Welcome to Venice

The Reality of Venice

Like a lot of famous places, I’ve heard endless tales of both the ups and downs of Venice. I found some stereotypes to be true, some I guess may be dependent on the time of year, and others I thought were downright false. There’s always a certain layer of subjectivity that you have to wade through when listening to other people’s travelogues. Maybe the storyteller woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day and could see nothing but the hordes of tourists, or maybe she had gotten a promotion last week and was still seeing everything through a golden filter. I do my best to use an unbiased brush while painting my verbal pictures of places, but I’ll add a necessary disclaimer: always take other people’s travel yarns with a grain of salt, including (especially?) mine. 

Perhaps my favorite thing about Venice was its peculiar soundscape. No cars can drive beyond the train station, which is quarantined at the very edge of the city. Even bicycle travel is restricted to children playing in piazzas, because most of the bridges have stairs. So the airwaves are filled instead with human voices, bird cries, and the swish of slow-moving water. Only occasionally does the growl of a far-off boat engine reach the inner sanctum of the alleys, and even then the sound is quickly swallowed by the canals. I always forget how precious silence is until I am ambushed by it in an unexpected place.

Venice is one of those cities that has grown too popular for its own good. Tugboats wrangle full-size cruise ships into the harbor every day at sunrise, the ships so ridiculously outsized that they dwarf even the bell towers. Like a daily tide, day-trippers flood the city. Fortunately, if you find the street blocked by a plug of slow-moving tourists, you can duck down any alleyway and probably be engulfed in silence. You might get a little lost in the process, sure. But that’s half the fun of Venice. Discovery feels most natural to me when I stumble upon the beautiful places, rather than actively seeking them out.

The city flirts dangerously with the sea, an affair that becomes more treacherous as the sea expands upwards a few millimeters every year and the city sinks downwards a few millimeters every year. Ancient Venetians knew the threat of the sea, and they built their city anyways, which I guess says a lot about the tenacity and possible naivety of ancient Venetians. Some people have said the city stinks, but I only ever encountered fresh smells of the Mediterranean.

I was fortunate enough to miss the 2019 devastating floods, which struck just a few weeks after my visit. In the past when I would hear about the floods, I just found it mildly interesting. But hearing about the destruction that occurred so soon after I fell in love with Venice, it did a number on my heart.

Weirdly, I think that’s my favorite part about traveling. It is one thing to claim I love the Earth. It is quite another to set foot in a new place and have it worm its way into my heart. From that day forward, I actually care about that place and what happens there. I hear about the floods in Venice and worry about the woman who handmade my papier mache mask. I see videos of the bushfires in Australia and worry for my friends who still live there. On the surface it may sound like I’ve spread myself too thin, but instead it just makes me feel more connected to the Earth and to humanity.

I think that’s my way forward. Putting myself back on my List, and putting my feet in ever more new places.

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