Venice

(Throw your map away)

It’s all the potential in a visit to Venice that makes the experience disappointing. I know this as soon as I’m standing on the concourse outside the Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia, looking at the church of San Simeon Piccolo. It’s a misnomer – the church is not small. Wide steps meet Greek columns that are topped by an impressive green dome. It’s twice the height of the four-storey buildings surrounding it. Between the church and me is the Grand Canal, a wide ribbon almost exactly the same colour as the church’s dome, and on it a flotilla of gondolas. My eyes can’t open wide enough … but then I notice the crowds weighing down the wharf that floats on the canal, and the queues for the vaporetto. Young children are crying from heat and the fatigue of travel, and their parents look desperate. Elderly couples stand close together scrutinising guidebooks, maps, printed instructions from hotels. Only the backpackers look comfortable in this throng – they’ve done this in every city across Europe.

I look around for the lovers. Venice should be their mecca but they are nowhere to be seen. No one whispers in their companion’s ear, allowing their lips to brush the lobe, their tongue to stray. There’s no kissing, no careless stroking. Maybe this isn’t the season for making love in Venice – it’s too hot, too humid, and far too crowded. I realise my first disappointment and am glad for it; the conditions couldn’t be better for a visit with children in tow, and I no longer regret our miserly booking of a single room.

We’re the last onto the vaporetto, which gives us the best position. The railing comes down behind us and we swivel to lean on it, delighted that we can turn our backs on the crowd in the boat and instead watch Venice reveal herself. We coast along the serpentine length of one of the world’s most famous canals, struck by the impossible beauty of it all. Palaces glide by, towers and more domes. We pass a fresh food market, and exclamations from the crowd behind herald the Rialto Bridge. I’m speechless, a rare thing, but there’s no time to comment on one sight before another demands attention. What the locals must take for granted – the houses that shelter them, the gondolas they travel in, the bridges they walk over to get from home to school to work to friends – in me creates a yearning, the sour taste of envy and a discontent for the place I call home. Who deserves to live here, and what can I do to be one of them? By the time we’re delivered to Piazza San Marco I’m delirious.

‘It’s the heat,’ Shannon says when I say I feel faint. He insists I sit down before we attempt to navigate the tight laneways in search of our hotel. It’s a mistake.

We only have two days here, and time is already running out. It’s like arriving at the buffet breakfast of a fancy hotel fifteen minutes before it closes. I’m paralysed with the fear of choosing the wrong sights and leaving this city dissatisfied.

Twenty-five years ago, en route to Switzerland, my train pulled into Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia. The guard announced that the onward journey would be delayed by twenty minutes, so I took the opportunity to stretch my legs. There were no crowds that day, and my eighteen-year-old eyes had never seen anything like it. Not in a guidebook – I didn’t have one. Not on the internet – it didn’t exist. Not in the photograph albums of friends – I was the first to escape my childhood home. I’d heard of Venice, of course. I’d probably seen something about it on television, but it was in the same category as Disneyland. It was hardly real.

I fill my lungs with the hot, humid air of Venice and let my eyes close. I’m aware of my swollen feet and the slackened skin on the backs of my hands, but nothing else betrays the years that have passed since I was last in Italy. Memories that have been dormant for decades flutter against my eyelids. The smell of this place, the sight of the canal and the sound of foreign voices – I’m eighteen again, and I’ve come to Italy to be inspired. I want to be a fashion designer.

A fashion designer! Really? The thought is comic and disturbing. My eyes pop open and I look down at my clothes: an ill-fitting T-shirt and ankle-length op-shop skirt, which was never worn by someone with taste, but which I thought might lend me the romantic appearance of an alluring earth-mother while I floated along rows of tomatoes, picking only the ripest and holding them to my nose to inhale their organic scent. Of course, such attire is completely impractical, and this became obvious when I trudged amongst the raspberry canes at Il Mulino. Stinging nettle kept catching in the swish of my hem, and my legs became mottled and itchy. There was nothing alluring about it. Since then I’ve worn a pair of elasticated cargo pants and a pink long-sleeved shirt whenever I’m out in the fields. I’ve also avoided all mirrors and reflective glass.

