Venice, Italy

Travel books and friends told us to maximize our time in Croatia at the expense of Italy, but we didn't listen and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't listen either because however pretty, clean and inexpensive Croatia is, it doesn't have the branding power of Italy, and you can say this doesn't matter until you're as blue as the Adriatic, but it does.  So, when the resort travel agency offered us a tour which included a boat ride to and from Venice, transportation to and from that boat, and a tour guide once we arrived in Italy for a grand total of $200, we got on the boat. 

I've heard people say that the canals of Venice are dirty, the streets are dirty, and the main square is over-crowded, but we only found the last criticism to be true.  I counted four plastic bottles bobbing in the water the entire day we were in Venice, but it can get very windy there and my daughter's empty bottle almost landed in a canal when she dropped it and the wind sent it rolling.  So, in yet another unscientific study, we found the amount of trash in the canals to be insignificant in relation to both the volume of water and the number of people visiting.  Disclaimer:  we were not in Venice during either a municipal employee strike or the filming of the Italian Job.  I imagine both incidents--especially when the boat chasing the main characters landed on a trash barge--could cause the cleanliness of the canals to suffer.

So, we arrived in Venice's version of port authority where several tour groups lined-up next to their umbrella-carrying leaders, and because we're either arrogant or independent, we ditched our tour group right away.  I have to admit that it felt like we were ditching class when we snuck over a canal bridge and ducked into the Mercator grocery store nearby.  We even spent extra time in the store so our tour was long gone before we emerged onto the sidewalk again.  

As luck would have it, the Mercator sandwiches were fairly fresh and the boy declares that their pizza is the best pizza he has ever tasted--inside or outside of Italy, at a restaurant, at home or in a super market.  This fact didn't dissuade him from testing pizza at another location, or getting a third slice at the Mercator on the way back to the boat after jumping up and down saying "Please, please, please.  I've been so good today."  And it was the crust of this third pizza that almost hit a port authority police officer--ironically, the only person within a 100 yard radius--when my son threw it to pigeons no one else saw....but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Restaurants in Venice charge an additional fee to sit down and eat, so grabbing food at the Mercator, then sitting on a bench near the lagoon is a good idea.  You can also watch dark, young Italian men unload crates of beer from their boats, then transport them to the al fresco restaurants nearby, and the organization and skill required to do so is the obvious attraction there.

 

Gondola rides cost anywhere from $25 per person for a group all the way up to astronomical figures for  new couples who aren't used to disappointing each other yet.

To become a gondola driver, one must endure 400 hours of training, acquire a gondolier's license (usually passed down from a relative), and gain acceptance into the Gondolier's Guild which is over 1,000 years old.  This seems like a lot of training to learn how to drive a boat, but I imagine at least 100 hours are devoted to reading people well enough to know whether a guy will be in trouble with his wife if he says no to a $350 gondola ride.  We saw one of these couples and the guy even sprang for a sub-par opera singer in the front of the boat.  So, it occurred to me that either this is a new couple, or this guy is in trouble with his wife, and then I wondered if she was at home or in the boat. 

So, in theory, Venice is a very romantic place--though we gave up the idea of being romantic when we bought plane tickets for the kids. 

People congregate in St. Mark's Square which makes sense since not every city has a major Gospel-writing saint in residence--though Venice wouldn't have him either if two of their citizens hadn't stolen him from Alexandria in 828.  In any event, we didn't see any angry Egyptians carrying shovels in the square, but it was packed with every other kind of person waiting in what must have been a two hour line to get into the church.  Because it seems that if you are in Venice for only six hours, you can either see the city or St. Mark's.  You can't see both.

So, we made a hasty retreat to a narrow sidewalk which meandored up to the Arsenal and the Naval Museum.  Now, I don't mean to blow the lid on any top secret goings-on in Italy, but there are a lot of naval officers walking over the bridges in a hurried way one doesn't associate with the up-keep of either a museum or an arsenal during peace time.  Access via the canal into the museum/arsenal area is also controlled by chain obstructions that are lowered by an invisible person when an authorized boat approaches.  I don't have any other evidence that something is going on, but you may want to get a gelato and watch things for yourself the next time you're in Venice.

We didn't expect to like Venice, but we wish we had stayed much longer than just a day, or at least stayed over night.  Leaning out of a window which overlooks a canal when the buildings, bridges, and boats are lit up must be a truly lovely sight.  One could also wander the streets and get lost for weeks on-end since every third street seems to end in a residence, a piazza, or the water. 

Speaking of which, give yourselft more than 45 minutes to get back to your boat if you're on the Calatravàs Bridge and your husband won't take the barge-like water buses down the canal.  The city is too much of a maze and it's too much of a stress to walk that far in less than an hour....though we did....and the boy wasn't arrested for throwing his pizza crust at the police officer which may have been due to our response which was exagerated enough to convince the officer that our son was worse off with us.

One last thing:  don't take your Swiss Army knife with you from Croatia to Venice because the Italian authorities will confiscate it when you go through security before getting onto the boat.  However, if you go through customs with a little blonde girl, they will wave you through security without sending you through scanners or checking your bag for the knife you forgot.  I'm not saying we did this, I'm just saying that Italian men are suckers for little blonde girls....and not in the sick way my son suggests.

You've seen thousands of pictures of Venice before, but here are some of the ones we snapped:

(Above): The boy with his pizza.

(Below): The Arsenale Bridge

© 2012 Nicole Wirth
Author of:  Letters to Salthill