Venice

We travelled to Venice by train, changing a couple of times.  The Italian national rail network “Trenitalia” is remarkably like the old British Rail but with an occasional touch of faded grandeur.  Our first stop was at Viareggio, where we had an hour to kill which we spent in the station cafe.  Annexed to the cafe is a large waiting room with a baby grand piano in one corner, tasteful arrangements of plastic flowers and a display cabinet containing mainly empty champagne bottles for some reason.  We sat at a table next to a group of smart old ladies and a middle-aged couple with learning difficulties.  Two of the old ladies and the middle aged couple were still there when we returned to this waiting room ten days later, so it clearly is the place to go in Viareggio for those with time to kill and not too much money in their pockets.  Anyway, I had just left Sue in search of the toilets when in walked a distinguished old chap in a dark overcoat, clearly a regular, who boomed his order to the bar and sat down in my seat, despite Sue’s protests and a scandalised clucking from the old ladies in which the word “bimbo” came up a lot (the Italian for “young man”).  He turned out to be a charming old rogue who made it clear that at his age he was entitled to his regular seat whether it was occupied or not.  At one point he declared in a loud matter of fact voice to the crowd in general “the world will be a better place when I am dead!”  Returning from the toilet I caught Sue’s amused smile and sat meekly at a vacant chair making a threesome round the table.  He gave us each a boiled sweet and the ice now broken a conversation developed in English and Italian between ourselves, the old boy and the old ladies.  He declared what a delightful city London was because there were so many Italians there and how wonderful Venice was.  At one point he stated “I was at Stalingrad you know”.  I don’t know whether the Waffen SS took Italian recruits but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the old git had been an enthusiastic volunteer.  Well anyway this is I think what happened – our Italian is now at the stage where instead of getting into simple misunderstandings we are capable of really quite complicated ones.  But whatever the true meaning of our conversation we left for our train uplifted by the indomitable spirit of one old man who was prepared to be himself and didn’t give a toss who knew it.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, apart from getting off at the wrong station in Prato which resulted in a hectic bus ride across town only to find that our connection was thirty minutes late anyway.  By the time we crossed the lagoon the last glimmers of the sun were fading from the clouds and we arrived in Santa Maria station in darkness and the Venetian rush hour.  We dragged our cases through the station concourse and out onto the station steps where the fourteenth and the twenty first centuries collide.  I’d been to Venice once before but the scene still brought a tear to my eye.  The station fronts straight on to the Grand Canal whose banks are lined with fine palazzos, churches and brightly lit shops.  The Canal itself was like a busy high street, only full of boats not motor vehicles.  Its black water was churned into grey froth by so many water buses, taxis and working barges that it seemed amazing that their propellers could actually get a purchase in the agitated foam.  The large water buses (Vaporetti) were full of commuters heading for the railway and nearby bus station.  They were dressed like the commuters of any North European city in hats, coats and scarves, preoccupied with their own thoughts, their sheer ordinariness contrasting starkly with their extraordinary surroundings.

We dragged our cases through the throng, up and over a steep hump-backed stone bridge across the Grand Canal then down a smaller alley by a canal to our hotel – the Sofitel Venice.  It’s like any other bog-standard four star business hotel anywhere else in the world, except maybe the service is a little below par and the price is 50% higher, even in this, Venice’s short so-called “low season”.  But to us it spelt PARADISE, an en-suite bath and shower, marble-topped vanity shelf, hot water, crisp linen and a large well sprung double bed.  Although tired we were unable to contain our desire to see something of the City and unwilling to pay for an over-priced supper in the hotel, so we went for a stroll.  Walking Venice at night is one of the greatest pleasures the world has to offer – a medieval maze of narrow alleys and canals with ancient, mouldering buildings three and four storeys high, shutting out the sky.  Around each corner a fresh feast to the eye – a small square (campo) with a sixteenth century well, or a medieval church the size of a cathedral squeezed in cheek by jowl against more humble tenements.  Eventually we found what turned out to be the perfect restaurant to end the day, a rough and ready student haunt, fashionably undecorated with brown peeling paint and old wooden tables and chairs.  The place bubbled with noise and laughter and there was a steady stream of pizzas, spaghetti with mussels and fritto misto (bits of fried fish and squid) flowing from the kitchen.  Behind the counter a crop-haired barman in a grubby T shirt and with a mischievous twinkle in his eye fixed drinks and assembled them on tin trays, muttering jokes to the waitresses about the customers.