But I did once dream of being a fashion designer, and I’m trying to think when that dream was forgotten.

I stood on the wharf that day, between the station and the Grand Canal, and burst into tears. There was only one traveller’s cheque left in my wallet – emergency money to get me to relatives in the UK if the nanny job in Switzerland didn’t work out. I had enough change to buy a packet of dry biscuits and a bottle of water. I wished desperately that I’d stayed on the train and spared myself the knowledge of what I was missing. I promised myself I’d come back. Perhaps in a few months, after I’d earned some money. I’d make Italy my home and Venice would be in my back yard. All I needed was a well-paying job, and surely that was guaranteed – I had a glowing reference from my Year Twelve Textiles and Design teacher, and four weeks’ work experience as a barmaid in Greece.

The nanny job in Switzerland didn’t last long, and within a month I was working in a nursing home in Slough, England, spooning mush into speechless mouths and wiping bums. It didn’t pay well, and a year after I’d left, I was back in Australia. Venice didn’t even make it into my photo album; I’d run out of film.

So here I sit, in the shadow cast by the Basilica di San Marco, holding back complicated emotions brought on by the sudden realisation that I never made Italy my home. That the life I’d looked forward to throughout my adolescence had evaporated without me noticing. It’s taken me twenty-five years and another dream to get back to Venice, and again time threatens to tear me away too soon. The guidebook doesn’t help – unlike in Lucca, there are at least seventy must-do sights and activities. I’m standing in front of my metaphorical buffet, starving, but unable to choose.

Then I remember a little gem of a book I found in a pile of discards at my local library. Venice is a Fish is a kind of guidebook, though it fails to mention almost every significant sight and lacks the detail that would help you locate a good hotel or the cheapest pizza. It’s written by a Venetian, Tiziano Scarpa, and he takes you on a sensual tour of his beloved city. ‘Throw your map away!’ he writes. ‘Why do you so desperately need to know where you are?’

Good question, I think. Though I don’t have an answer. For now, I decide we should dawdle, as he suggests. Lose ourselves and drift on the tide of sensation.

~

I’m sitting on my pack in the middle of Piazza San Marco, agog at the Basilica. It’s exotic and opulent, topped with delicate spires that look like candles on a cake, and iced in gold and coloured candy. But this isn’t what’s caught my eye. On a balcony, below gilded arches, is a group of novice priests. I can see them clearly through the viewfinder of my camera. Their faces are smooth and hairless, their bodies lean. I count eight, each in a long black cassock tapered into a slender waist and falling straight, over narrow hips, to the ground. Bands of virgin white encircle their necks and wrists – forcing poise, or just accentuating it. They’re elegant and beautiful, and not all beyond vanity – some have allowed their regulation short hair to grow long at the front, quiffed and held in place. These same young men (I’m suddenly seeing beyond the black robes) wear sunglasses, more stylish than necessary.

I’ve stared long enough. I take a photograph of the young priests as they take their own photographs from the balcony. I wonder what images their cameras will hold. Perhaps, on closer inspection, they’ll spot me in the crowd – a small, untidy figure, sitting on a backpack near the edge of the square, her camera tilted up.

I’ve caught my breath and tamed my thoughts. I wrestle my pack onto my back and follow Shannon’s lead past the Basilica and into a congested lane coming off the square. We’re looking for Scala Contarini del Bovolo, a small 15th-century palace with an extraordinary external spiral staircase. The name refers to a snail’s shell, and if we find it we find our hotel. But navigating the narrow alleyways beyond Piazza San Marco is harder than we thought. Our packs aren’t welcome, they knock and obstruct and irritate all those people wishing they’d chosen May or October for their romantic getaway. To make things worse, I’m terrified of losing Riley to the labyrinth, and a vision of his small, quiet self being bumped into a canal by the oblivious girth of a large American has glued my hand to his. There’s an exaggerated sigh every time another pair must de-couple to slip past us.

