightness created by the domes themselves.  It was though extra for the guided tour, and extra to climb the tower, and three percent for lookin’ in the mirror twice, so we didn’t see it all.  In the afternoon Il Frare was better value for money.

 

An imposing Gothic structure, this church boasts some of the greatest works of art in the city, including statues depicting both creeping skeletons and hulking slaves but especially, over the alter, one of the most arresting Titians I have ever had the good fortune to gaze upon, which I did for some time.  The Assumption stands over twenty feet tall, framed by the domed gothic window, and the Virgin swathed in the rich velvety red of the Renaissance’s greatest colourist, steps from a cloud which divides the temporal and spiritual into a sky of shining, metamorphic gold.  It was here that I was struck by the extent to which Italian churches are as much art gallery as place of worship.  Again and again in Venice, in Florence, in Rome, extraordinary works by history’s true greats are hung not in museums or galleries but in the cathedral or church which commissioned them, five hundred years ago.  As an Englishman I had no experience of this; it occurred that perhaps the difference is that here in Italy, there was no power which could rob the Church of its treasures: the church was the power in the land.  So on its walls and in its hands these extraordinary works remain, dedications to the Son, or the Virgin, the Spirit or the Saints, but a reminder also of the wealth and influence and patronage of the Diocese, the Cardinals, the Church.

 

The island of Murano, which we visited the following day, is an altogether nicer experience than San Marco or San Polo, Venice’s central islands.  Venice is architecturally very busy: narrow streets and thin canals abutted by four and five storey buildings.  There is a lot going on in a small footprint.  Murano takes that idea, takes away the crowds, grips the edges, and stretches and smooths the surface like kneading a thin and crispy Italian pizza.  The canals grow wider, the buildings reduce to less imposing, less frenetic proportions.  You can see more sky, and walk four abreast while you’re doing it.

 

Murano is of course famous for its glass, much of which is… well, horrible.  Ungainly shapes and overbright colours, necklaces which would give you a hunch and candlesticks whose headpieces should remain forever unlit lest they illuminate the clunky, primary-hued disaster below.  We did find some absolutely beautiful pieces while window shopping though, including some of the finest, most delicate, gold-laced wine glasses in existence, each one of which sold for over four hundred euros.  Well, sold perhaps, but not to us.  And we got to watch the seemingly alchemical process by which rich orange-red malleable glass, heated to 1200degrees until it glows bright and opaque, is fashioned and blown into intricate translucent shapes by skilled hands whose techniques have barely changed in the centuries since glass-blowing was confined for safety on this island 700 years ago.  The Museum of Glass was worth the half-price admission for being half-closed-for-repair, with the examples of ancient Roman glass (yes, apparently, – I had no idea either!) worth a visit on their own.   We soaked up the sun on the ferry back to San Marco, then enjoyed the views of Venice bathing in it, from the top of the Campinile.  On a cloudless scorching day Venice looks almost peaceful from a height of 80 metres.

 

An eventful few hours later, we were seated in the Roman Arena in Verona awaiting the start of Carmen.  If holiday memories are best glossy, travel writing is better honest, so perhaps it is worth briefly recording the ghastly, short-tempered, forty-minute trek to the station which was the inspiration for my description of Venice’s sidestreets above.  I should probably record the purchase of the train tickets with less than a minute to spare, to a soundtrack of frustrated shouting and wounded good intentions and a backdrop of terrified Venetians standing well back from my ticket machine.  Certainly the ticket inspector, who upon discovering that we had failed to validate our ticket at the station,  suggested helpfully that we should have purchased tickets for the 6.12pm train prior to 6.12pm in order to have time to process them properly, deserves a special mention, as does the fact that I didn’t throw him out the window.

 

But we got to Verona on time in the end, and had forgiven each other and started speaking again by the time the performance started.  This was of course the extra show of the performance I’d missed the previous weekend, and it was so much more fun for Zoe being there to share it with.  The atmosphere crackled as the sun sank behind the Roman walls, and I was absolutely overwhelmed when a cast of almost two hundred, including half a dozen dressage-trained horses, took the stage for the opening number.  The whole thing was a remarkable, unforgettable spectacle, although I’ll admit that three hours in, when technically it was now tomorrow and we’d now had the third intermission, I was starting to become as aware of my buttocks as of the stage, protected as they were from ancient stone by only an uncomfortable inflatable cushion.  I did though get to meet some of the cast during that intermission, who were the sexiest gypsies I’ve ever seen.

 

We killed the time between the end of the show and the first train of the new day with coffee and gelato in the piazza, a stroll through the deserted halflit streets of Verona at 3am, and a nap in the train station.  Our final day in Venice was spent swimming and sunbathing (and sleeping) on the Lido, that long thin sandbar island which is sliced into dozens of private beaches and a couple of public ones of which our choice, Blue Moon, is perhaps the best known.  The sand is ochre, the water is cool but clean, and although Zoe thought the beach was busy, in comparison to my most recent point of reference – Copacobana – it was practically deserted.  We had a chilled out day and enjoyed a delicious seafood lunch including a new experience for me – cuttlefish in its own ink, superb – at prices much more human than in San Marco.

 

Zoe left the following morning and I walked the now-familiar route to the station, across the trekked off to catch the train for Florence which was… fully booked.  So I bought a ticket for the 6pm train and spent another afternoon in Venice, walking all over Santa Croce and the Dorsuduro, and found there some small part of the tranquility and verisimilitude I’d been searching for, and which I’d found so lacking around St Mark’s Square and in the Rialto.  I walked right down to the striking dome of the Santa MAria della Salute, which commands the view from the whole of the quay of San Marco, and then chose the Gallerie dell’Accademia over the Peggy Gugenheim museum because, called me a bluff old traditionalist, but I still prefer Giotti and Bellini to Yoko Ono and Jackson Pollock.  It is arguably Venice’s finest gallery, with with a superb and lively Tintoretto – Creation of the Animals – and it provided me the full knockout impact of the three majestic domes and glistering gold mosaics of the Basilica which the scaffolding had denied me, in the form of a stunning Bellini set in St Mark’s Square.   After a peaceful air-conditioned couple of hours I stepped back into the sun and the heat, and followed the course of the Canal Grande around to the station, where I pushed through the throngs of the Pride Parade (it’s quite hard to convey both “yeah! down with the Catholic Right!” and “get out of my way” with nothing but body language.  I fear I may have failed.) Finally, remembering to validate my ticket, I boarded the train for Florence.