We woke up early in Biassa to catch the train to Venice. The plan was to take an early train to Bologna and shoot over the Venice by early afternoon. Things do not always go according to plan.
Italians like to strike at random times. When I was living in Poggio a Caiano, the teachers went on strike at least three times in two months. The bus system in Florence shut down two days when I was studying there. It is what they do. It seems maybe they don’t have enough vacation days, so they have to rally for a cause to have more than 48 free days a year.
This Friday morning, we tried to buy tickets to Venice through Bologna and a nice man explained that that would not be possible. I had already heard Catso! (f***) and Pezzo di Merda! (piece of s***) exclaimed in the ticket line, so I knew something was up. It seemed the Tuscany Eurostar staff decided it needed to strike for a long weekend. So, rather than a speedy trip across northern Italy, we were going to be stopping twice and taking InterCity for a good part of the trip. Awesome.
In our first stop, Sestri, I took advantage of the waiting time to buy a few more decks of cards so that I could teach Erin the card game Canasta. On our way to Milan from Sestri we set up camp in our cabin and played a hand. While we played, an Italian man watched from the door with interest. After we finished the first hand, I invited him in the cabin to watch. In excited Italian, he began asking about the game and why a joker didn’t stop everything.
Before starting a new hand, as best I could I explained the rules and nuances. He had never seen the game, but liked the idea. We were going to continue to play, but a newcomer joined the cabin and our Italian friend wanted to chat anyway. He was a commander of an undercover drug unit in Genova, and he had been in the business for a long time. He was a paratrooper for the military in Sarajevo and Bosnia, and he was supposed to go to Iraq but his knee gave out on him. He was the type of man that I’ve only really seen in Italy. He had beaming pride for his country, and a love that would never take him far from home. In all of the world, he explained, the top three cities are Rome, Florence and Venice. Imagine. We told him we were en route to Venice, and he clutched his heart and confessed that he cried the first time he went to Piazza San Marco. He couldn’t understand why I would want to go to Vienna, and he desperately wanted Erin to come to Italy to study (go figure). Perhaps in the US there are these pockets of zealots, but I have mostly managed to miss them. In Italy, many people love their small homeland. Our friend, however, was very proud of his American cowboy boots that a cousin got him in Texas. With pride, he pulled up his jeans and showed off the light brown leather while proudly saying they were Marlboro and they cost 800 euro. He only wears cowboy boots and he has 20 pairs of them. Perhaps there is some similarity between this proud Italian man and American counterparts in the Lone Star state. Who knows.
For the rest of the way to Venice we were in the company of Italians who preferred to catch up on the news in La Republicca or make out with their boyfriends than befriend American girls, so we read and played more Canasta.
We arrived in Venice at sunset, and I don’t think there could have been a more perfect time to come out of the train station and see the city for the first time. The station opened a main canal and was bustling with people who were rushing to and from waterbuses. I felt almost like I was on a movie set. Everyone – even the lost tourists who were consulting maps and asking questions loudly – seemed to know what they needed to be doing at that moment. The buildings on the other side of the skinny canal were old and beautiful, and the light was framing them in a picture-perfect way. Pigeons were finding scraps and dogs were chasing pigeons. Small children were running around the piazza while parents, unconcerned, were figuring out where to go next or complaining about being overrun with tourists. It was quite a first impression.
In most ways, Venice was what I was expecting. I did not, at any point, cry from the emotion I felt. It is a small, beautiful old town that is overrun with visitors and managed by locals who are trained year-round to make a living on tourism pretty much exclusively. I empathized with the older shopkeepers who seemed resentful that they had to constantly cater to visitors in order to sustain, and I recognized friends from home in the young waiters and waitresses who seemed to have fun practicing English and finding out about their city’s guests.
The streets everywhere are labyrinthine, with alleys that lead nowhere and water everywhere as a false point of reference. The alleys and streets were barely four people wide, and the buildings were tall enough and compact enough that it was usually only possible to see what was directly ahead and behind. Street names changed in a single turn without indication and few paths were straight for more than 50 feet.