Shannon stops and consults the map that I’ve agreed we can look at until we find the hotel. He’s none the wiser. We retrace our steps. Carnevale isn’t until February, but the masks and costumes that have made it famous adorn window display after window display. At another juncture, another wrong turn, the boys and I pick our favourite disguises while Shannon tries to solve the puzzle of the calli.

Aidan settles on a long-beaked bird with startled eyes. Riley chooses a pirate’s costume. I’m tossing up between a fine-featured white porcelain face that could only be worn with the matching Marie Antoinette dress, and a more honest mask depicting joy on one side, sorrow on the other. There’s something unsettling about it. My face is reflected in the glass and superimposed, and I feel like a fortune teller has just told me my fate.

‘Follow me,’ Shannon says. ‘I think it’s just around the corner.’

Our Venetian sanctuary has been decorated by its octogenarian owner and is a flouncy mishmash of bedspreads and cushions – I fall instantly in love, and realise I would never have made it in the fashion industry. But it’s Riley who discovers the most extraordinary delight of our accommodation.

‘Mum, Dad, look what I can see!’

He’s sitting on the toilet – seat down, pants up – with the window beside him wide open. It’s a front-row seat to Venice. We take turns to sit and look down on the narrow canal. There’s no footpath beneath our window, or on the other side. Stone foundations are sunk into the water and built on with the same ancient bricks that form the spiral staircase of the neighbouring palace. Small windows, just a metre above the waterline, have been bricked up against the acqua alta, or high water, of autumn. The walls above are rendered and crumbling, discoloured with age and mould. An oleander, full with pink and white flowers, reaches around the corner from some unseen courtyard. It’s a picture of decrepit beauty, and we can view it, undisturbed by the rabble, at the most ordinary moments of our day.

I usher everyone out of the bathroom and turn on the water for a shower.

As I dry myself off I hear him. Until now, our little canal has been silent, despite the season and the crowds, which can only be explained by the buffer of closely built stone structures and the meandering habit of the waterways. He’s a tenor, and his song is slow and rhythmic, as if the tempo is being set by the drop-push-lift of his oar. When he takes a breath I listen for the approach of the gondola, but hear nothing. It’s a stealthy craft, and I think of how useful that would have been for Casanova.

The song resumes and the gondola glides beneath the bathroom window. It has passengers, a family of four that are willing and able to fork out eighty euros for a half-hour ride. If any of them looks up they’ll see me. But people rarely look up, so I stand here, my wet body wrapped in a towel, listening to the gondolier sing to them. The gentle song laps against my ears, even after they’ve passed under the oleander and out of sight.

Energy restored, we venture back out, past our spiral sentry and into the slipstream of people heading away from Piazza San Marco. We’ve left the map behind and are following our senses. The boys want to stop at the first pasticceria, but Shannon and I decide to search for something in a quieter location.

The calle opens into a campo– it would be called a piazza in any other part of Italy, but in Venice there’s only one piazza and it belongs to San Marco. The white noise fades. Then a real sound, clear and singular, stretches towards us. A bow is being drawn across the strings of a violin. It orients us, and we move towards it, even though the boys protest – there’s no pasticceria that they can see. I reassure them that there’ll be one just around the corner, because there always is.

The violinist sports an out-of-shape white fedora. He has an old face, darkly tanned, deeply lined, and framed by grey hair. When he looks up his eyes are unusually blue.

We scuttle past, the boys intent on seeing what the next corner will reveal. It’s a gelateria. Aidan asks if they have Pokémon flavour – his hopeful habit has followed us since Rome. The woman holding the scoop clearly has no idea what he’s talking about, so without a second thought Aidan selects fragola and stracciatella, strawberry and choc-chip. When we each have a cup piled high with our favourite flavours, we return to the violinist. The boys are compliant now, so we find a stretch of pavement shaded by a stone wall and sit between splodges of chewing gum.

