Page 10 of 10
Venice, Italy
When it's love and darkness and my sidearm
So after 88 slideshow pictures, 9 flickr albums with 486 posted pictures, 165 walked miles, 465 climbed flights, 15 travel days (but a slideshow that somehow lasted only 10 pages), endless stories about jetpacks and Steve Zissou and Odile Decq, here we are, together, for one last page of the slideshow. And if you're looking for a place to end things, there aren't all that many places that beat Venice. Here among the splendid decay, among the ruins and the crowds and that kayaker over there and all those creepy guys selling stolen selfie sticks, the elegant sinking city waits for one last chance to show why you love it and why you hate it and why it is unlike anywhere else this world dares to offer. Welcome to Venice and welcome to the last page of this slideshow.
Venice is unlike every major city in Italy and unlike most of the major cities in Europe in that it was founded after the fall of Rome. You can say a lot of terrible things about the Romans (starting with slavery and all those crucifixions and then going in just about any direction you want to from there), but one thing you just know for sure is that the Romans never would have thought that building in Venice was a good idea. First off it would be hard to defend, how can anyone really protect all of those islands from all sides from any barbarian with a boat. Second the land would not allow for the simple grid pattern of a Roman city, there is no way they would allow all of those haphazard canals and alleys- they would be impossible to keep clear of plebeian revolts or worse. And despite being surrounded by water, the place had no clean drinking water source. Venetians imported water and stored it in giant cisterns, not the best policy. The Romans had no plans to build aqueducts to a hard to defend city when they had the entire rest of the known western world to do with as they wished. And if they did build aqueducts, chances are that they would watch them fail due to the horrible soil conditions.
This is the leaning campanile of San Stefano, not nearly as famous as that tower in Pisa but it’s just as dangerous looking. From my hotel window I could see this tower, a constant reminder that building in Venice was never that great of an idea to begin with. Walking around the city for a few dark days (the weather could be optimistically described as unsettled), it is hard to really objectively understand why building Venice was ever really a good idea. Almost every building feels like it is failing or about to and during my time there the piazza at San Marco was starting to flood- all throughout the city, temporary wood planks and metal supports were stacked and ready to be deployed to make suddenly impassable walkways usable. You could see elegant rooms with chandeliers in buildings falling apart with peeling finishes and walls that were a few degrees short of being close to straight.
All of these years and all of these decades and all of these centuries of bad ideas and neglect don't always result in what you think they should. My love/hate relationship with Venice is not always all about questioning its very existence. All of those terrible planning decisions have ended up with an unexpected result, a city unlike any other- a living, breathing anomaly where there is beauty in loss and life in the ruins. The entire city might know that deep down it's doomed to die in the deepening seas, but none of that matters right now. It is a place where today matters more than tomorrow and once you buy into that, everything you see takes on a deeper, far more beautiful meaning.
Venice may not have a Roman past, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a past. The Basilica of St Mark's is dark and brooding and Byzantine in a really good way. They still don't allow pictures inside (for no good reason) which is a real shame. But the bigger shame is that they don't allow pictures in their second floor museum where the real Triumphal Quadriga stand. Four bronze horses that are close to 2500 years old that were claimed to have been owned by Alexander the Great (science has pretty much disproven that), they stood for centuries at the Hippodrome of Constantinople (not Istanbul), then were stolen by the Venetians, then stolen by Napoleon, then returned to their third or fourth home right here on the balcony of St Mark's. The real horses were replaced by replicas, and while I'm usually fine with that, these horses are a little different. It's hard to imagine something with ties to Alexander the Great, Constantine and Napoleon being too precious to stay outside and not remaining as the visible, stolen trophy they deservedly are.
As for the rest of St Mark's Square, it remains as you always imagined it. The campanile, the basilica, the dueling orchestras, that weird clock, the columns with the flying lions and the view of the lagoon are all just as they have been for centuries- flooding and the future be damned.
In and about St Mark’s Square in Venice, which (as I just said) remains as you always imagined it.
There are no cars in Venice, only boats to ride and alleys to walk through and to eventually get lost in. As a result, the boats can be annoyingly busy and the main walkways can be downright impassable at times. One of the real inescapable experiences in Venice is watching scores of people struggle as they try to drag large pieces of wheeled luggage up and over all of those little bridges that cross all of those little canals. When it comes to the Grand Canal, the bridge crossings are a little easier but a lot less frequent. There is the Rialto Bridge, the Academy Bridge, that boring bridge just to the left of the train station and this one, the Ponte della Costituzione, the new bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava. Like all Calatrava projects, the bridge took a lot longer than expected and cost way more than anyone could have imagined. Also like all Calatrava projects, the bridge is well designed and pretty damn beautiful in its own right. A rare glimpse of something new in a city that revels in all that decay.
The slideshow has been nowhere near accurate in terms of actual chronological order. If you were to count the slides from 1 to 10 in the actual order that I visited places, it would go 1-15-3-2-13-5-4-6-8-7-9-14-11-10-12. So even though the slideshow ends in Venice, my trip did not. On the morning that I left my reasonably good hotel, I had a reserved seat on a 6:10 AM train out of Venice SL to Verona PN with another transfer in Fortezza before ending up in Brunico/Bruneck and the rain. My hotel was located not all that far from the Academy Bridge, a great location to explore St Mark's but not so great in terms of getting to the train station- it was at least a 35-40 minute walk away through back alleys with all sorts of weird turns. I had a feeling that I would end up lost despite a handy offline GPS enabled map, so I gave myself plenty of extra time. By or even before 5 AM I left my hotel just as an overnight rain stopped, and started on the walk to the station and right out of Venice.
If you have never been to Venice before, walking through the city fits right into my love/hate narrative. The pathways are often narrow and always disorientating, although every now and then you come to a piazza or a bridge that allows the magic of the city to come through. At 5 AM on a Saturday morning, that magic is totally different. All of those people that you normally see clogging the city's arteries were all still asleep (or possibly missing I guess) and I had the city completely to myself. Every wet street, every bridge, every canal were there just for me. And despite the nagging feeling that I might be murdered as I turned through every blind corner and down every blind alley, Venice decided that killing me just wasn't worth the headache. Instead it left me with the rarest of experiences, a chance to walk its streets without distractions and watch the city reveal itself for what it really is. And what I found out is between me and Venice. So after 50 pictures and 10,487 words (yeah, I counted), now that I actually have something interesting to say, it’s time for this slideshow to end.