About seven the next morning, as dawn was beginning to filter through the curtains of our room, I was awakened by the unmistakeable sound of air-raid sirens going off around the City.  Even in our supposedly post cold war era the noise still freezes my blood and since September the 11^th who isn’t haunted by the possibility of a dirty nuke being set off somewhere?  As the fear of Armageddon subsided from my mind I thought “Acqua Alta”, the high water that afflicts Venice several times a year when low air pressure and the wrong combination of winds send the waters of the Adriatic flowing across St Marks Square and seeping into the rest of the City.  Sure enough the sirens turned out to be a flood warning and by eight o’clock I could see from our terrace at the top of the hotel, workers putting out duck boards in the streets below.  By ten o’clock the water was over the pavement in front of the hotel lobby as a group of bewildered looking Japanese tourists were being assembled in the foyer.  The high water afflicted the City every day for several hours around lunchtime for the next three days.  My over-riding impression is of how the Venetians just take this in their stride, putting on their wellies and making their way to work across the duckboards, taking in the cafe tables and chairs as the water starts to wash across the pavement and sitting in their shops reading a book until the water retreats far enough for them to open up for business again.  For us the floods kind of added to the fun, trying to pick our way from one landmark to another without getting our feet wet and looking out from St Marks at the tourists in the Square below making their way along the tiny duck boards like ants in a flooded colony.  But this year has been the worst on record for Acqua Altas and it must be very wearing for the Venetians and God knows what it does to the fabric of the City.

We spent our ten days doing the tourist trail, walking the City and hopping on and off the Vaporetti both in Venice itself and the outlying islands of the lagoon.  When we weren’t sightseeing or eating out we generally spent our time taking long, luxurious hot baths.  What can one say about Venice that hasn’t already been said?  If any of you haven’t been – all the superlatives you have heard about the City are true. 

For me Venice poses two intriguing questions – first, how the hell does it actually stay up?  It has been in decline since the Great Plague of 1630 and travellers have been writing about its physical and spiritual decay since at least the 18^th century.  From what one gathers its foundations have the consistency of a soggy digestive biscuit and many of the Palazzos and Campanile lean perilously.  The Acqua Alta is getting worse year by year and no one has yet come up with a definitive plan to defend it from the sea for a sensible fraction of Italy’s gross national product.  And yet I can’t really see Venice slipping beneath the waves like some vast sand castle.  The Venetians seem to have a talent for keeping the City patched together and for turning decay into an art form and a principal component of the City’s inexpressible beauty.

My second question is – who exactly are the Venetians?  Venice is a City with a past, but no present or future other than to trade on its past.  This means it lacks a vital constituent of the character of almost all other cities – economic growth and all that goes with it.  Thus one can visualise Londoners for example as a series of caricatures symbolic of the City’s growth – the East End barrow boy turned Eurobond Dealer, the Jewish taxi driver from Golders Green, etc.  But the Venetians?  By contrast they seem to be shadowy figures – Gondoliers, shop assistants and museum attendants – people represented by rows of brass name plates with bell pushes outside common entrance doors down dark and damp alleyways.  This sense of mystery is accentuated by the atmosphere of the City itself and its history of intrigue and paranoia. Not for nothing is the carnival mask the City’s most potent symbol and throughout Venice there are Lion’s Mouth post boxes into which people could drop accusations about their fellow citizens.  I think I came closest to answering my question on a busy Vaporetto one evening.  Stood on the crowded ferry was an old woman wearing a long coat and a large pillbox-like hat.  She had a large downward pointing nose and cat-like, almost oriental eyes.  There was something aristocrastic and inscrutable about her expression, perhaps a product of her distinctive features.  I cannot recall seeing anyone like her in the works of the great Venetian Masters and yet at the same time she looked as though she had stepped out of a painting by Titian or Tintoretto.  She seemed to know all the commuters on the ferry and passed the time of day with many of them.  I have no idea who she was or where she was going, but in my mind she was undoubtedly a Venetian.

As a parting note on the City my favourite quote from a traveller is from Edward Gibbon author of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” who was a visitor in the mid 18^th century:

“The spectacle of Venice afforded some hours of astonishment and some days of disgust.  Old and in general ill-built houses, ruined pictures, and stinking ditches dignified with the pompous denomination of canals; a fine bridge spoilt by two rows of houses on it, and a large square decorated with the worst architecture I ever yet saw.”

Ah well, I guess you can’t please ‘em all.