The old man is accomplished, as far as I can tell. I’m not usually a fan of the violin. Having endured it during countless school concerts, I’ve usually found it high-pitched and whiney. But now, in this impossible place, it makes the most beautiful music. The instrument is as old as its player, scarred all over, and where the varnish has peeled the wood has lost its honey tone and become grey.

No one else stops, no one applauds. I want to stay until the last curtain call. I wonder how often he comes out to play, how much he earns and whether this is a joy or a terrible indignity. I wonder if he’s Venetian or a refugee, another desperate person earning money as best he can.

When we were lost this morning between San Marco and our hotel we heard the whizz of flying toys. A young man was releasing them into the air, fishing for the attention of the boys, getting it, and cajoling us to buy one. We refused. Then we heard a shout from another man with the same dark skin, in a language I thought might be Ethiopian. Not that I know what Ethiopian sounds like, but their faces made me think of the famine that ravaged that country and the constant television coverage that once got me thinking that aid work could be a good alternative to fashion – it was a time of fickle dreams. The salesman’s grin disappeared as he hastily packed up his merchandise. He ran with his friend into the crowd, the sound of their footfall heavy and fast. It was a complete contrast to the browsing slowness of the rest of us, with our visas stamped clearly in our passports, and our experience of famine nothing more than a few unforgettable images and a song we all bought each other for Christmas in 1984. The young men vanished, and a few seconds later two polizia walked past the place where the whizzing toys had been displayed.

‘Please can we get one?’ Riley asked. But by then it was as if they’d never been there at all.

There is no whizzing of cheap toys now, just the sweet sound of the violin. We stay listening until our gelato cups have all been licked clean by Aidan. I give the boys two euros each to place in the violin case and wonder briefly how fashion and humanitarianism could have coexisted in my adolescent mind. Then we walk away.

Shannon goes in search of bottled water and I sit with the boys on the stairs of a small bridge that joins the campo to another tangle of lanes. There’s nothing purely utilitarian in this city. Below the hand rail of this bridge, wrought iron has been fashioned into an intricate design of curves and curls. If I hadn’t sat on its steps I wouldn’t have noticed. Through them I can see Venice reflected in the glassy green of the canal. The buildings that rise out of it have shimmering twins, with their own shimmering decay and their own shimmering sky. Black iron twists itself around a submerged balcony, trying to hold its fluid form. I search for the Venetian who might live there, and a woman floats out. She has my face, and her feet are webbed.

‘This place stinks!’

I can always count on Aidan to bring me back to earth. I hadn’t noticed, but he’s right – this place does stink. Mostly, it’s like the stems of flowers that have been in a vase for too long. And there’s the faint smell of sewage.

Shannon returns with water – and panini.

‘I’m not eating lunch in a toilet,’ Aidan says. He rises from his stair, but contradicts himself immediately by taking a bite of the roll.

‘Need a hand?’ Shannon is offering his. It’s cool from holding the bottle of water, so I transfer it to my cheek and close my eyes. Then I look back through the fretwork of the bridge to the empty balcony. If I wanted, I could reach through the curling bars and dip my fingers in the canal, puncture the glassy green. It’s tempting, but something beautiful would be disturbed. I let myself be pulled to standing.

We didn’t plan to return to the Piazza San Marco, but we float on the current of the crowd and end up there anyway. We pass Café Florian, and I reach in through an open window to run my fingertips along the back of a chair covered in red velvet. It’s surprisingly cool, and I have a sudden urge to feel it against the backs of my knees and to rest my head against the cold marble tabletop while I wait for someone to bring me a drink on a silver tray. But an orange juice costs eleven euros, so I withdraw my hand and ask Shannon to pass me our water – it’s lost all its chill.