Our hostel was in the area near Rialto, which was one of the most commercial areas in the city. We found it only by asking three different people, and when we finally found it I thought it was going to be the Hostel That Didn’t Really Exist. We buzzed for twenty minutes without getting a response. I spent five dollars calling the number listed and it cut short without connecting. We waited for another 15 minutes to no avail. By this point it was 8:30 and we hadn’t yet done anything in Venice.
We retraced our steps to an Internet café that cost five euro for half an hour, and after frantically checking email I asked for assistance. The man, a local who was blaring American hard rock in the café and took five minutes to acknowledge us when we first came in, turned out to be much more helpful than I was expecting. He had never heard of the hostel – another strike against it – and was already suggesting other places to stay. Dammit. Before giving up completely, though, he phoned the number again, and they finally answered. He explained our situation, and the hostel owners said they would be at the hostel soon. After profuse thanks and paying 10 euro for the Internet, we maneuvered back to the hostel to wait. The owners’ children came 20 minutes later and admonished us for not calling, and then we finally had a room. It was quite a production for a highly underwhelming hostel, but we didn’t care.
We found dinner quickly after checking in, and – once again – Erin was the fancy of an Italian man. We started out with one waiter, who didn’t seem interested in paying attention to either of us, and then another waiter came when Erin requested another glass of wine. He teased her for having another drink, but he then paid extra attention to our table. He asked Erin’s name and where she was from. He asked how long she was in Venice, and he was visibly disappointed to find out she would only be in town for one night. As we wrapped up our meal, he beseeched her to let him take her out after he finished work, and he was striken when she turned him down to – of all things – go pack for the next day. It was the equivalent of being told she had to wash her hair, and he felt the sting of rejection. But to show an amicable farewell, he winked at her as we left the restaurant.
The next morning we woke up early to be able to see at least part of Venice before leaving. We found a bakery full of delicious cookies and pastries and got a handful of sweets for breakfast. Venice had an inordinate amount of bakeries, and one specialty was a cookie that was something like a cannoli. Its cream with a little bit denser, but it has a crumb shell with cream inside, chocolate chips on top and it was dusted with powdered sugar. I fell in love. They had variants all over the city, and it was amazing to me that I had willpower to not stop at each shop.
We then found Piazza San Marco, with its gorgeous church and Palazzo Ducale set on the canal and showered with the morning sun. The piazza was quite beautiful with a clock tower accented with midnight blue and gold. The church has wonderful bas reliefs showing Saint Marc being carried inside. There were ornate columns and small statues everywhere. Inside the piazza, there were people and pigeons everywhere. It was barely 9:30 and already there were at least 30 tour groups crowding the piazza, listening intently in Italian, French, Chinese and Japanese. Vendors were selling food for the pigeons, and people who had the crumbs were flanked with birds. The birds perched and pecked on people’s arms, shoulders and heads. Before we could get suckered into buying food, we headed out.
Erin needed to get back to Rome for her flight out, so we said goodbye as she headed to a waterbus for the station. I spent the rest of the day wandering Venice by myself. I went to the Guggenheim museum, which had a great collection of modern work. I saw the university and a handful of churches in various parts of the city. I snacked on meat-stuffed fried olives and a speck sandwich and sat on the water to read for a while. In the afternoon, I just wandered and looked. I went to some of the main shopping streets, and Italians from all over the country were out in full force. While Italy has banned smoking inside, it has not banned it altogether. As I walked the tight streets, I felt like I was in a bar with smokers because the air was so thick with smoke. I walked to the end of two of main streets to watch ferries coming in, and I snacked on honey and granola gelato as the sun was setting.
To end the day, I spend an hour or so waiting for my train and watching pigeons fly around the terminal. I left for Vienna on an overnight train, and for the first time in a few days, I was the only English-speaking person on the train.
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