It’s inevitable that we join the queue to enter the Church of Gold. But the sun blinds and burns us, so I suggest that Shannon sit with the boys in the nearby shadows while I wait in line. Each second is a pulse in my chest. I’m conscious of time passing, conscious that two days may not be enough to see beauty beyond the crowds of Venice, conscious that when we leave here we’ll be going to our last farm, and after that, we’ll be going home. I’m starting to feel anxious that I won’t find what I came looking for in Italy. It’s like I’ve been shopping all day and there’s only one store left open; if it doesn’t have what I want I’ll go home with sore feet and nothing to show for it.

‘You look like you need to sit down,’ says Shannon.

He takes my place in the line-up and I retreat with the boys to the covered walkway around the Doge’s Palace.

When Shannon is finally at the head of the queue we race over to join him. We’re waved into the Basilica and the crowds fall away. The first delight is a reviving drop in temperature, then the splendour of a gilded sky, a coloured floor that gives the impression of a hundred Persian rugs scattered thoughtlessly, and a jewel-encrusted golden alter piece. I touch everything I am allowed to touch and some things I’m not.

~

Our first day has meandered and exhausted itself. When the sun falls below the rooftops we find ourselves in Campo Santa Margherita with a distinctly younger crowd. They spill from bars around the square, gesticulating and speaking Italian. They’ve been sensibly indoors all day and have now come out to play.

‘That place has the longest queue,’ Shannon says. ‘It must have the best pizza.’

The place he’s pointing to, Pizza Al Volo, looks neglected. Fuck the police is scrawled across its concrete facade and the entrance is flanked by large bins dressed in torn black plastic liners. But there’s no arguing with a queue of young Italians, so Shannon joins them. I go to the bar nearby and order two glasses of what everyone else is drinking.

‘Spritz,’ the man behind the bar shouts at me when I ask what it is. I watch him mix Prosecco with Aperol and a slice of orange. The plastic cups are disappointing. We’ve spent the afternoon coveting this rosy drink, watching it being sipped from bulbous glasses that catch the light and sparkle. As the day drained us, it started to look more like an elixir of life than a mere aperitif, something worthy of a quest.

I take ours back to the bench where the boys are waiting. They each have a slice of pizza that requires two hands to hold.

‘This is the best pizza ever,’ Aidan says, tomato sauce extending his already enormous smile.

Riley just nods, too preoccupied with eating to stop for conversation. I pass Shannon his spritz and raise mine in celebration. The cups don’t clink, but in this place, with a large cardboard pizza box on my lap and the boys beside me with tomato sauce all over their faces, the slightly sweet fizz of the spritz couldn’t taste better.

The sky darkens to sapphire and the heat subsides. People are starting to get drunk in Campo Santa Margherita. A man and woman lurch from side to side, talking too loudly. When he falls over a rubbish bin, she screeches at him, as if he’s drawn unnecessary attention to them, as if she hasn’t. They’re ugly, but interesting, so we watch until he rights himself and they lurch towards us.

‘Time for gelato, boys,’ Shannon says. They’re quick to respond.

We choose a calle at random. There’s a footpath on both sides of this canal, with small flat motorboats tied parallel to their railings, the way cars would be parked in any other city on the planet. It’s a residential street, and we’re unexpectedly alone. This is when the imagination ranges through the possible and impossible. I fall into step with Shannon and hug his arm to my chest.

‘Do you think we could live here?’ I ask.

‘Not really,’ he says, without pausing to think.

He doesn’t want to play along, and I feel a quickening in my chest. Shannon and I have set out on a journey together, with the same destination in mind, but I keep getting lost. Shannon knows exactly where he is in the scheme of his life, and he imagines himself in no other place. We walk in silence for a few minutes, and when an old man comes towards us leading an old dog, we separate.

The boys run ahead, stopping at tiny bridges to await our directions. I’m comfortably oblivious to where we are, and happy to cross a bridge simply to admire the filigree of its railing or to follow the curve of a calle beyond. For a while, Shannon follows my lead but when the last light of day has gone he calls me back.

‘This way, Pip.’

I’m on the first step of a bridge that arches like a cat over the narrow canal we’ve been walking along. The boys are already halfway across, but they don’t hesitate to turn back. They don’t care which way we go, they just want to keep moving. As he passes, Riley takes my hand. I take a last look at a balcony spilling with flowers on the other side of the canal, then turn to catch up with Shannon.

He’s operating without a map, but Shannon still seems to know where we are. Within ten minutes we’re back on familiar ground. Even if I hadn’t spied it on our arrival I would recognise the Rialto Bridge. It spans the Grand Canal like a tiara, the flash of cameras are its glittering jewels. Aidan and Riley sit on the water’s edge, looking through a forest of timber poles sunk deep to stop the gondolas from straying. The hustle and bustle of the day is over, and the gondolas are resting. Some have had sheets of blue canvas thrown over them, others are open to the cloudless night. They’re like horses freed from their saddles, fed and tethered. They nuzzle and clink and constantly shift their weight as the canal moves beneath them.

We could be in any time: there are no cars, no fumes, no advertising for Coca-Cola. People have retreated to the restaurants and theatres, and although we can hear them talking, we can’t see the modern cut of their clothes or their mobile phones. In the dim light cast by old-fashioned street lamps, the only person we can see is wearing black trousers and a blue-and-white striped shirt – he’s mooring his gondola. It’s the Venice I’d hoped for and I want to capture it, but in doing so I cut it short: my camera is digital, and the flash is too bright.

~

Venice is beautifully impossible. Over the past two days we’ve been hot and bothered and short of time. The queues have been long, and the gondolas too expensive, but we forgive all these flaws because of all the beauty. Already we’re gilding our memories of this city.

An hour before we’re due to leave we’re standing on the Bridge of Sighs. While we wait our turn to look at the view, Riley wants to know if we can come back one day and stay in the same hotel.

‘I guess we can. Why do you like it so much?’ I ask.

‘I like the man who sings from his gondola right below the toilet. That wouldn’t happen anywhere else.’

‘What about you, Aidan, what do you love about Venice?’

‘The pizza. They have the best pizza,’ he says.

I’ve glimpsed so much and imagined much more. Last night, after the boys fell asleep, Shannon and I hatched a plan to return for a month, just as winter is turning to spring and before the crowds arrive. The year is yet to be determined, but the thought that it might happen is enough to soften the inevitable disappointment of leaving.

The tourists in front of us have moved on and it is our turn to look upon Venice one last time.

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand.

A name like this could only have been given by a poet, and once Byron had named it, the dream wrote itself. For nearly two hundred years people have imagined prisoners being taken from the interrogation rooms of the Doge’s palace to the prison for execution. As they walked across this bridge, high and enclosed above the Rio di Palazzo, they would sigh at their last view of their beloved city.

But this isn’t what really happened. Prisoners didn’t walk across this bridge before going to their deaths – executions had ceased before it was even built. They didn’t pause at the windows and take a last look – the view is obscured by a thick limestone lattice and, like us, they would have strained to see it. So what made Byron’s alter ego sigh? What makes me?

In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear;
Those days are gone – but Beauty still is here.

As I stand between the Doge’s palace and his prison, the life Shannon and I are seeking looms on both sides, and I realise that the dream I brought to Italy is crumbling, as other dreams of mine have crumbled. This time though, it’s not just my dream, and the wave of nausea that comes over me isn’t teenage regret: it’s dread.

I’m afraid I want to turn away from our plans for a good life. I’m afraid that perhaps this whole idea was just something I borrowed from Shannon when love and babies, then study and work, crowded out all my thoughts of travel or fashion or doing good. Shannon spoke his dreams out loud, and images of the life he wanted fell on fertile ground – for years they grew well in me. But now? I’m not sure.

There are times when Venice floods, and times when she stinks, and times when she’s so repressively hot and crowded that I’ve wanted to escape. But there are also times when I’ve seen her with a poet’s eye and she’s the Venice of my dreams, the beautiful impossible city, and I’ve wished I could stay forever.

My fingers are curled around the cool lattice separating me from a clear view. I know there’s still beauty in the life we’ve been searching for, but I don’t know if it’s enough to hold me.